A magical moment of soft and warm light, the golden hour is a period slightly before sunset or slightly after sunrise when the sun is low in the sky. Many photographers aim to shoot during these time periods in order to take advantage of the unique natural lighting. Rizon is an elegant new app for iOS that will not only find you the best time but remind you to head outside when the time approaches.
If you want to shoot "vintage" photos with your iPhone, there are apps like Instagram. If you'd like to do the same thing with video, there's a new app for that called VHS Camcorder. It turns your iPhone into a 1985 camcorder, allowing you to shoot VHS-quality footage that'll give you a pang of nostalgia that takes you back three decades.
Popular browser-based editor Polarr has released a new plugin for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that enables users to instantly edit any photo they stumble across on the Internet. With the click of the mouse, an image can be imported into Polarr’s online web-based editor for a number of adjustments. No more having to download an image to your local drive -- this is complete editing in the cloud.
Have you ever tried to show a friend a photo on your phone, only to have them start swiping through your entire personal photo collection uninvited? If you do know someone like that, there's now a lighthearted way to prank them. It's an Android app called Ninja Snap that will surprise nosey swipers by showing them their own face in your album.
Have you ever wondered if you were getting the best performance out of Adobe’s Photoshop Creative Cloud? Depending on your particular workflow and individual needs, your favorite image editing software can be tweaked and adjusted for optimal performance. Today, we are taking a look at some of the settings available in Photoshop to get you running more efficiently on your personal computer.
Earlier this month, the photo sharing service 500px rolled out a new version of its iOS app that focused on sleekness, simplicity, and social sharing. Media outlets immediately pointed out how similar the new app's look and feel is to other services, particularly Instagram.
If you’ve ever dreamed of seeing the world through the eyes of a wild animal or insect, then you happen to be in luck. A team led by scientist Jolyon Troscianko at the University of Exeter in the UK has developed an application that processes RAW image data and then converts it into a result that showcases the way various animals might view their surroundings. Best of all, the software is open source and you can download it today.
Friends often ask for copies of photos you took of them at gatherings, and Apple wants to make it less of a hassle to send those images. The company has developed a new photo sharing system that uses face recognition to automatically figure out who's in your shots and have the photos sent to them.
Facetune is one of the most popular photo tools in both Apple’s iOS App Store and Google’s Play Store -- to such a great degree that Apple officially branded the app as an “Essential” download a short while back. Facetune is known for its ability to smoothen skin, emphasize eyes, fill bald patches, reshape facial structures, brighten teeth, and much more. Now, the Jerusalem-based company behind it, Lightricks, is ready to go a step farther after securing $10 million in new venture …
MIDI2LR is a new free and open source program that lets you edit photographs in Lightroom 6/CC using any kind of MIDI controller. If you've always wanted to go from using your mouse and keyboard to using knobs and buttons, this is something you might want to look into.
If you enjoy injecting analog warmth into your digital photographs, then you may want to check out the new RNI Films app for iOS. Developed by Really Nice Images, the application allows mobile photographers to apply realistic film simulations to their images with a few taps. Similar to the company’s film pack for Lightroom, RNI Films comes with a collection of real negative, slide, instant, vintage, and monochrome film stocks for you to simulate.
It is not a new notion to challenge the need for pro photographers in the 21st century when just about everyone has a smartphone and a high-resolution camera in their pocket. Just last year, Facebook released a video asking “Why have one photographer when can have a hundred?”. Now, a new application called Ceremony is looking to help collect all of your favorite moments by crowdsourcing images from the guests at your party.
Corel has just announced ParticleShop, a plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom, and PaintShop Pro that allows users to create photo-realistic effects with a set of ‘life-like brushes’.
It is said that eyes are the windows to our souls and when focusing in on a portrait, we do our best to make sure they are razor sharp. With a bit of help from Photoshop, we can take the beauty of the eyes a step further. Today, we will be examining a method that I have personally used over the last few years to truly make eyes pop and give them another dimension of depth.
A few months ago I decided to do something a little different and create an iOS app to present my photography. I had been thinking about it for a while and had a vague idea of what I wanted the app to achieve and how I wanted it to work.
Need a digital sketchbook to document your photography shots and ideas? Morpholio just launched an iOS app for you. It's called Journal, and is a iPad sketchbook app that has special tools designed specifically for photographers.
