Last week, we took a look at an excellent Photoshop alternative for Mac OS X, Affinity Photo Beta. This week, we are taking a look at a possible Lightroom alternative, Emulsion, to see if it can also help you step outside of Adobe’s ecosystem. While Adobe provides an excellent range of products, some photographers are looking to expand their horizon with more affordable alternatives.
One of the emerging trends in the world of photography is the idea of automated recognition and tagging of things found in photographs. Flickr can now suggest autotags for your photos, and Google's new Photos service lets you search through your unlabeled photos using advanced image recognition.
Want to experience the work of one of the greatest American portrait photographers on your iPad? Check out Avedon, an official app created by the foundation of the late photographer Richard Avedon.
The most affordable package option for the latest versions of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop costs $110 a year. If you are a photographer, you know that every cent you can reinvest back into your hobby or business is well worth it. With that being said, there may be an option on the market that is not only a better value compared to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, but also blows it out of the water in terms of performance - that piece of software is Affinity Photo for Mac.
Like many other photo loving enthusiasts, I carry a large number of photographs around on my iPhone. If you utilize a service such as Apple’s iCloud, then you could also automatically be syncing thousands of images from your master collection for on the go viewing. With hundreds, or even thousands, of photographs to organize there has to be an easier way. Hit Labs believes they have a solution with their intelligent organizing photo library app for iOS, Picjoy.
Want to see an impressive example of what the new Dehaze slider in Photoshop and Lightroom can do? Check out the 1-minute video above by photographer Grant Friedman, who tested out the feature using a foggy and blown out RAW photo of Times Square on a rainy day.
BitTorrent is an industry leading protocol for peer-to-peer filing sharing over the Internet, enabling people to quickly share files when needed. Today, the company announced a new photo and video sharing application, BitTorrent Shoot. Designed to allow fast exchange between many different mobile device platforms, BitTorrent Shoot is available in Google Play, Apple’s App Store, and the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Finding the perfect photograph to use can be a challenge. Most photographers seek to copyright their work giving them the exclusive rights to its use and distribution. When you simply want to use a photo for a school presentation or your personal blog, navigating the legal landscape can be a nightmare. Luckily, the folks over at Creative Commons have created an Android app to allow you to find quickly and request images that you can legally use.
Want an ultimate single-page cheat sheet for looking up keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC? The design team over at setupablogtoday have created just that: massive sheets that you can study and explore to your hearts content.
Adobe announced a major update to its Creative Cloud subscription service today, bringing a large number of improvements to the entire Adobe family of 15 CC desktop apps. Here's a look at what's new for photographers in Creative Cloud 2015.
Adobe today announced Adobe Stock, a new stock content service that's directly integrated into creative workflows that involve Adobe applications.
That Dehaze feature that Adobe teased last month is now official for Photoshop's Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom in a major new Creative Cloud update. The feature helps eliminate fog and haze from photos to create "startlingly clear images."
Facebook today launched a new standalone app called Moments that's designed to help friends build collaborative photo albums for easy sharing of memories.
Celebrities now have another reason to shy away from paparazzi photographers. Scientists have created a new technique for creating controllable digital versions of celebrities using only a set of paparazzi photos to reconstruct faces and create convincing expressions.
If you shoot film, you know how difficult it can be to properly organize your photographs once they have been digitized to your computer. Modern digital cameras allow easy organization with built in metadata that provides every bit of information you could ever need; however, digitally scanned photos contain no such data. Promote Systems has introduced the Meta35, a device to easily import and sync your film camera’s metadata.
If you use the Camera app on an Android phone, you may soon be getting a fancy new feature called Smart Burst, which will let you capture a rapid-fire sequence of frames and then have the best one selected for you as the keeper.
Photography has always served as a way to preserve family memories; now, Shutterfly wants to make them easy to turn into travel albums. Using your iPhone and the company’s new service, TripPix, users can design full-featured albums, which include 15-30 photographs, on their iOS devices and then print them for only $20. Anyone can easily convert their collection of digital photos into beautiful travel books in just a few minutes.
PhotoShelter launched a mobile app today that lets photographers on the service manage their photo portfolios on the go using their smartphones.
Apple just announced the next version of its OS X operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference this morning. The successor of Yosemite will be OS X El Capitan, version 10.11. The update will be focused on user experience and performance.
If you like the idea of online photo sharing but dislike the idea of popular users getting all the attention, ROL is a new app you should check out. It's a competitive photo sharing service that focuses on promoting images based on their merits rather than on a photographer's follower counts.
Last week when Google Photos launched, I quickly tested it out and then wrote a post with my immediate initial reaction to the service. Much of my early disappointment centered around the fact that Google chose to limit the size of photos in the service to 16 megapixels. As a DSLR shooter this meant that a large portion of my library would be downsized with Google Photos. Bummer.
If you're a Nikon photographer using iOS devices, you may be in for a treat in the near future. Rumor has it that Nikon and Apple are currently collaborating on a secret new iOS app for Nikon cameras.
With many cameras now supporting integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, a good number of photographers are editing their photographs while still on the road. There is a variety of applications on both iOS and Android that offer different feature sets at varying price points. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the best offerings to help you pick out what may be the best solution for your circumstances.
The Finnish app development studio Sumoing has just launched Relook, a new photo-editing app for iOS that it calls the first professional-level facial retouching app.
Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.
