Some pretty amazing new software developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics is bringing something akin to cloning to the world of HD video. Using a step-by-step process, the software removes moving people or objects from video and then fills in the empty space with data from other frames.
Unsharp Mask: the sharpening filter of choice for photographers everywhere. It’s a fantastic tool that can really take an image to the next level when used correctly and I’m here to tell you that you should never use it again. That’s right, bid it a fond adieu and stop using Unsharp Mask. Forever.
Did you know that YouTube isn't just for uploading videos? Google's popular video hosting service also has a special feature designed just for photo slideshows. If you've never considered using YouTube for photos, you may have never noticed the option, but it's right there on the Upload page.
Google announced a new "spring cleaning" initiative yesterday through which some of the company's not-as-popular apps and services will be terminated to allow attention and resources to be focused on the heavily used ones. The notice that sparked the most hoopla was the death notice for Google Reader, but another photography-related one was also included in the notice: Snapseed.
Adobe is pushing hard towards cloud services and digital distribution. Its Creative Cloud software subscription service appears to be on a tear, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying monthly fees for always-updated software that traditionally came in boxes that carry hefty price tags.
An interesting new video-based interface technology developed in Hong Kong promises to make stop-motion animation more accessible to beginners, while making it that much easier for the pros as well.
Skin care company Dove is speaking out on the issue of "fake beauty" being promoted in photographs through Photoshopping. Rather than address the issue directly at first, the company decided to speak out directly to those responsible for "fake" images by doing some clever guerrilla marketing. It essentially pranked retouchers through the Web by releasing a fake Photoshop beauty Action that undoes manipulation rather than creates it.
No official version of Instagram exists for BlackBerry 10; so while users might be able to adjust their photos to get the perfect shot, they haven't been able to share those shots with the 100M+ member Instagram community.
Designer and web developer Ryan Taylor has developed a nifty piece of online software for photographers that he hopes to get funded through Kickstarter by the end of this month. Dubbed Safelight, the software would offer an online selling and proofing solution for those photographers who want to integrate an interactive store into their online portfolio.
Still photographs are easy to print and share, but how would you go about sharing a video with someone physically, without having to pass them some kind of tablet computer? HP has a solution: it's called Live Photo, and is an app that uses augmented reality to view videos "embedded" in printed photographs.
When the new Google Chromebook Pixel was announced a week ago, one of the new apps announced alongside it was for managing photographs. Photography played a bit part in the laptop's design: it has a 12.85-inch, 4.3 million pixel touchscreen (the highest pixel density of any laptop) that has a strange aspect ratio of 3:2 -- the aspect ratio of classic 35mm film.
Photographer Ed Pingol was sick of battling carpal tunnel every time he needed to cull or edit photos in Lightroom. So instead, he developed the Cullinator, a software app for Mac that pairs perfectly with an attachable gaming controller to keep you editing and culling ergonomically for hours without fatigue.
When Malik Bendjelloul -- director of the Academy Award-winning documentary 'Searching for Sugar Man' -- ran out of money just a few necessary shots away from completing his film, he wasn't sure what he was going to do. He had decided to shoot the film on a Super 8 film camera, but the cost of film had taken a larger toll on his budget than he had expected.
In February 2012, Adobe launched a photo editing app for Android and iOS tablets called Photoshop Touch. The software price priced at $10, and offers many of Photoshop's core features in a touch-based interface.
Last year we shared a clever "real world Instagram filter" concept called InstaCRT, which took submitted photos and rephotographed them on a real CRT monitor to capture a CRT look. Seeing the success of that project, Ray-Ban has decided to use the same idea in a clever bit of marketing to promote its Ambermatic sunglasses.
In the past, wedding receptions frequently involved disposable cameras placed on every table so that you could get your guests' perspectives on the festivities.
Film emulation software company VSCO has added another offering to its lineup of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw plugins. VSCO Film offers the same high-end film emulation power as Film 01 and 02, except it's designed for mimicking the look of instant films rather than standard color and black-and-white film stocks.
Starting today, you can download a free and legal copy of Photoshop. That's right -- free and legal. There's a catch, though: it's the original 1.0.1 version of the program that was released back in 1990.
Here's a crazy fact that's making the rounds on the Internet: if you live in Australia, it's currently cheaper for you to fly to the US and back to purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection than to purchase it in your own country.
Talking to computers is one of the exciting new trends that's emerging in the tech world, and in the future we may find ourselves casually talking to our gadgets as we go about our lives. One application of this that you may never have considered is photo editing: what if you could post-process your photographs simply by telling an image editor what you would like done to the images? …
There's a new photo sharing app in town called Reactions. That news isn't particularly unique or exciting in itself, but the developer behind the app is rather noteworthy: it's legendary hacker George Hotz (AKA "geohot").
It seems like every photography app and update has to do with iOS users, so here's one for the Android fanboys out there. Amazon's Cloud Drive Photos app -- which went live last November -- just got an update, complete with several much-requested features.
If you got on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed an abundance of strange, .gif-like video loops. These are the result of 'Vine,' Twitter's stand-alone video clip sharing app that is being called something akin to the "Instagram of Video" by more than a few online sources.
When shopping online, you've probably seen options for entering promo and discount codes during the checkout stage. Most of the time, however, you probably don't have a suitable code to use for knocking some dollars off the purchase price. Scouring the web can sometimes do the trick, but it's difficult to sift through the noise and find working codes.
If you were planning to install 500px's popular photo sharing app on your iPhone or iPad today, you're out of luck. The app was abruptly yanked from the iTunes App Store earlier today over the fact that users can search for photos showing artistic nudity.