Here's a great 2-minute video tutorial that teaches a technique for fixing white balance in Photoshop. The basic idea is that you can locate a 50% gray point in a photo even if you didn't use a gray card during the shoot. Once you identify a suitable point, you can use that Gray point in your Curves tool instead of simply selecting a Black point and a White point (a more basic color correction technique that may not work as well).
We are on the fringe of widespread virtual reality that can truly captivate our minds and take us places we've only dreamt about. Services such as Roundme continue to bring these worlds a step closer every day. By utilizing a network of 360-degree imagery and a platform designed for professionals, advanced virtual tours are only a tap away.
Every week, Apple selects an application from the iOS App Store and makes it available for free to anyone with an Apple ID. This week’s app is ‘Matter’ by Pixite, which is normally $2. It allows you to add surreal 3D objects to your photographs. With only a few taps, you can add three-dimensional effects to your pictures with realistic shadows and reflections.
It looks like 500px is putting its recent $13M in funding to good use: the company today announced a redesigned app for iOS that focuses on simplicity, personalization, and social. The company's goal is to showcase user photographs better and to make them more discoverable for other users on iPhones and iPads.
Getty Images has added a brand new feature to their stock photo and video service iStock. Customers who purchase content can now have their media automatically synced to their Dropbox account. The new ability makes working on the go a tad bit easier and allows buyers to quickly centralize their purchased content in a single location.
The Photoshop Training Channel published this great 9-minute video with 5 useful Photoshop tricks that the majority of casual Photoshop users probably have never learned before.
Creatives utilizing Adobe’s software suite who have yet to buy into the company’s Creative Cloud will soon find some of their updates coming to an abrupt halt. Adobe has announced that the upcoming release of Adobe Camera Raw v9.1.1 will be the last version available for CS6 users. Those looking to continue receiving the latest updates will need to upgrade to a monthly or yearly Creative Cloud subscription.
Users of VSCO Cam for iOS and Android know that the app is more than just another photo editing suite; it is a social gateway for sharing photographs with others around the world. VSCO’s mobile application employs the company’s famous analog filters for retro styling on the move. Now, newly introduced ‘Collections’ will allow users to assemble their favorite images into one package and share their curations with others.
Adobe's new Dehaze slider has been wowing photographers since it was launched for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW last month. We've seen what it can do for haze, rainy days, and blizzards, but there's yet another interesting application: enhancing photos of the starry night sky.
It looks like the idea of sharing front- and rear-camera photos at the same time isn't lucrative enough to be big business. After raising a whopping $4 million from investors, the unusual photo-sharing app Frontback is now announcing that it will be shutting down on August 15th, 2015.
It's out with the old and in with the new: Google today announced its plan to shut down its Google+ Photos service after the launch of Google Photos back in May.
If you're the early adopter type and are looking into owning both the Apple Watch and the Olympus Air, here's some good news for you: the two gadgets can be combined into one functional camera system. A new app allows the Apple Watch to be used as the live view display and control interface for Olympus' unusual camera.
YouTube personality Casey Neistat wants to change the way people share their lives on social media. Selfies and self-consciousness get in the way of authentic sharing, he says, so he created a new app called Beme.
Rocket Rooster is a digital filter company that produces affordable plugins for Adobe’s Creative Suite. After creating over half a dozen styles for cinema purposes, the company set their sights on creating products for still photographers using Lightroom. Rocket Rooster’s latest filter set, the Analog Film Pack, includes 20 old school film presets and over 100 variations.
If you've always dreamed of owning a business that builds software for photographers, there's currently an opportunity to jump in headfirst. Koken, a free and self-hosted content management system for photography and portfolio websites, is for sale.
A couple of years ago, when I switched careers and moved into photography full time, I did a lot of research on multiple aspects of running a photography business. One of those areas, digital asset management (DAM), deals with, well, managing your digital assets, your image files.
Lightroom Dashboard is a new browser-based app that helps you visualize your Lightroom catalog data and surface interesting details about your personal photography habits. To get started in using the service, all you need to do is drag and drop your catalog into your browser.
More and more still photography cameras are getting advanced video features, so it only makes sense that cinema cameras are moving more into the world of still photos as well. Last week, RED launched a new version 6.0 firmware for its cameras, which brings a number of powerful new features for shooting photographs alongside video.
Fan’s of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology may be a bit disappointed to learn that the company is retiring their mobile applications for iOS and Windows Phone. Microsoft won’t be ditching their entire Photosynth efforts. However, they note that they will be instead focusing on the more immersive solutions introduced in the Photosynth technical preview. Those who have already downloaded the applications can continue to utilize them, but they are now officially unsupported.
