Software

In this video and post I’ll cover 28 great features, tricks, hacks, and more of Adobe Photoshop CC 2015. Some are simple, some are difficult, some are well known, and some are more like Easter eggs.

Did you know that Facebook and Instagram both have a "secret" feature that converts your photos into ASCII art? By doing a slight tweak to the URLs of photos, you can view them as color and black and white versions that are made up of letters.

Don't have the time or money to visit a photo exhibition you're interested in? In the future, paying a visit will be as simple as strapping a virtual reality headset to your head.

Adobe today announced its latest updates for Lightroom and Camera Raw. In addition to various bug fixes and new lens and camera support, the main upgrade is the introduction of a new feature called Boundary Warp. It's designed to solve the issue of irregular boundaries when creating stitched panoramas.

Shooting two or more cameras generally means you need to ensure the cameras are all synchronized to the same clock time. Unfortunately, my Canon 5D Mark III drifts horrendously when it comes to keeping good time -- perhaps even 20 seconds in a week. I found myself continuously having to set each of my cameras before each wedding shoot to ensure images are timestamped in the right order.

Ever notice when you search for photography gear online that all the prices are exactly the same? Does it make you wonder why there isn't at least ONE retailer selling that awesome lens for less? …

After launching its peer-to-peer camera gear rental network back in 2013, CameraLends is now pushing into new territory: mobile.

Microsoft has launched a new camera app for iPhones that's designed to help you take the perfect selfie. It's called Microsoft Selfie, and it uses some of Microsoft's latest technology to auto-tweak snapshots of your face.

Want to see which of your Instagram photos made the biggest splash in 2015? 2015bestnine is a new website designed for just that. There's no login or registration required: simply enter the account username you'd like to see, and the site will spit out the 9 most liked photos of the year.

Here's a sweet and simple photo organization tip for those of you using iPhones and iPads: in the Photos app in iOS, you can create a new folder by long pressing the plus button (+). Albums can help you group collections of photos, but folders can help you group sets of albums for increased organization.

Here's a short and simple 45-second video tutorial by UK glamour photographer Markp, who shows a trick for quickly removing a patch of stubble from a portrait in just a few seconds. Instead of doing precise editing, you can select the area, set Feather to a suitable number, and then run Filter->Noise->Dust & Scratches. With a correct Radius and Threshold setting, the stubble disappears from the skin.

Just days after Tumblr announced support for Apple's Live Photos, Facebook is following suit. The social networking giant announced today that the official Facebook app on iOS can now lets you share and experience Apple's Live Photos.

If you're a Mac user and are annoyed that OS X automatically launches Apple Photos every time you connect a device or insert a memory card, there's good news for you: you can disable the program from launching for all devices with a single command.

Since May of 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been beta testing a new smartphone app called B4UFLY (pronounced "before you fly"). It's a portable resource that helps aerial photographers and other drone pilots stay up to date on where it's safe and legal to fly.

Sony just launched a new PlayMemories app called Sky HDR. It's designed to replace the graduated neutral density filters in Sony photographers' camera bags by making it easy to capture correct exposures for a bright sky in the background and a darker landscape in the foreground, all in one shot.

Adobe today announced Lightroom for mobile version 2.1. The update adds a number of new features for photographers who edit on their iPhone or iPad on the go.

GoPro has released a new update to its iOS app that turns the Apple Watch into a remote control for GoPro action cameras.

Back in May, Google unveiled its new Photos service, which offers free and unlimited photo storage for preserving life's memories. Now the company is going a step further by making the experience social: a new shared albums feature allows you to build photo collections together with friends and family.

Tumblr has just announced that it's introducing support for Live Photos, a feature Apple released earlier this year with the introduction of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Live Photos lets you watch a few moments of video that are recorded immediately before and after your snapshot.

Clarifai, a NYC-based startup that's developing state-of-the-art image recognition software, has launched a new free photo app on iOS. It's called Forevery, and it's a new AI-powered app that helps you organize, discover, and share photos on your phone.

Photoshop 2015.1, released earlier this month, has a surprise that wasn’t promoted very well -- you had to go digging to find it: the new version introduced a new real-time healing brush algorithm. When I came across it, my eyes lit up.

Adobe may be dominating the photo editing space with Photoshop and Lightroom, but there are still a number of companies out there competing against those ubiquitous programs. One of them is Alien Skin Software, which just announced Exposure X, its latest software solution for organizing, editing, and enhancing photos.

Flickr today announced its new virtual reality app for the Samsung Gear VR headset, allowing people to experience 360° photos hosted on the service through an immersive virtual reality experience. The photo sharing service began teasing this new VR experience back in September.

Apple is rolling out iOS 9.2 today, and among a host of minor features and fixes is new iPhone support for Apple's Lightning to USB Camera Adapter. This means you can now connect your camera to your iPhone and import photos directly without having to use a computer as the middleman.

