programs

I Tested 10+ Photoshop Alternatives to See How They Stack Up

To Adobe or not to Adobe. That is the question many photographers are asking with the spate of new image processing programs vying to “kill Photoshop.” I tested more than ten contenders as alternatives to Adobe’s image processing software, evaluating them for the specialized task of editing demanding nightscape images taken under the Milky Way, both for single still images and for time-lapses of the moving sky.

148 Photo Editing Tools and Apps

Earlier this year, after researching photo editing tools, I shared a list of 104 photo editing tools you should know about. After receiving a great deal of interest and feedback from the photography community, I've created one final ultimate list of 148 photo editing tools and apps.

Microsoft Releases a Program for Making Cinemagraphs, or “Cliplets”

Cinemagraphs, or still images that have a dash of movement, have become very popular as of late. So popular, in fact, that Microsoft Research is jumping onto the bandwagon. The company has released a new tool for creating cinemagraphs, which they call "cliplets":

A still photograph is a limited format for capturing moments that span an interval of time. Video is the traditional method for recording durations of time, but the subjective "moment" that one desires to capture is often lost in the chaos of shaky camerawork, irrelevant background clutter, and noise that dominates most casually recorded video clips. This work provides a creative lens used to focus on important aspects of a moment by performing spatiotemporal compositing and editing on video-clip input. This is an interactive app that uses semi-automated methods to give users the power to create "cliplets"—a type of imagery that sits between stills and video from handheld videos.

Their free new Cliplets app lets you easily turn a 10-second video clip into a Harry Potter-esque cinemagraph.

Putting Faces to the Names Found on Photoshop’s Splash Screen

Every time you launch Photoshop, you're greeted momentarily with a splash screen showing a cloud of names that give credit to the people who have worked on the program. This "Behind the Splash Screen" video introduces you to some of the people whose names are found there, and provides some background on how Photoshop CS5 was developed (as well as the huge challenges they faced).

Use Your Webcam as Scanner Camera

Texas A&M graduate student Roman Kogan has written an interesting program that turns your webcam into scanner camera.

This program turns your webcam into a scanner camera, similar to the ones used to record photo finishes, but much, much, much slower. With it, you can create images like the ones on this page with ease and with no digital manipulation! It works by taking one pixel line at a time and arranging those slices in a line to produce the image. Thus one dimension of the image is spacial, and the other is temporal.

Batch Conversion with Photo Magician

Photo Magician is a free and lightweight (less than 1MB) program for Windows that allows you to batch convert a directory of photographs. It's similar in functionality to Photoshop's "Image Processor" feature, with one difference being you can't select the output quality like you can using Photoshop.