Software

The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.

When Nik Software was acquired by Google back in September, one of the prized catches -- besides Nik's impressive suite of high-end photo editing software -- was Snapseed, a highly popular photo editing app for iOS. Many people suspected that Google was gearing up to fight more directly with Instagram, now the Facebook-owned 800lb gorilla in the mobile photo sharing space.

We reported in the middle of last month that Eye-Fi was planning to launch a new cloud-based photo sharing service with the name Circ. That day has arrived: the wireless SD card maker has officially launched the service into private beta. Unlike other cloud services, which cap storage space for free accounts -- 5GB is a popular limit -- Circ doesn't. Rather than limit free accounts by storage, Circ is based on the number of devices used. A free account lets you sync 2 devices, while a $50/year …

When photographer Devon Mikale was in high school, he created this lengthy manual for his newspaper class to help others learn how to get started in Photoshop. The high school's faculty loved it so much that they ended up purchasing it for re-distribution in future classes. Mikale has graciously allowed us to publish the guide here for free.

Earlier this year, we shared an amazing iPhone app by imaging company Scalado called PhotoBeamer. The app allows you to quickly run a slideshow of your Camera Roll photos on any device that can load the PhotoBeamer website, simply by pointing your phone at that display. One month later, Nokia acquired Scalado and began folding the small company's projects into its own software. Now, Nokia has launched a repackaged version of PhotoBeamer exclusively for its Lumia phones.

Today Facebook finally launched the photo sync feature that it has been privately testing for smartphones over the past couple of months. The feature is built into the social network's official mobile app for Android and iOS, and makes it easier to automatically sync your phone photos to the Facebook cloud.

Back in August, Adobe announced that HiDPI display support -- including for Apple's Retina displays -- would be coming to Photoshop CS6 sometime this fall. If the rumors floating around are true, we may only be about two weeks away from the official announcement date.

A week after acquiring a 2-man mobile-app-developing team, photo-sharing service 500px has launched an official app for the iPhone, which joins the iPad version that was launched about a year ago.

Back in October, Roger Cicala shared some first impressions of the Canon EOS M with us, and stated that he believes the camera is "a firmware update and a price drop away from being a great camera." While we haven't seen any major price cuts to the camera so far, a firmware update may be on the near horizon.

If you've been jostling with crowds today over Black Friday deals and are heavy laden with shopping bags, take a look at this sweet deal that won't be any extra hassle: Amazon is currently selling the full boxed version of Adobe Lightroom 4 for just $79! It's regularly priced at $150, and sometimes dips down to $100, but $79 for one of the most popular image editing programs is quite an attractive offer. No word on how long this pricing will last, but we're guessing that it'll go back up after …

500px is on a tear. The service has been growing like a weed as of late, and appears to have some ambitious plans in the works. The company announced today that it has acqui-hired (i.e. buying out a small company mainly for the team's talent) the two-man development team Pulpfingers, creators of the popular iOS 500px browsing app ISO500.

If you use a Mac and regularly need to resize batches of photos, there's actually a tool built into your operating system that lets you do just that without having to open any image editing program. It's called "sips", which stands for scriptable image processing system. It's extremely easy to use, but you'll need to know how to use Terminal to take advantage of it.

We've known since last month that Lytro is planning to roll out at least one fancy new feature for its light field cameras (parallax-based 3D), but now the company has taken the wraps off the feature to give us a sneak peek at what they'll offer. The two new features that will soon appear in Lytro's Desktop software are called Perspective Shift and Living Filters.

If you have two similar photos of two different people, Photoshopping one face onto the other isn't very difficult. Change that to two video clips of two people talking, and you have a much more challenging task on your hands. That's the problem Harvard University computational photography graduate student Kevin Dale decided to tackle. His research project, titled "Video Face Replacement," introduces a way of doing this "digital face transplant" in a relatively automated way. The demonstration …

Samsung released the open source kernel files for its new Galaxy Camera late last week, something commonly done in the smartphone world -- at least with certain platforms -- but a foreign concept in the world of digital photography. This opens the door to all kinds of possibilities as hackers begin to peer into the cameras brain and dream up new possibilities for how it should work.

MyShoebox is a new photo storage and sharing service that has been making a splash after launching a little over a week ago. Its offering is easy to describe: free and unlimited cloud storage for photos that can then be viewed from anywhere. Think of it as a Dropbox dedicated to preserving and enjoying photos.

