Software

For Windows users who frequently need access to Creative Commons photography, Abelssoft's free desktop app CCFinder can help streamline the hunt for a good image.

Back in 1967 Yoko Ono said that it was her ultimate goal "to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world." And now that the 21st century has arrived she's one technological step closer to achieving that goal. Her new app, #smilesfilm, compiles all of the pictures of people's smiles taken and uploaded to either Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #smilesfilm into one easy-to-browse place.

Who says you can't make money selling photos taken on your iPhone? Certainly not the creators of a new app dubbed Foap, which allows you to do just that. The app is pretty easy to use: just download it for free off the iTunes store, upload your best pics, tag them so they're easier to find, and submit. After that every photo will have to be manually approved before it's put up on the Foap Marketplace for $10 a pop, $5 of which goes to the photographer.

Video game developers have learned over the years that socially-shared achievements are a great way to encourage beginners to learn new tasks. Taking a page from their book, Adobe has a neat new game called LevelUp that encourages Photoshop learning using the same tricks. Available for CS5 and above, the extension encourages exploration and assigns missions to introduce features and tools that player might never have seen before. Tasks include removing redeye, whitening teeth, and replacing the …

Earlier this month we reported on rumors of a significant Canon EOS 7D firmware update that was possibly in the works, and today that update became official. Not surprisingly, the rumors seem to have been spot on, as firmware v2 for the 7D brings many of the highly-anticipated and frequently-requested features that users of Canon's flagship APS-C SLR have been pining for.

The camera in your smartphone is good for a lot of things, and we're not just talking about Instagram and causing the sad yet inevitable demise of the point-and-shoot; now it can also be used to send and receive secret messages using light. A new Casio camera app called Picapicamera encodes messages or graphics using a sequence of red, green and yellow flashing lights, which another user of the app can then point their camera at to decode.

Recently, Microsoft has been showing off many of the new features we'll be seeing in the much-anticipated official release of Windows 8, and the most recent sneak peek Microsoft gave us was of the new Photos app. The app offers a native way for Windows users to organize, view and share all of their photos regardless of what they were taken with or where they're stored.

After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your iOS devices probably noticed that your browsers failed "the test". The reason? Color management is strangely absent from iOS. Software engineer Jeffrey Friedl, who discovered this fact a few months ago, writes, …

Instagram's latest 2.5 update has swapped out their "popular" tab for a new "explore" feature which allows users to browse photos based on users and hashtags -- it's a more functional search system. Now, instead of seeing photos that have the most likes, users can search for hashtags based on events and topics, which also makes it possible for users to have wider circulation of their images.

Adobe promised Lightroom 4 as part of its Creative Cloud subscription plan, but didn't have it ready to go when the cloud service was launched back in April. Today they finally added the popular image editing program to the package, giving you some additional photo editing muscle for the same $50/month rate. Not bad, considering Adobe's $2599 CS6 Master Collection doesn't even include Lightroom.

There's an overabundance of ways to share and organize your photos these days. From Flickr and 500px, to Facebook and Shutterfly, you can store and share your photos in many places. But according to Yahoo!, many people still use good ol' fashioned e-mail. Yahoo!'s senior director of product management Dave McDowell said that over 500-million photos are sent through Yahoo! Mail every day, and so in an attempt to streamline that process and better cater to the needs of their 300-million users, …

A camera's dimensions are often reported alongside its other specs (e.g. megapixels, ISO), but it's pretty difficult to gauge exactly how large it is by those numbers alone. RealSize is a helpful iPad app that helps you get a better sense of size by displaying gadgets on its screen at exactly the size they are in real life.

If you've ever deleted a photo by accident you probably already know about applications like DiskDigger that can go in and recover the image from the electronic beyond. This can come in really handy when an overzealous clicking finger accidentally erases several worthwhile pictures from your hard drive. Up until now, however, there was no way to perform the same search and rescue on your mobile device. Fortunately, DiskDigger for Android changes that.

File hosting powerhouse Dropbox has added automatic camera uploads to its iOS app -- a feature that Android users have enjoyed for some time now. In addition to backing up your photos in the cloud, the company is offering a new gallery view for browsing photos and 3GB of additional free space if you upload 3GB in photos (or videos).

Aviary -- the online photo editor that replaced Picnik as the official editor for Flickr -- is expanding their scope by releasing an Android and iOS app. Up until now iOS users had no Aviary to speak of and Android users had only a "plugin," but as of yesterday, full-blown apps for both operating systems are available in the iTunes App store and Google Play.

