Earlier this week Apple released Final Cut Pro X, the latest version of the popular video editing software. The program was completely rebuilt from the ground up but lacks many features found in previous versions, frustrating many users and causing people to label the program “iMovie Pro”. Conan O’Brien wasted no time lampooning the program and drawing attention to Apple’s ever-increasing PR nightmare. Lets hope Apple doesn’t do the same thing to Aperture!
Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook — a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total — is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.
The information comes from 50MB of images and documents leaked to the blog, and TechCrunch says that the app can be described as Path meets Instagram meets Color meets With. Unlike the legions of photo sharing apps struggling to capture users, Facebook can simply tap its 600+ million users to instantly dominate the market — much like it did with photo sharing on the web.
Apple unveiled its new iOS 5 at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2011 today, which includes some notable upgrades to the camera functionality on the iPhone. First off, the volume up button now doubles as a shutter button, allowing the phone to be used more easily in a camera orientation. There’s also a new camera button on the phone’s unlock screen, letting you quickly switch to the app before a precious moment slips away. Finally, a AE/AF lock feature will allow you to tap any area on the screen to quickly determine the appropriate focus and exposure for that point.
It seems every time we feature a fun or useful phone app, it’s for the iPhone. If you’re an Android user (there’s more and more of you out there), here’s one for you: Photo Tools is a free app that offers a pretty large number of useful photography tools bundled into a single application. In it you’ll find everything from a digital gray card to a sunset/sunrise calculator.
If you’re both a photography lover and a Mac user (there’s a lot of you out there, right?), computer expert Lloyd Chambers has an uber-helpful section on his Mac Performance Guide website for photographers who want to learn how to optimize a Mac for Photoshop and other photo editing programs.
If you’ve ever tried saving a layered file in Photoshop CS5 that’s more than a 1GB in size, you’ve probably experienced pretty sluggish performance. This is because the program always does image compression on the file that shrinks the file size at the expense of your workflow. If you’re rich in hard drive space but short on time, Adobe has released a plugin called that lets you disable image compression, speeding up the saving of large layered files by 20x!
In December 2010, Russian security firm ElcomSoft announced that they had cracked the encryption software that Canon uses to prove that photographs are genuine and unmodified. Today they announced that they’ve also cracked Nikon’s system, which shows that forged images can be made to pass validation using Nikon Image Authentication Software. To prove their point (like they did in the previous case), they released a series of ridiculous images that pass validation. The above image shows Russian president Dmitry Medvedev addicted to Apple(s). Read more…
This advertisement might not seem too special or difficult to do at first glance, until you find out that it was done completely in Photoshop.
Our original plan: traditional animation in flash, still art in illustrator. Boy did that change. As we went through look development, everyone was feeling the wonkier hand drawn feel. Goodbye Illustrator. As we talked through the pipeline process with our new animator buddy Ben, he suggests “just do it ALL in Photoshop”. With a flurry of keystrokes, the animation timeline was opened, and we were animating… right there… all in one program. ZOMG. [#]
Did you know that Photoshop is capable of animation? Check out the Window->Animation panel.
Perfect Layers is a new plug-in by OnOne Software that brings layers functionality (e.g. image layers, blend modes, layer masks, etc…) to Lightroom and Aperture. The program is currently in Public Beta right now available as a 30-day free trial, meaning you can download and try and a free preview version for Lightroom.
Update: Wow, that was fast. Looks like the program isn’t in Public Beta anymore. Instead, you can try it for 30 days or pay $500 for the full suite of programs/plugins.
Photoshop is a pretty resource intensive program that can slow down to a crawl when you’re working with large and/or many files. Aside from beefing up your hardware specs to provide the program with more memory or disk space, there’s also a number of Photoshop and operating system preferences you can adjust to make sure the program runs as smoothly and quickly as possible. The Photoshop performance team recently published a helpful guide with 19 adjustments you can make, which range from optimizing cache level to turning off thumbnail display.