Photographers who have been patiently waiting for Adobe to bring Retina-compatibility to Lightroom will be glad to know that support is indeed part of the next update to the popular photo-editing program. In fact, you can download the compatible version already: Adobe has released a Lightroom 4.3 Release Candidate so photographers can help test the app and help squash bug before it becomes an official release.

Facebook wasn't content with beating out Twitter in the pursuit of Instagram: the company has now beaten Twitter in launching photo filters in its primary mobile app as well. Just days after The New York Times reported that Twitter will be adding retro filters to its mobile apps in order to compete against Instagram, Facebook has gone ahead and added Instagram-style filters to its official Facebook iOS app.

This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users' photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user's photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.

Here's a friendly public service announcement: remember to time on your camera before and after Daylight Savings Time (which just ended yesterday in the United States) -- unlike cell phones, digital cameras generally don't adjust their own time. If you accidentally forgot and now have a bunch of photos with timestamps that are off by an hour, there are some programs out there that can help you set things right.

It seems like every company wants a share of the cloud photo storage pie. This past Thursday, Amazon launched a Cloud Drive Photos app for storing and sharing photos through its Cloud Drive storage service. It just so happens that AT&T also launched an almost identical service that same day. It's called AT&T Locker, and is an app for iOS and Android that "lets you store, sync and share your data in one safe, convenient place."

It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.

Amazon has launched Cloud Drive Photos, an Android app that makes it easy to store and share photographs to and from the the cloud. It's a consumer-oriented app build on top of Amazon Cloud Drive, a cloud-storage service that competes with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.

Just in case you've been wondering: yes, the latest versions of Adobe's photo-editing programs are all compatible with the new Microsoft Windows 8. Adobe product manager Jeffrey Tranberry writes, …

When Google upgraded its Android OS to Jelly Bean 4.2 a couple of days ago, the company unveiled a new camera app called Photo Sphere that lets you shoot 360-degree panoramas by waving your camera around. If you've been dying to play with the app on your Android device running the older version of Jelly Bean, but can't bear to wait until 4.2 officially comes to you, this should be music to your ears: the new 4.2 camera/gallery upgrades and Photo Sphere have been successfully ported to Android …

Apple may have launched a neat panorama feature with iOS 6, but Google is one-upping the Cupertino-based company today with its new Jelly Bean flavor: Android 4.2. The OS now comes with an official 360-degree panorama app called Photo Sphere.

Apple has released a new OS X update that provides system-level compatibility with the RAW photos of a number of newer cameras that were launched over the past year, including the Nikon D600 and Canon EOS M. It's called the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 4.01, and allows newer RAW files to be viewed and edited in programs like Preview, Aperture, and iPhoto.

Want to enjoy some of the world's latest and greatest news photographs on your iPad? Reuters has a new app designed just for you. Called The Wider Image, it's a photo experience that's designed to bring beautiful photojournalism to life in your hands.

If you've been using Dropbox as a photo backup solution and the official iOS app for accessing your images in the cloud, you may have noticed that downloading photos to your device didn't give you the exact files that you wanted. Instead of beaming the full-resolution images to your Camera Roll, the app would shrink photos to a much smaller size to speed up downloading times. A 14MP 4592x3056 photo would only be saved at 960x638, for example.

Don't worry Canon 5D Mark III shooters: Canon didn't forget about you after all. Less than a week after announcing a highly-requested firmware update to the Canon 1D X to address AF complaints, Canon has revealed that a similar -- but even better -- update is also coming to the Canon 5D Mark III.

Back in September, we wrote that there was a new service by photo-book company Mixbook called Mosaic on the way. New details have been unveiled that offer a better look at how the service will work. In short: it's an iPhone app that's designed to make turning your photos into photo books as easy and as affordable as possible.

Do you trust your hand-eye coordination enough to throw your Android smartphone into the air? If so, you can now use it for automated camera toss photography. ThrowMeApp is a new app created by programmer Anton Beitler, a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

People often laugh and poke fun at the cliche of impossible image enhancements seen in TV shows and movies, but you won't be laughing when you see what SmartDeblur can do -- you'll be gawking in amazement. Created by programmer and image processing expert Vladimir Yuzhikov, the program can magically reveal details in photographs that are blurry due to poor focusing and/or shaky hands.