After Facebook launched its own iOS camera app last month, many people were surprised that the app was simply named "Camera" on the home screen. To clear up confusion -- and likely to prevent any trouble from Apple -- Facebook has updated the app with a new name: Camera•. No word on how it's supposed to be pronounced ("camera dot"?) but the change comes along with the latest update that includes more reliable uploads.

Rounding out a day packed with Apple announcements and general excitement at the WWDC 2012, here's one final Apple tidbit coming from rumor site Apple Insider. According to them, recent job postings at Apple hint at the possibility of an Aperture mobile app coming in the near future. After receiving a tip from an anonymous user, Apple Insider found that the Aperture team is looking to fill quite a few manager and developer positions, many of which require experience developing on the iOS …

It looks like previous rumors about an updated photo stream in iOS6 were right. Apple has officially announced what they're calling "shared photo streams," which are exactly what they sound like: mark certain photos or albums as "shared," choose who you would like to share them with, and you're done. The folks you chose to share the album with will get a notification (if they have an iOS6 device or a Mac with Mountain Lion) and be able to browse, like and comment on your pictures in iPhoto, …

Just like point-and-shoots, the camcorder market was also hit hard by the advent of good-quality smartphone cameras. For the average person, all the home video capability they might ever need can now be found in, say, their iPhone. The only problem with that -- besides a higher susceptibility to Vertical Video Syndrome -- is that the videos you take on your smartphone rarely leave your smartphone.

Most everybody's heard of "Draw Something," the app where you are given a word and you have to draw something that will get the person on the other end to guess that word. But we're photographers and photo enthusiasts! We don't draw, we capture moments! Well, now we're also in luck, because app developer Rumpus has just announced a guessing game for the photographically inclined (or just about anyone who likes snapping and sharing pictures) called What The Photo.

In early May, Adobe had CS5 users in a tizzy when they announced that users would have to upgrade to CS6 for a fix to the 8 eight critical vulnerabilities they had just discovered between in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Professional. Fortunately, after a bit of an upheaval Adobe changed their tune, and now the long-awaited patches are out and ready for you to download and install. If you followed the links in our original feature and found that you were indeed affected by the …

A new iOS app from design studio Maybe It’s the Lightening, simply titled Stilla, works with one simple premise: every photo has a second photo -- or third or fourth -- that your camera missed. For every picture of your friend on the boat, there's a beautiful sky and a glorious reflection of that sky in the water that you missed. Stilla seeks to remedy that.

After losing the battle over photo taking, filtering and sharing supremacy to Instagram last year, the app and website PicPlz is finally throwing in the towel and calling it quits on July 3rd.

Looking for a solid photo editing app for your iPhone or iPad? Snapseed, an acclaimed photo editing app for iOS, has been selected as Apple's free app of the week. Apple kicked off the program last week, so this is only the second app to be featured. It ordinarily costs $5.

Creating cinemagraphs -- still photos in which one or another section is moves repetitively -- can be a pretty tricky process, but a new technique developed by Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala and his UC Berkley colleagues may make it quite a bit easier. Their technique involves "de-animating" a video by "drawing" two sets of "strokes" over the video: one set over the parts you want to move and another over the parts you'd like standing still.

Former Photoshop product manager Kevin Connor and Dartmouth professor (and digital forensic expert) Hany Farid are working together to help put a stop to image manipulation where it doesn't belong. Putting their two brains together they formed a company called Fourandsix, which is primed to release a full suite of software tools that will help law enforcement officers, photo editors and other interested parties detect secret digital photo manipulation.

In early March, Nikon offered a temporary fix to a lock up issue that had been plaguing the D4 and D800. At the time you had to turn off the ‘Highlights’ and ‘RGB Histogram’ display options to avoid the issue, but Nikon promised a more permanent fix was in the works. Good news, the fix is finally here in the form of Firmware Update B:1.01.

What do you get if you apply every Instagram filter to a single photograph? Belgian blog Appelogen decided to find out, starting with a normal photo of a pathway and applying one filter at a time. The resulting image is pretty abstract, and prompted them to ask the question, "is it art?" …

Here's an interesting idea by Oregon-based engineering consultant Paul Anderson called The Daylight Viewfinder. The patent pending invention, which is in the process of raising $44,000 on Kickstarter, is a suction mountable, sun blocking viewfinder/app combo that allows you to take great pictures with your phone (currently iOS only) even in bright daylight.

