News from Microsoft’s Pro Photo Summit

At Microsoft’s third annual Pro Photo Summit, held earlier this summer in Redmond, Wash., some of my favorite parts were the “Five Minutes to Wow” segments. Basically, each presenter had five minutes to demonstrate a product or technology and elicit a “wow” from the audience.

The presenters were from Microsoft’s research group and from several other companies, and they showed some pretty amazing things. Multigigapixel images; 3-D models of landscapes and cities constructed from hundreds of images; a new image file format; new and better techniques for sharpening images – all these and much more were presented during the two-day summit...