Adobe has announced Photoshop Elements 11, the latest refresh to the company's more-affordable and easier-to-use counterpart to Photoshop, which it claims is the #1 selling consumer photo editing program.
When news of Google's acquisition of Nik Software emerged a week ago, most of the tech press (and this blog) focused on one particular offering: Snapseed. It's a highly-acclaimed mobile photo editing app that has been growing like a weed as of late, so it made sense that Google would want it to participate in the ongoing mobile photo sharing war, right? Well, maybe not.
Social photo aggregation service Pixable has been acquired by Singaporean telecommunications company SingTel for $26.5 million. The service helps in photo browsing and discovery by aggregating photographs from your various social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flicker) and using a special ranking system to only show you the interesting images. Billing itself as a "photo inbox", users can also keep up with their friends' photographs on-the-go using the company's popular iOS and …
Facebook is testing out a new feature for its Android mobile app called "Photo Syncing". The feature automatically backs up your smartphone's photographs by uploading them to Facebook as they're shot, tucking them away inside a private "Synced from Phone" tab on your photos page that isn't visible to anyone but you. You can then later choose which photos you'd like to make private and which you'd simply like for Facebook to hold on to.
Nik Software announced today that it has been acquired by Google. The company is the maker of Snapseed, one of the most popular photo editing apps in the iTunes App Store and a competitor to Instagram.
This news might not be very relevant to most of you, but Adobe has announced that future versions of Photoshop will not be compatible with Windows XP.
Apple's iPhone and iOS get a lot of media attention, but Google's Android OS is the world's most popular smartphone operating system by a long shot. Given this fact, it makes sense to at least target both markets if you're releasing something that's intended to be widely used. Triggertrap understands this, and today released the Android version of its mobile camera triggering app.
In October of 2011, the tech world went into a frenzy after Adobe showed off some crazy image deblurring research it's working on. By calculating the camera movements that caused the blur in the first place, the algorithm is able to "reverse" the motion blur and sharpen the photo. If you've been impatiently waiting for the feature to show up in a new version of Photoshop, you might want to check out Blurity, a similar blur removal tool that's already available. The software has been available …
Back in 2011, it was discovered that iPhones, iPods, and iPads running iOS 5 had a hidden panorama feature that was built into the operating system but not ordinarily available through the devices. Methods were discovered for unlocking the feature, which we all assumed was simply a half-baked feature that wasn't ready for release at the time.
360° interactive photographs of products are a great way for online merchants to increase their conversion rates -- people apparently feel more comfortable buying things if they can see what it looks like all the way around -- but creating those views can be a pain. Enter RotaryView's new CupChair, a simple app that greatly simplifies the process by taking care of most of the steps for you.
Love it or hate it, Instagram is currently a pretty big deal in the mobile space. Big enough, perhaps, that many smartphone users might not even consider switching to a phone running Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system unless the photo sharing app is available. If you're one of those people, get ready to think about jumping ship: Instagram is coming to Windows Phone.
We're in the year of the camera's app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera's app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren't easily available in the old age of cameras.
As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming increasingly important. Facial recognition algorithms are quickly becoming a standard feature in popular photo origination programs (e.g. iPhoto), but people-sorting is only the tip of the "semantic photo search" iceberg. Cloud photo service EverPix is one company that's currently working to take photo recognition beyond faces. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch writes, …
Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.
New uber-high-resolution HiDPI displays like Apple's Retina display are amazing to look at, but aren't very useful unless 3rd party software makers optimize their programs to support the technology. If you're a photographer that has already shelled out a few G's on a Retina-equipped Macbook Pro, you're probably disappointed with the fact that Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom aren't optimized for the display. In fact, some photographers are finding the display unusable for professional photo …
GIMP, the image editing program that's a popular open-source alternative to Photoshop, is now easier than ever for Mac users to start using. Though it was completely free, installing it has long required that X11 also be installed -- a major pain in the butt. That changes with the latest version of GIMP: the app is now a self-contained native app that's a breeze to install. It's as simple as dragging and dropping.
The worlds of digital photography and cloud storage have been colliding as of late, with industry players such as Adobe and Apple coming out with services (Revel and Photo Stream, respectively) that synchronize your photo collections with the cloud.