The debate between analog and digital may never end, but there can be a happy medium. One of the reasons that analog continues to live on is due to the wondrous ‘color profiles’ that one can find in different packages of film, along with their unique grain profiles. VSCO, a company that designs presets for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, has released their latest collection “VSCO FILM 07” - the eclectic films package.
Kolektio is an application designed to make sharing photographic moments with friends easier than it has ever been before. The app designed for Apple iOS devices (coming soon to Android) allows users to create a ‘moment’ and then contribute snapshots to it. Kolektio wants to make sure that you are never worried about losing another party photo ever again.
If you've downloaded a copy of GIMP for Windows from SourceForge in recent days, you may want to double check to make sure you didn't get other programs installed as well. Some copies of the "open source Photoshop" were apparently being offered with for-profit adware bundled with the installer.
Camera triggering company Triggertrap has launched a new iOS camera app called Triggertrap Selfie. Its functionality is simple: sound-triggered selfies. Simply point your phone, make a loud sound (e.g. scream at your camera), and the app will take care of snapping a shot for you.
Google today announced its new and long awaited Photos service, a standalone service that's separate from Google+. It's "a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device," Google says.
Pixelmator, the popular photo editing app for Mac and iPad, is now available for iPhones. The app is designed for mobile photographers who want "advanced, desktop-class photo editing tools" at their fingertips without having to move photos off their phones.
Photographer John Coates wanted to become more familiar with the latest default Photoshop CC 2014 keyboard shortcuts, so he created a handy cheat sheet to use as an at-a-glance reference. It's designed for photographers who use Mac, and is of high enough resolution (2560×1440) to be used as the desktop background on many displays. You can download the file for yourself here (or here).
At Adobe MAX 2014 last October, Adobe gave a tech preview of a new "dehaze" feature that it's currently developing that can seemingly magically remove haze from photos. Above is a new sneak peek video Adobe just posted that shows what's "coming soon to Lightroom CC."
OldSF and OldNYC are two websites created by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, who gathered tens of thousands of historical photos of San Francisco and New York City and plotted them on city maps.
Google is reportedly set to launch a standalone Photos service separate from Google+ in the very near future, and one of the things we'll be seeing through the transition is a revamped Photos app for Google's Android. If you're curious as to what the upcoming smartphone app will be like, there are new leaked screenshots that give us a taste of its features and functionality.
After a three year run, Adobe is retiring Photoshop Touch, its current horse in the mobile photo editing race. The company announced today that the iOS and Android app will be removed from app stores on May 28th. The software will still be usable on your device if you've downloaded it already, of course, but there will be no further updates.
Adobe wants to be the 800 pound gorilla of mobile photo editing. Today the company released the 2-minute sneak peek video above showing off some mobile retouching features its currently developing. In the clip, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows how effortlessly photographers will be able to edit 50.3 megapixel Canon 5DS photos in the app.
There are a great number of storage options out there for your photographs, but a new app called Bundle believes they can bring something to the table that others cannot. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, the service helps to easily arrange your images into ‘bundles’ and then upload them to the cloud for safe backup from both Android and iOS devices.
Nikon has just released a new firmware update for the D750. The download is version C:1.02 and is designed to make your D750 "more reliable." …
Last September, we featured Lumy, an elegant iPhone app that's designed to help photographers track golden hour and other times of the day with ideal natural light. Today, the company released an update that brings the app to the new Apple Watch, allowing photographers to be reminded of certain lighting conditions with notifications on their wrist.
Want to find the sweetest photo locations near where you are? There's a new app that can point you in the right direction. It's called ShutterSpots, and it's an interactive community database of popular places to capture great photos.
RealNetworks (remember them?) has announced a new cloud photo and video storage service, RealTimes, which provides an online backup for storing and organizing your favorite memories. The service will be available starting today for iOS, Android, Mac, and PC owners. As with most other services, RealTimes comes in a collection of different flavors depending on how much you are willing to pay.
In this post, I'll share a trick I use to get some adjustments "beyond" +100 or -100 in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.
Forcing your family and friends to sit down and relive memories via a slideshow has been a popular option since Kodak patented the first Slide Projector in 1965. However, since the turn of the century, digital photography has taken off, and the once familiar clicking sound of carousel units are nowhere to be heard. Instead, here comes ‘Wideshow’, an iOS app designed to help you view your standard 4:3 images on the large widescreen with added benefits.
I recently had the absolute pleasure of meeting and shooting with Mackenzie Johnson! Today I'm going to share how I turned my portrait of her into a painting. Not everyone is a painter, but with a little time and patience -- and Photoshop -- I believe anyone can achieve this effect.
Back in August 2014, we reported that Microsoft was working on some game-changing software that would magically transform first-person videos into stabilized "hyperlapses." Today, the company officially launched that software, called Hyperlapse, for Windows, Windows Phone, and Android.
Flickr rolled out a new search engine last week, but one thing it still lacks is a way to search by EXIF data. A new website has launched to fill that hole. Called shutterdial, it's a Flickr search engine that lets you find photos by camera settings such as focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.
Leica has discovered a serious bug that owners of the new Monochrom (Typ 246) need to be aware of. The camera's DNG files have been found to be incompatible with Apple's new Photos app. It's not just that they can't be opened: the files could corrupt your library and cause you to lose your entire photo collection.
Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.
A Los Angeles-based cloud graphics company called OTOY has announced the world's first spherical light field capture that creates a navigable scene in virtual reality. By capturing light field data with a special Canon and GoPro camera rig, the company created the beginnings of immersive photos you can move around in.