When you think "Instagram competitor," the first app that comes to mind is Flickr's new offering. Having released just in time for Instagram to royally annoy its users with the proposed ToS changes, disgruntled Instagrammers flocked to Flickr in droves.
Is your Adobe Lightroom running slowly on your computer? Adobe regularly receives questions through social media regarding sluggish photo editing, and recently decided to start compiling the non-traditional solutions that work onto a single helpful page. In the Lightroom Help section of the Adobe website, there's now a page titled "Performance hints".
We've featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram's popular filters. What's unique about this new offering is that the presets aren't limited to the latest version of the mobile app's filters -- there's also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.
Want to create a long exposure photo but don't have a camera that can keep its shutter open for extended periods of time? Mansour Moufid of Elite Raspberries is working on a script called "Hipshot" that can take ordinary video footage and convert it into a faked long exposure still photo. He writes, …
Dropbox has been making major moves toward being a series photo-sharing service as of late, and its latest Android app update moves the service one step closer in that direction. The new feature allows users to quickly and easily share entire collections of photographs with friends and family.
Samsung camera lovers received some good news via Dropbox today. According to Dropbox's head of mobile business development Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, future Samsung smart cameras are going to come packing Dropbox and 50GB of free storage for 2 years.
For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.
Here's some potentially huge news from the photo-editing software industry today: Adobe may be giving away its older Creatie Suite 2 for free. This includes Photoshop CS2.
Photojournalist John D. McHugh was sick of having his photos stolen and infringed upon the moment he posted them online. And even though he can, of course, put watermarks on his photos in Photoshop, he found himself wondering if maybe he couldn't come up with a better way. Enter Marksta, an app that allows you to watermark photos right on your iPhone before posting them to Facebook, Instagram, and other places where they may be easily stolen.
French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics of using Lightroom 4 to post-process your digital photographs. If you're just getting into using Lightroom and shooting in RAW, it's a helpful primer that will allow you to hit the ground running.
A couple of weeks ago we featured a Google Chrome extension for overlaying "rule of thirds" lines over any online photograph. Now we have a different tool for examining other photographer's photographs: Image Histogram.
Part awesome party-trick, part brilliant idea, the new Cycloramic app from Egos Ventures is about the coolest thing you can get for one dollar on the iTunes app store at the moment. The app -- which will only work with the iPhone 5 -- triggers your phone's vibration at the exact right frequency to make it spin around in a perfect circle. Just stand your phone up, hit go, and keep an eye on your friend's faces (several reviewers called the reactions "priceless").
If you've been thinking about buying a copy of Apple's Aperture 3 for your post-processing work, you might want to hold off for a bit. A replacement may be on the near horizon -- at least according to a new book listing that has popped up over on Amazon Canada.
It was a pretty popular week for photography-related iOS app releases. First Facebook steps all over Snapchat's toes with its new 'Poke' app, and now Shutterfly has decided to enter the mobile market, putting its recent Penguin Digital acquisition to work. The launch comes just in time to squeeze in some last-minute personalized Christmas shopping, something that you couldn't do with the old version of the app.
Last week we ran a story about temporary photo and video sharing app Snapchat's recent explosion onto the market and how, sexting jokes aside, venture capitalists the world over are clawing to get a piece of the action. A few days later we found out that Facebook was about to rain all over Snapchat's parade by using Snapchat's idea to create its own app.
Want to see whether or not your favorite photographers are following the rule of thirds when composing their shots? Programmer and photography enthusiast Alex Dergachev has created a simple browser bookmarklet that overlays RoT gridlines over any (or almost any) web photograph.
Now that filtered smartphone photos have taken over the photo sharing world, many people -- especially investors -- are wondering: what's next? One possible answer may be temporary photo sharing.
First, there was a competition, which suggested that one second of video could capture a unique, meaningful moment. Then a young woman from LA used roughly one second of footage per day to document a year in her life. And then finally, Cesar Kuriyama's similar video documenting his frivolous year off work following his 30th birthday went viral.
Earlier today, Adobe officially launched Lightroom 4.3 and Camera Raw 7.3, an update that brings support for Apple Retina Displays (and other HiDPI high-res screens) to Lightroom. The news comes just a couple of days after Photoshop received its own HiDPI compatibility update.
If you haven't heard of the photo sharing app Snapchat yet then you probably will soon. The app -- which blew up earlier this year and is about to secure a boatload of venture capital -- is built around an incredibly simple concept: you don't always want to share photos on a permanent basis.
Flickr is the latest photo sharing service to shift its mobile offering to become more like Instagram. Just two days after Twitter launched photo filters for its mobile app, Flickr has updated its official iPhone app with the same feature.
A couple of weeks ago we shared a rumor that today would be the day Adobe officially announced a few major improvements to Photoshop CS6, including support for Apple's Retina display. Well, as luck (or good sources) would have it, we weren't wrong. This morning Adobe announced several exciting updates to Photoshop and Creative Cloud.
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
Instagram officially ended Twitter's ability to display embedded Instagram photos this past weekend. Twitter users aren't pleased, but Instagram is now trying to divert their attention away from what they no longer have to what they do. The company announced a major update to the iOS version of the app today, which includes a sleeker look, faster speed, and a brand new filter for Instagrammers to play with.
We live in a world that's teeming with digital photographs. More photos are now uploaded every two minutes than were created during the entire 1800s. Facebook is seeing thousands of photographs uploaded to its servers every second of the day, and Instagram was flooded with 10 storm-related photos per second during Hurricane Sandy.
