Adobe promised Lightroom 4 as part of its Creative Cloud subscription plan, but didn’t have it ready to go when the cloud service was launched back in April. Today they finally added the popular image editing program to the package, giving you some additional photo editing muscle for the same $50/month rate. Not bad, considering Adobe’s $2599 CS6 Master Collection doesn’t even include Lightroom.
Adobe Creative Cloud (via Engadget)
After dipping its toes in Apple’s Mac App Store last July by offering Photoshop Elements, Adobe has now jumped in headfirst by listing its professional-caliber program, Lightroom 4. The download costs $150 and tips the scales at 388MB. Adobe might be a giant company, but it gets charged the same commission as any other developer: for every copy sold through the App Store, Apple pockets a cool $45.
Nikon shooters: Nikon Camera Control is a new open source Windows application that lets you remotely control your Nikon DSLR using a PC and a USB cable. Features include tethering, remote control over camera’s basic settings, remote shutter triggering, an intervalometer for time-lapses, and fullscreen review.
Here’s a great 6-minute video in which PBS Off Book examines the impact three Internet phenomena — Kickstarter, Creative Commons, and The Creators Project — are impacting the world of art.
Traditional funding models are dissolving, new forms of expressing ownership have arisen to accomodate for remix culture, and artists are finding ways to connect physical art experiences and traditions to the internet. In the digital era, the experience of art from the perspective of the artist and the art audience is shifting rapidly, and bringing more people into the creative process.
(via Laughing Squid)
There are plenty of presets out there that attempt to make your digital images look like they were shot with film, but VSCO Film by Visual Supply Co is different: it’s a Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW add-on that uses film profiles to change how the RAW files are interpreted rather than simply perform standard adjustments on the images. The video introduction above shows some examples of what the various options can do. This patent-pending method of film emulation doesn’t come cheap — it costs $120 each for Canon or Nikon profiles, and $200 for both.
VSCO Film (via Jeremy Cowart via John Nack via Wired)
Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 4 today. New features include support for location data through a map module, book making through Blurb, new video features, new shadow/highlight controls, simplified basic adjustments, new local adjustments, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. You can find a complete list of changes here. You can downloaded the program for free and use it until the beta version expires on March 31st, 2012.
Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta [Adobe]
What if all advertising photos came with a number that revealed the degree to which they were Photoshopped? We might not be very far off, especially with recent advertising controversies and efforts to get “anti-Photoshop laws” passed. Researchers Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth have developed a software tool that detects how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered compared to the original image, grading each photo on a scale of 1-5. The program may eventually be used as a tool for regulation: both publications and models could require that retouchers stay within a certain threshold when editing images.
Here’s an hour-long program from 1981 that featured Joel Meyerowitz and his street photography in New York City.
(via shooting gallery)
Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.
Does anyone know of any programs that does the same thing for the photos on your computer? That would certainly be neat, and much more applicable to photo-enthusiasts.
Thanks for sending in the tip, Mladjo!
For the first time ever, an Adobe program is available through the Mac App Store. Yesterday, Adobe began selling Photoshop Elements 9 there for $80, a generous 20% off the regular $100 price for the boxed version. It’s a pretty big deal, because Adobe — along with Microsoft — is a company that would love to keep its software out of Apple’s App Store. It generates significant profits by selling its popular programs in the traditional boxed format, while businesses that sell through the Mac App Store must fork over 30% to Apple (which may soon become the most valuable company in the world). This news shows that Adobe is at least testing the waters, and may eventually expand its offers in the Mac Store to reach Apple’s rapidly expanding customer base.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Editor (via Wired)
Image credit: Dipping her toes by LyndieH