Is it wise to convert your raw files to the Adobe DNG format? If you are using Lightroom or Photoshop with Camera Raw, you have the option to convert your master files to DNG. In this article I want to focus on the benefits of converting, the reasons why converting to DNG may not always be ideal or necessary, as well as tackle some of the misinformation about DNG.

Back in April 2014, Dropbox announced Carousel, a photo app for archiving and sharing personal memories via a Dropbox account. Now, less than two years later, Dropbox is announcing that Carousel will soon be no more.

Adobe today announced Lightroom Mobile version 1.4 for Android devices. With this latest version, the photo editing app is now completely free -- you don't need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to download and use the app.

In October 2015, Apple quietly unlocked 10-bit color in its release of the OS X El Capitan operating system update. 3rd party software didn't support the new color output, so it was limited to Apple's official Preview and Photos apps.

Google today launched Cardboard Camera for Android, an app that lets you shoot 3D virtual reality photographs with a smartphone. Resulting photos can be viewed immersively through a Google Cardboard VR headset.

Adobe just announced the November update for Photoshop CC. The new version features the custom toolbar editing feature we got a sneak peek for last month, as well as a new touch interface and other features and improvements.

Phase One today announced Capture One Pro 9, the latest version of its popular RAW converter and image editing software. The update includes both improvements to existing features as well as a number of new features for managing and editing images.

GIMP has announced version 2.9.2 of its popular free and open source image editing software. Included in the research is 16-bit and 32-bit per color channel processing and a number of other features and upgrades.

Being able to easily manage and post to multiple accounts in Instagram's app is something users have been requesting for quite some time now. If you've been struggling to maintain separate accounts for your personal life and business, here's some good news for you: it looks like Instagram will soon be rolling out a multi-account feature.

VSCO's popular film simulation software for Lightroom and Photoshop just saw a massive price cut. Instead of price tags of up to $119 for each pack of filters, the price has been halved for each pack, so you can pick up any of them for just $59.

Amazon launched unlimited photo storage for Prime members back in November 2014. In March of this year, the company began offering the service for $12 a year, allowing anyone to store their lifetime collection of photos -- including RAW files.

Austin, Texas-based front end developer Una Kravets has created CSSgram, a tiny library that recreates the look of Instagram filters using CSS filters and blend modes.

Back in July, Panasonic announced an upcoming feature called "Post Focus" that allows photographers to select their focal point after photos are shot. Instead of using light field technology like Lytro or an array of cameras like Light, Panasonic's feature uses rapid-fire focus bracketing.

User interface designer Brad Colbow has sparked a conversation about Adobe's mobile app lineup with the 5-minute video critique above. It's titled "Dear Adobe, Your Mobile Apps Are a Mess."

Adobe today released Lightroom CC 2015.3 and 6.3. As was promised last month, this latest update restores the old Lightroom Import experience that was found in Lightroom prior to the tumultuous 6.2 update, which Adobe ended up apologizing for.

Back in September, Adobe ate some crow after showing off the new Photoshop Fix, a mobile app that has many of the powerful retouching features of Photoshop. In the demo, an image of a model was used to demonstrate the new “Smile” feature, whereby the user can manipulate the strength of a smile by simply dragging a finger.

If you have the app "InstaAgent" on your phone to track the people who visit your Instagram account, you might want to delete it now. The app has been banned by Apple and Google from their app stores after it was discovered that the app steals account passwords and posts ads without permission to people's photo feeds.

Eyefi is best known for its Wi-Fi-capable memory cards that allow photos to be beamed to computers and mobile devices directly from cameras. Wi-Fi is appearing as a built-in feature in more and more cameras, though, and Eyefi has been pivoting its business in recent days.

Want to see what Photoshop's adjustment layers are actually doing to your photos in terms of curves? There's an easy new way to do so.

The developers behind the popular Android camera app Camera51 have just announced a new app for helping people shoot the photos they need. This time the startup has targeted the online seller community with Product Camera, which lets you easily shoot product photos by automatically masking out the background behind objects.

Facebook is in the process of rolling out a new feature in its Messenger app called Photo Magic. Using facial recognition, it scans through your new photographs, spots the faces of your friends, and asks you if you'd like to send those photos to those friends.

Photographer Trey Ratcliff is on a roll. Just months after designing a camera bag with Peak Designs and watching it become the most-funded bag in the history of Kickstarter, Ratcliff announced today that he has teamed up with Macphun to create the ultimate HDR creation software, a program called Aurora HDR.

Facebook yesterday announced that it's working on new artificial intelligence technology that can describe photos to people who can't see them. The AI would allow the blind to interact with the world of photo sharing in ways that aren't currently possible.

Sony's rollout of uncompressed 14-bit RAW continues: the company announced today that it will be releasing a new firmware update for the Sony a7 II on November 18th that adds the ability to the camera.

OS X El Capitan added some major features to the operating system when the update was released at the end of September 2015, but it appears that there was a pretty significant one that didn't receive as much fanfare: 10-bit color.

The photo filter company VSCO today announced DSCO (pronounced "disco"), a new app for creating and sharing animated GIFs of your life's moments.