360 Panorama has come a long way since we first shared it two years ago, going from an unpolished app with some highly negative reviews to one of the most popular camera appears boasting thousands of reviews and a 4.5 star rating.
It has come so far that this week Apple selected it as the iTunes Free App of the Week.
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Face detection has become the snapshot photographer’s invaluable assistant in ensuring tack-sharp faces, but soon it’ll be able to add two more job responsibilities to its resume: exposure metering and speedier autofocus. Two patents recently awarded to Apple show that future iOS cameras (perhaps the next iPhone?) will have standard camera features that rely much more on face detection technology. The first patent, titled “Dynamic exposure metering based on face detection“, allows the camera to automatically select faces as the primary target for metering. In more difficult situations — group shots or people standing in front of a crowd, for example — the camera will use factors such as “head proximity” to select the primary subject.
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Diptic, a top 5 paid photography app in the iTunes App Store, has been selected by Apple as this week’s free app. The app normally costs $1 and lets you quickly combine multiple photographs into diptychs. There are 52 preset layouts that support between 1-5 photos each, and 14 filters for giving your images different looks. You can see sample diptychs created with the app in this Flickr group.
After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your iOS devices probably noticed that your browsers failed “the test”. The reason? Color management is strangely absent from iOS. Software engineer Jeffrey Friedl, who discovered this fact a few months ago, writes,
[...] try viewing this blog post on your iOS browser; the results will, I’m fairly certain, leave you feeling blue.
Obviously I can personally test only a small subset of devices and applications, but I have not found any — not even one — iOS application that displays the second image properly. You can save it to your camera roll and view it with any number of applications, including apps from such leaders as Apple and Adobe, and they all show me as blue because they all assume incorrectly, even though the color profile is right there in the image. Back in 2006, on the History of Color Mis-Management page of my color-space writeup, I called such applications “Color Stupid”, but in this day and age, such applications should probably be called something much worse, like “Color Moronic”, or “Color Leaves-Me-Dumbfounded”.
The blog post is chock full of images that won’t display properly on your “color stupid” iOS device.
So Much For That Glorious iPad Screen: iOS and its Apps are Not Even Color Managed [Jeffrey Friedl's Blog]
P.S. To learn more about digital image color spaces, check out Friedl’s great 7 page primer.
File hosting powerhouse Dropbox has added automatic camera uploads to its iOS app — a feature that Android users have enjoyed for some time now. In addition to backing up your photos in the cloud, the company is offering a new gallery view for browsing photos and 3GB of additional free space if you upload 3GB in photos (or videos).
Dropbox for iOS (via Lifehacker)
Aviary — the online photo editor that replaced Picnik as the official editor for Flickr — is expanding their scope by releasing an Android and iOS app. Up until now iOS users had no Aviary to speak of and Android users had only a “plugin,” but as of yesterday, full-blown apps for both operating systems are available in the iTunes App store and Google Play.
The new app will offer many of the same features you would find in the mobile Photoshop Express or iPhoto: you’ll be able to crop, rotate, add text, sharpen, blur, add preset effects, one-tap enhance and the list goes on. You can also rearrange all of those tools to your liking, so that they better fit the order you would use them in. And when you consider the fact that Aviary sells for the low low price of “free,” there’s really no reason iPhone and Android users shouldn’t go pick it up and give it a shot.
(via Engadget)
After Facebook launched its own iOS camera app last month, many people were surprised that the app was simply named “Camera” on the home screen. To clear up confusion — and likely to prevent any trouble from Apple — Facebook has updated the app with a new name: Camera•. No word on how it’s supposed to be pronounced (“camera dot”?) but the change comes along with the latest update that includes more reliable uploads.
Rounding out a day packed with Apple announcements and general excitement at the WWDC 2012, here’s one final Apple tidbit coming from rumor site Apple Insider. According to them, recent job postings at Apple hint at the possibility of an Aperture mobile app coming in the near future. After receiving a tip from an anonymous user, Apple Insider found that the Aperture team is looking to fill quite a few manager and developer positions, many of which require experience developing on the iOS platform in one form or another. Read more…
It looks like previous rumors about an updated photo stream in iOS6 were right. Apple has officially announced what they’re calling “shared photo streams,” which are exactly what they sound like: mark certain photos or albums as “shared,” choose who you would like to share them with, and you’re done. The folks you chose to share the album with will get a notification (if they have an iOS6 device or a Mac with Mountain Lion) and be able to browse, like and comment on your pictures in iPhoto, Aperture, or even on AppleTV. Non-Apple users will have to settle with browsing your shared photos on the web. Read more…
The ability to connect your camera to your smartphone wirelessly is starting to really gather some steam. Unfortunately, up until now, that technology usually required a WiFi connection and an adapter that often cost some serious dinero. But if all you’re looking to do is share the photos you take instantly sans WiFi network, you don’t have many options. Enter CloudPic Mobile. Read more…