Frank Said What? is an amazing new iOS camera app that can accurately describe any photo you show it. It's not just smart, it's witty too: "Frank" will usually give your photographs humorous captions. Some will make you smile, while others will make you laugh out loud.

When Adobe unleashed Photoshop CS5 back in April 2010, one of the big features that had photographers buzzing was Content Aware Fill. With a simple selection and a few keystrokes, the tool could magically delete a portion of a photograph and replace the void with details from the surrounding area. The tool was so revolutionary that when a sneak peek demo went viral, viewers began calling the video fake and too good to be true. It wasn't.

There have been a number of projects in the past that asked people to capture videos and photographs all over the world during a single day. Montblanc wants to take the idea one step further: the luxury company has launched a photo project called "Worldsecond" that aims to have all its participants capture photographs across the globe at the same moment in time.

The Canon 1D X firmware update that Canon accidentally leaked yesterday is now official and available over on Canon's website. The upgrade adds two autofocus features that photographers have been asking for since the camera was released: illuminated AF points and the ability to use cross-type autofocus at f/8.

Beauty retouching on still photographs of faces is both ubiquitous and controversial in some industries. You've likely seen your fair share of tutorials and demonstrations that show amazing feats of Photoshop, but did you know that the same 'shops can be done on video? And not just any video, mind you: 4K video.

Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS.

After months of dedicated hacking, Magic Lantern has finally been released for the Canon 7D. The new alpha version of the firmware add-on introduces a slew of new features to the camera, including focus peaking, zebra stripes, magic zoom, spotmeter, liveview customization, image review tweaks, and much more.

Visual Supply Co (AKA VSCO), best known for its film emulation software, has launched a new product that's designed to reduce the time you spend post-processing your images in Adobe Lightroom. VSCO Keys is a tool that adds powerful and customizable keyboard shortcuts to Lightroom 3 and 4. You can assign keys to the various sliders in the program, allowing you to keep your hands off your mouse during photo editing.

Tumblr jumped into the mobile photo sharing game today by releasing Photoset, a new photo sharing app for the iPhone and the iPad. The app is stupidly simple and is focused on doing one thing well: sharing groups of photos with others.

If you own an iOS device, you've probably noticed that the Camera Roll in the native Photos app doesn't come with any way to mark photographs as private. For this reason, the App Store features a large number of apps (both paid and free) designed to offer that feature, allowing you to choose what to show and what not to when someone else is flipping through your photographs. If you want an easy way to "mark photos as private" without having to download a special app (or pay money for a fancy …

Adobe has officially added lossy compression into the latest specification (1.4) for its Digital Negative (DNG) RAW file format. The new Lossy DNG, which first appeared as a feature in Lightroom 4 earlier this year, gives photographers a middle-ground between the quality of lossless DNG photos and the small file size of JPEG photos.

On September 22nd, more than 100 developers descended upon Berlin to compete against each other in building the best photo app they could within 24 hours. After a long, sleepless night and thousands of lines of code, 27 new photo apps were born. Here's a look at the top three that won the competition.

Google recently reaffirmed its commitment to keeping recently-acquired Nik Software's high-end photography tools alive, which led some to believe that Snapseed -- Nik's popular photo editing app -- would be neglected or shuttered. That doesn't appear to be the case.

There's an iPhone camera app generating quite a bit of buzz, and it's not Instagram or Camera+. The new rising star is Manga-Camera, a fun app that's been downloaded like hotcakes in recent days (okay, we made up that expression). It has been downloaded over a million times in just the past week, and is currently the number one most popular app in the Japanese App Store.

Would you use a camera app that could only shoot a single photo before becoming useless as a camera? The answer is probably no, but you should still take a look at One Memento nevertheless. It's might sound unappealing at first, but the idea behind the app is quite interesting.

Instagram is in the process of pushing out version 3.1.0 of its photo sharing app. For iOS, the new version updates the app to be compatible with iOS 6 and the taller screen of the iPhone 5, doing away with the annoying gap that owners of the new phone have been seeing. While it's certainly a welcome improvement for Instagram devotees, seeing an app be updated for the new display isn't exactly a rare sight these days.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a new company called Fourandsix (pronounced "forensics"), a collaboration between a former Photoshop product manager and a professor who's an expert in digital forensics. The goal of the new startup was to build powerful tools that would make detecting digital photo manipulation easy. Well, the first Fourandsix product is now available.