Wacom -- the same company that brings Photoshop artists and big spenders products like the 24HD Touch -- announced today that it is making an addition to its more whimsical line of Bamboo products. Dubbed Bamboo Loop, the new iOS (and soon Android) app puts photo sharing and SMS together to create a more fun and engaging messaging experience.
Earlier today, the Nokia Lumia 925 that was teased yesterday became a reality. But more impressive than the phone itself, or the camera inside it, is actually the software running that camera. Announced as part of the Lumia 925, Nokia's new Smart Camera application will soon bring some pretty cool photo features to the Lumia lineup.
One of the advantages of digital photography is having information about how each photo was shot embedded within the photograph's file itself. This EXIF data is something photographers commonly jot down in notebooks as they walk around and shoot with their analog cameras.
A couple of weeks ago, the Magic Lantern team announced that they had discovered a RAW DNG Live View output on the 5D Mark II and Mark III. At the time, they could only get 14 frames per second for only 28 frames before the camera needed to buffer, but the team was confident that they could eventually increase the speed to 24p and pull a true RAW video feed out of the camera.
Nikon DSLR owners who want to control their cameras from their PCs have a few options available to them. But while most of them offer basic functionality (i.e. aperture, shutter speed and shutter release control), the free, open source software digiCamControl seems to offer a bit more.
Beamr's space-saving application JPEGmini has gone through a few evolutions over time. What started as a web app to reduce JPEG files by up to 5x without losing quality has since spread to the world of desktops and mobile devices with their space-saving Mac app and high-res photo sharing iOS app.
A team of researchers led by PhD student Dustin Adams at the University of California at Santa Cruz have created an amazing application that may someday soon help visually impaired photo enthusiasts and photographers take better photos.
CollegeHumor -- the folks behind such photo parodies as the Nickleback Instagram spoof and the overly-specific stock photos parody -- are releasing an iOS game today. The game, dubbed Bout, gives you and your friends the chance to battle over taking the most creative or laughter-inducing photo when given a specific prompt.
Hipstamatic has seen better days. Ever since Instagram came along and stole its thunder by offering filters for free, the app hasn't had the same following it once did. But the company isn't going to take this lying down. After having to fire several core employees last August, Hipstamatic is bouncing back by debuting a new social networking app called Oggl.
While it is true that photo apps are in high demand and, therefore, a dime a dozen, we were still surprised to find out that rapper Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dogg) decided to branch into the market himself. In partnership with Upper Playground, 99centbrains and Cashmere Agency, the rapper has officially broken into the smartphone photography game with his new app Snoopify.
As Google Glass ramps up to the point where it's eventually available to the general public, app developers are looking to get in on the ground floor and start developing for the platform early on. Naturally, several of those apps will seek to provide an Instagram-like service for Glass users, and the first to jump on this bandwagon is an app called Glassagram.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Canon today officially launched a new firmware update (version 1.2.1) for the 5D Mark III that brings two notable improvements to the camera: uncompressed HDMI output and the ability to use cross-type autofocus at f/8.
If you're interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.
A neat way to present a recap of a trip is to take all the photographs taken over many days -- both keepers and unwanted shots -- and string them together into a fast-paced time-lapse video. A problem with this type of video, however, is that the photos often fly by so quickly that it's difficult for your brain to distinguish between them and to pick out "highlights." …
Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it's a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.
FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.
Film footage from the early 1900's, when hand-cranked cameras were all the technology available, aren't exactly high-quality. Choppy, jumpy, and sped-up, the people in these films look anything but natural.
Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world's first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.
Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into "works of digital art" ... at least that's what they're calling them.
Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."
The Internet let out a collective gasp back in October 2011 when Adobe gave an advanced preview of a crazy new image deblurring feature it has been working on. The feature can take a photo that's blurry due to camera shake, calculate the movements that caused the blur, and "reverse it" to create a sharper photo.
The Android operating system has been expanding beyond the world of smartphones and into the realm of "smartcameras" as of late, but did you know that by doing so it has simply gone full circle? That's right: Android was originally intended for digital cameras rather than for phones.
From the very first version of Lightroom in 2006, Adobe has been releasing public betas prior to shipping to make sure that the final product has all of the kinks worked out, and this year is no exception. Earlier today, Adobe released the public beta of its upcoming Lightroom 5, complete with video and photo examples of a few exciting new features.
