With the prevalence of smartphones and the massive photo community that is Instagram, it’s no surprise that news outlets and journalists are more and more frequently turning to the service to source photos for major events. Unfortunately, Instagram’s search functionality is almost non-existent. That’s where the new open-source search tool QIS comes into play. Read more…

Adobe caused quite an outcry from the photography community yesterday after announcing that its future software offerings will only be available through subscription plans to its Creative Cloud service. The main gripe was that the $50/month cost for all the programs in the CC suite–or $20/month for just Photoshop–didn’t make financial sense for independent photographers and smaller photo studios.

Well, the sound of grumbling has reached decision makers over in the San Jose-based company. In a post published on the Photoshop.com blog yesterday, the company revealed that it’s thinking about introducing special Creative Cloud packages geared specifically at photographers.
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At its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced Photoshop CC, the next version of its flagship photo editing software. Unlike version that came before it, Photoshop CC will only be offered through Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription plan.
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A couple of weeks ago, we shared a sneak peek of Adobe’s upcoming Shake Reduction Tool for Photoshop that has been dropping jaws ever since an advanced preview was debuted all the way back in October of 2011. The tool selects a section of the image, uses some complicated calculations to determine how the camera was moving when the photo was taken, and then remove the blur — pretty incredible stuff.

But it looks like Adobe has been beaten to this magical release by the small startup Intelligent Imaging Solutions and their newly announced Photoshop plugin Piccure. Read more…

Want to plan out and test your studio lighting setups before setting up equipment and bringing subjects into the picture? German software development company Elixxier has been developing a software program designed to help you do just that. It’s called set.a.light 3D STUDIO, and is, according to Elixxier, the world’s first software dedicated to photo studio simulation.
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One of the key features afforded by the fusion of photo sharing and social networking is people tagging. On services such as Facebook and Flickr, adding information to identify the people in photos is as easy as clicking/tapping a face and telling the service who that subject is.

Instagram this morning announced that it’s joining in on the people-tagging fun. The company has released a new “Photos of You” feature that makes tagging a person as easy as adding a hashtag.
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A couple of weeks ago, it was discovered that Google Glass has wink detection features baked into the device that could allow users to stealthily snap photographs of anything just by winking at it. Today, the first wink-to-shoot app was launched.
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Tablet computers may soon rival desktop computers in RAW editing potential. Adobe has revealed that it’s working on bringing Lightroom-style photo editing to tablet devices, and the software would include powerful RAW photo editing features that are currently found only in the desktop versions of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.
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Created by photographer Peter Basma-Lord, the Eternal Light Mac and iOS app offers users a way to play back an infinite number of photos in a slideshow format, set to music, at any speed they like. If you so chose, you could select every single photo you have hidden deep within all of your external hard drives and play them back at breakneck speed — a sort of, near-death experience slideshow if you will.

And even though this may not seem like something one would want to do, it’s actually the idea that inspired Lord to create the app in the first place. Read more…

Created by five former Apple employees, Fotonaut’s Fotopedia is a much more photographic way to get educated about the world around you, and Fotopedia Reporter was their way of letting anyone contribute to the archive. Be it an encyclopedia entry about The Brooklyn Color Run or a photo essay on slaves in the Antilles, you can showcase your photojournalistic skills by telling whatever story strikes you.

But those stories don’t always strike you at home when you have easy access to Fotopedia Reporter on the Web, so the Fotonaut folks have decided to make it easier on you by releasing a companion iPad app. Read more…