The "bullet time" effect popularized by the 1999 film The Matrix is generally done by arranging a large number of still cameras on a circular track, so most of the rigs out there cost quite a bit of money to put together. A Columbia University researcher named Yan Wang is trying to make bullet-time imaging more accessible. With his CamSwarm technology, all you need is a group of friends who have smartphones or tablets.
A graphic tablet can be a useful but expensive piece tool in a photographer’s setup. That's why the folks over at Astropad HQ decided to enable Apple’s iPad to give you the same experience as using a graphic tablet. Astropad is a $20 solution that lets you to turn your iPad into a full featured graphics tablet. Powered by the company’s custom technology know as ‘LIQUID’, your iPad is always responsive and ready to work.
All good things must come to an end. After a free beta testing period that generated plenty of buzz and over 230,000 downloads, Affinity Photo has just launched as an official paid app in the Apple App Store.
With Google's first prototype version of its Glass head-mounted computer, users can take pictures by pressing a button on the side or by “OK Glass, take a picture.” In the future, composing a specific photo with Google Glass may be as easy as framing the shot with your fingers.
Flickr sparked some controversy back in May after it was discovered that the service's new autotagging feature was prone to mislabeling black people as "apes." It looks like Google Photos developers didn't learn from Flickr's embarrassing misstep: a Google developer is apologizing after it was found that Google's Photos app misidentifies photos of black people as "gorillas."
The popular browser-based photo editor Polarr has now arrived on mobile devices. After launching in the iTunes App Store late last week, the app was featured by Apple and was downloaded a whopping 250,000 times in the first 48 hours.
I took a trip to Iceland this past March, but weather wasn't the greatest while I was there. We encountered a few blizzards, and I took some photos to see what I could recover from them. Adobe recently announced a Dehaze tool for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, and I wanted to know how well it could recover image data from a blizzard -- which could be considered be an extreme version of haze. After trying the slider on my images, I'm very impressed!
It is no secret that Facebook has been hot on the trail of Snapchat. In 2013, the massive social network reportedly offered to buy the small Snapchat startup for three billion dollars. After being turned down, Facebook decided to try and invent their own alternatives - Poke and Slingshot. Despite the two applications being more full-featured, Snapchat prevailed. Now, Facebook has decided to ‘borrow’ some of Snapchat's features its primary mobile app.
There are a number of easy-to-use model release form apps out there already, but Snapwire wants to do better. The photo marketplace has launched its own free app called Releases. Designed for professional photographers, the app lets you easily create, sign, and send model and properly releases using your iPhone.
Adobe Photoshop serves as an important process in many photographer’s daily workflows. Whether you are fine-tuning your shots from a wedding or simply touching up a photograph of your cat, Photoshop can help you bring your mind’s visualizations to life. However, you may be utilizing more of your time than needed if you employ repetitive actions without the use of macros.
Have you ever wished that you could quickly access your photos from 3rd party apps on your iPhone as quickly as you access your Camera Roll photos? KwiltKeys is a new third-party keyboard for iOS that helps you quickly find and select photos that are stored both on your device and through different services. Just download the software to your device and you are ready to post any of your photographs within your favorite apps in seconds.
When Adobe launched a major Creative Cloud update that brought the powerful new Dehaze slider to Lightroom CC, photographers who had purchased a standalone copy of Lightroom 6 instead of subscribing to Adobe CC didn't receive the new features.
Do you yearn for a time when graphics were more pixelated and Betamax still had a chance? At times, we can’t help but to reminisce about late 20th-century technology, which is why we have decided to take a close look at Retrospecs for iOS. This nifty $2 app allows you to quickly transform your favorite pictures into retro computing art with the press of a button. Today, we are taking a look to see if it fulfills our nostalgic desires or gives us the pains of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.
Instagram wants to be more of a pulse of what's going on in the world, so today the service announced overhauls of two major sections: Explore and Search. The changes are meant to help connect people to things in the world as they happen.
Nothing can be more frustrating than taking a beautiful photograph only to later find out that it is riddled with digital noise. While digital image sensors have advanced the field of photography, they have also introduced new problems to tackle. Luckily, programs such as Adobe Lightroom can reduce the amount of noise within a photograph caused by high ISO settings or long exposures. Today, we are going to learn how to tackle noise reduction in Lightroom CC.