Nikon released software development kits (SDKs) for its SLRs some time ago, allowing for developers to create software that play nice with Nikon cameras. Using the company's DSLR SDKs, savvy programmers can develop software that controls camera functions such as aperture, shutter speed and even shutter release.
Following on the heels of a similar announcement by Adobe itself, design marketplace Creative Market has announced that it too has set up an in-app marketplace for Photoshop users. Out now, Creative Market's Photoshop extension allows users to browse and buy from the company's massive catalog of templates, fonts, infographics and more without ever leaving the comfort of Photoshop.
Steganography is the art of passing secret messages in a way that most observers wouldn't detect even though the message is in plain view. Unlike cryptography, which attempts to transmit messages as nonsense, steganography uses security through obscurity, relying on the fact that most people aren't looking for secret messages in ordinary things. Passing notes in invisible ink would be one example.
Hyperlapse photography involves shooting a series of photographs over large distances and then stringing the photos together into a time-lapse video that zooms the viewer through the locations. Creating a real hyperlapse involves quite a bit of work, so the folks over at Teehan+Lax Labs decided to go virtual by turning to Google Street View to source the necessary photos.
Photo sharing is "in" these days. Just look around, and you'll find that pretty much every major social network has it as a major pillar of their service. Facebook is the largest photo sharing site in the world by volume. Google+ has all but absorbed the once powerful Picasa brand.
Amateurs just getting into post-processing sometimes opt to purchase the much cheaper Photoshop Elements over spending the hundreds more it would cost to get the industry standard pro version. Unfortunately, the gap in features between Elements and the upgrade leaves a lot to be desired, which is why the ElementsXXL plug-in came to be.
Social photo sharing, especially where location services are involved, is tricky. As we saw with the Color app debacle, privacy concerns rule all and no amount of pre-release hype and funding can overcome those. Still, as TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler said on his blog, "a killer social photo album service" should exist, and Albumatic is making a bid for that designation.
Most smartphone photography apps are all about three things: taking, editing and sharing. ThrowBack, however, isn't about any of them. Instead of focusing on taking your photos and enjoying them now, the ThrowBack app wants you to "forget your memories so they can be remembered again."
The Touch is a Mac app created by Arctic Whiteness that allows photographers and videographers to get a better handle on Lightroom and Final Cut Pro X by adding extensive touch gesture functionality.
Did you know Instagram's mobile app can be used to view movies? Okay, okay, you won't be able to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster on it, but it's possible to enjoy glimpses of old school silent films.
Retro filters are still doing their steady march toward becoming ubiquitous across camera and photo-sharing mobile apps. Today, Google announced a new update to its iPhone and Android Google+ apps that adds these filters for people who want to make their photographs look "retro."
One half of the face above is a photograph, and the other half is a highly detailed computer generated rendering created using a program called KeyShot by Luxion. Can you tell which is which? If you can't tell, why should we? (Okay, to be honest, we're not sure either).
When Google acquired Nik Software back in September, the photographic community took it as a sign that the internet giant was focusing more intently on our passion. But last week, when Google announced it would be pulling support for the desktop version of Nik's popular mobile editor Snapseed, the same people wondered if this spelled the end of the rest of Nik's well-respected suite of plugins.
About a year ago, we shared an app called 645 Pro that saves photos shot with the iPhone (and other iOS devices) as TIFF files. Now there's a new app that's even more "raw". Digital Negative, a new app by a company called Cypress Innovations, claims to be the first app that captures uncompressed images that retain 100% of the information captured by the camera sensor.
Here's a walkthrough of how I hooked up my Android phone to my DSLR. Why did I do this? Because of Dropbox, social media, quick editing for the web, an intervalometer, macro/low-angle photography, an external LCD screen for video, Wi-Fi, and more.
If you often find yourself taking screenshots of your friends and family while in Google Hangouts video chats, the company will soon be releasing a new featured designed just for you. It's called the Hangouts Capture app, and it lets you easily snap and save funny moments with others as they happen on your screen.
Photo-sharing apps run the gamut between the hyper-social (ala Instagram: like, comment and share to your heart's content) and the secretive (ala Snapchat: this photo will self-destruct in 3 ... 2 ... ). Ustwo's new app Rando falls somewhere in that latter category, because while you can share photos with Rando, you have no idea who you're sharing them with, or who is sharing them with you -- and forget about likes, comments and favorites.