Flickr's Android app is almost one year old now, and the service is getting it ready for its birthday by pushing out an update with a fresh UI and new features. Version 1.5 introduces a new navigation menu, new explore features, metadata editing, new camera options, and more.
If you've been looking for a way to hold "photo conversations" with friends and family as easily as you chat through text messages, Skype has a solution for you. The company has added one of the features requested the most by its millions of users: mobile photo sharing. Upgrade to the latest version of Skype's iPhone and iPad apps, and you'll be able to beam your latest snaps to anyone on your contact list without having to worry about things like file size limits or paying for MMS charges.
Geotagging is one of the big trends in photography these days, as more and more cameras allow GPS coordinates to be baked into the EXIF data of photos to document where they were taken. iOS app developer Reddyset wants to join in on the location tagging fun, but from a very different angle: taxitagging.
Digital artist and programmer Joe Macirowski is one of the many people bemoaning the spread of Instagram-style filters to every nook and cranny of online photo sharing. Even though he enjoys Instagram itself, the fact that more and more people are using the filters to share their memories outside the app made Macirowski decide that something "had to be done." What he did was write Normalize, a new iOS app that is anti-Instagram... literally.
Last month, nearly three hundred programmers descended on Dropbox's headquarters in San Francisco for the third annual Photo Hack Day. In the span of 24 hours, they threw together 70 new apps using the APIs of different photo services. $10,000 in prize money was distributed to the top three apps. Here's a look at the three best hacks that popped out of the competition.
Instagram has rolled out version 3.0 of its photo sharing app, which now boasts over 80 million users around the world. The new release focuses on improving the browsing experience for photos, with geotagging being one of the core ideas. There's a new Photo Maps view that's similar to what you can find on services like Flickr. The page overlays photos onto a map, allowing you to browse images based on where they were shot.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's the quote by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke that you'll find on Cardiio's homepage. It's a quote that is quite appropriate, given what the app can do.
A couple months ago we shared an app called Foap, which allows people who take pictures with their phone to put the images up for sale for $10 a pop. If Foap is the bane of microstock photographers, then Scoopshot is the bane of photojournalists.
If you've been shying away from posting your photographs to Facebook because you don't want them stolen, security software company McAfee has come up with a solution for you. It's a new tool called McAfee Social Protection, and helps you protect your photos using invite lists, blurring, and lock-down.
360 Panorama has come a long way since we first shared it two years ago, going from an unpolished app with some highly negative reviews to one of the most popular camera appears boasting thousands of reviews and a 4.5 star rating.
Nikon might be releasing an entirely new camera to upgrade its Nikon 1 lineup in small ways, but Canon is going a different route with its 7D DSLR. The company has rolled out a major firmware upgrade that makes major improvements to the features of existing cameras.
Hey Android users: if you're looking for an easy way to make your photographs "pop", check out Perfectly Clear. Previously available only for desktop machines and iOS, Athentech Imaging has now released the Android version of the popular auto image correction app.
Email services offer massive amounts of storage these days: so much that we no longer need to worry too much about deleting photos to make room for new emails. While this is convenient, it also makes it easy for your email account to turn into the equivalent of a messy attic: photos inside often disappear out of sight and out of mind.
Want to mimic the look of Instagram's filters using Photoshop? We're happy to announce that we have a set of Photoshop files that allow you to do just that.
New parents love sharing photos of their babies with the world, but that doesn't mean the world always appreciates having baby photos clutter up its Facebook news feed. Unbaby.me is a humorous Chrome extension that removes baby pictures from your feed and replaces them with awesome stuff (e.g. pictures of cats, dogs, and bacon).
Photographer Casey McCallister reverse engineered Instagram's filters, turning them into actions and presets for Photoshop, Aperture, and Lightroom that allow you to retro-fy your photos with one click. The download packs include all 17 Instagram filters and are "latte-priced" at $5.
One of the big conveniences of shooting digital is that your pictures pop out with useful details baked into the EXIF data. Exif4Film is a tool that makes recording EXIF information easier for film photographers. It comes as a pair of programs: an Android app helps shooters store specific details as soon as photos are captured, and a desktop application takes the Android app data and automatically adds it to your film scans. The apps are completely free, and developer Kostas Rutkauskas tells us …
Still shoot film? Use filters when you shoot? FilterCalc is a new Android app that's designed to help non-TTL photographers figure out proper exposure when using filters.
For those of you who have never heard of Magic Lantern (or know it only as a 17th century image projector) as far as Canon HDSLRs are concerned, Magic Lantern is a firmware add-on that first appeared in 2009 for the 5D Mark II. Since then it has been ported to most Canon HDSLRS and, for years, it has been known as a hack that brave and/or curious Canon owners have added to their cameras in order to squeeze out more functionality -- in some cases a lot more. The risk, of course, was always …
If you browse the photos in your iPhone's camera roll, there's a good chance there are some in there that you forgot to upload, email, or otherwise share with your friends. Whenever you're out with a group and photos are being taken, the end of the night always consists of handing out e-mail addresses or promising to upload photos to Facebook, but sadly, more often than not, we forget. Enter Flock, a new "magic" photo sharing app from Bump Technologies.
BlackBerry doesn't get much attention from App developers these days, and as such many of the photo apps iOS and Android users take for granted are expected to be sadly absent when RIM's new mobile operating system, BlackBerry 10, makes it onto phones. Still, the upcoming operating system has already made some waves using Scalado rewind technology, and according to CrackBerry, there's a lot more photo goodness on the way from RIM in the form of a full suite of editing options and Instagram-like …
Smartphone use in Photojournalism is certainly not new, and Hipstamatic has been there from the start, but the San Francisco-based company's recent decision to start a Hipstamatic Foundation for Photojournalism is drawing equal parts criticism and praise.
If you're a Windows user that preordered a Lytro light field camera, here's some terrific news: your expensive paperweight is now a camera. Lytro announced the Windows version of its desktop application today, more than half a year after the "shoot-now-focus-later" camera was first unveiled. To free your photos from their camera prison, you'll need to be running Windows 7 with at least 2GB of ram.
ASMP Releases is a free model and property release app for iOS by the American Society of Media Photographers. Quite useful for if you'd like to use your street photographs commercially.
Exactly two years ago today, Instagram testers uploaded the very first image to an app called Codename: a simple photograph of a sandaled foot and a dog. Three months later, Codename launched to the public as Instagram, the $1 billion photo app that boasts 50 million users who have shared 1 billion photographs.
"Super-Resolution From a Single Image" is an interesting research page by computer scientists over at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. It details the group's efforts to create sharp enlargements of small photographs, and offers comparisons between their algorithm and other popular ones being used and researched (e.g. nearest neighbor, bi-cubic). The large image of the baby seen above was created from the tiny image on the left. See if you can create something more useable using …
Firmware updates come pretty often, so they don't typically make news unless they bring with them a particularly impressive set of improvements, like v2.0 for Canon's 7D a few weeks back. And although Olympus' firmware version 1.2 for the OM-D E-M5 does help improve the functionality of your camera, it's also being talked about for another reason entirely.
Sebastian Guerrero, an independent researcher in Barcelona says he's discovered a way to force friendship with any Instagram user -- private or public -- by exploiting an Instagram server-side vulnerability. In one case, Guerrerro forced Mark Zuckerberg to follow his test account. Then Guerrerro sent him a message through a photo post, which would show up in Zuckerberg's photo feed of people he follows. Guerrero also used a test account to follow a private user without the required approval …
Diptic, a top 5 paid photography app in the iTunes App Store, has been selected by Apple as this week's free app. The app normally costs $1 and lets you quickly combine multiple photographs into diptychs. There are 52 preset layouts that support between 1-5 photos each, and 14 filters for giving your images different looks. You can see sample diptychs created with the app in this Flickr group.
LZRTAG is a free Android app that lets you generate QR codes associated with uploaded images -- mostly animated .gif images. The codes can be printed out and placed on walls and other surfaces. When scanned with the Android app, the codes call up the associated image and display it in an augmented reality on your phone.
There are plenty of stories out there of photographers allegedly being mistreated at the hands of the police; unfortunately, this mistreatment often includes the destruction of any evidence of the altercation. But the New Jersey ACLU is hoping that their new Police Tape app helps people more discretely record these interactions for future use in court.
If you keep up with the world of photography, chances are you have at one point or another read The British Journal of Photography; if it's one of your main reads you may even have their popular iPad app. And now you've been given a smaller, more portable option, because the magazine has officially released its first iPhone app, an app that the creators say will "change your expectations about how a magazine should look on an iPhone."
Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures -- interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point -- easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions.