Have you ever walked out to your car and seen someone abysmally parked next to you, or up on the sidewalk? Even if they aren't blocking you in specifically, didn't you wish there was a way -- other than leaving a less than professional note -- to let people know that the owner of this car is a jerk? Well, the people over at the Moscow Newspaper The Village decided to takle this problem (which is apparently much worse in Russia) head on by designing and releasing Parking Douche, an Android app …

Last weekend we mentioned that the Bump app had just added browser integration, allowing you to transfer photos from your mobile device to your computer by simply "bumping" the space bar. And now another sharing app called PhotoBeamer has crossed our virtual desk that does something a little bit different, but does it just as well.

Livestreaming events on YouTube is becoming commonplace, but besides the experience of being there, the one thing that livestreams don't provide is a way to take pictures and remember the event. When you're there you're taking video or snapping a shot, when you're on your couch you're watching video and, at best, grabbing a few screenshots -- not the most effective method.

If you've been using smartphones for any length of time you've probably heard of Bump, the app that allows you to transfer photos and contact information between two phones with a simple... well... bump. And now they've expanded their functionality to include a website/webapp that makes transferring photos from your phone to your computer a breeze.

Hovering somewhere between "novel idea" and "pointlessly stupid," InstaCRT is a new iOS app that bills itself as "the world's first real camera filter." Photographs processed through the app are given a CRT monitor look that doesn't involve any digital fakery. Instead, your photo is actually sent to the creators' machine located in Stockholm, Sweden, where it's displayed on a tiny CRT monitor and then photographed by a DSLR. The new photo is then beamed back to your phone in less than a minute.

It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this …

Using keyboard shortcuts while editing your photos can save you loads of time, and cheat sheets are a good way of learning them. If you're too lazy to print one out or save one as an image on your computer, there's an app called CheatSheet that's designed just for you. It's a free Mac App that runs silently in the background. Whenever you hold down the Command (⌘) key for ~3 seconds, it brings up a complete list of command shortcuts offered by whatever app you're currently using. We've tested …

Huge news came out of the Facebook universe today with little to no warning: Facebook has launched its own camera app. Seemingly out of nowhere, the social networking giant has launched its own "Facebook Camera" camera app that, of course, connects directly to your Facebook account, making it that much easier to take, upload, tag, and comment on your photos.

Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don't recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there's an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.

Slow-motion video is usually the territory of expensive equipment like the Miro M120. Alternatively, if you're not looking to shoot professionally, you can always take the video you capture on your phone or regular camera and slow it down, but the results are usually choppy and (sadly) nothing you'd want to broadcast on YouTube. Fortunately, there is another way; iPhone videographers who own the 4S now have a free, fun alternative in a new app called SloPro.

About a week ago Adobe sent CS5 users on a rampage when they not only announced the existence of eight "critical" vulnerabilities (split between Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Professional), but also told users that they would have to upgrade to CS6 if they wanted a fix. Users of CS5 and CS5.5 were understandably outraged, but fortunately Adobe were listening this time and just yesterday changed their tune.

Learning to play a game and learning to use Photoshop follow two, very different patterns. In the first you "discover" how the game is played, you fiddle with the buttons, try combinations, have eureka moments and eventually become proficient at it. Learning Photoshop, on the other hand, requires extensive tutorials and help; books are available from thin "easy-to-use" instruction books to heavy tomes many hundreds of pages long.

After dipping its toes in Apple's Mac App Store last July by offering Photoshop Elements, Adobe has now jumped in headfirst by listing its professional-caliber program, Lightroom 4. The download costs $150 and tips the scales at 388MB. Adobe might be a giant company, but it gets charged the same commission as any other developer: for every copy sold through the App Store, Apple pockets a cool $45.

Shoebox is an app by 1000 Memories that lets you turn your iOS or Android smartphone into a scanner for digitizing old paper photos (the photos don't have to be old, of course). The app goes far beyond manual snapping and cropping: it uses edge detection to help you crop, color balance to compensate for lighting, and auto-flattens the resulting image to adjust for your camera's tilt. You can download it for free through the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

Want to enjoy photographs on the web without the annoyance of words? Check out Wordless Web, a simple browser bookmarklet by Ji Lee and Cory Forsyth that instantly strips away all the text on any website.

The future of consumer photography could very well be with new sensors, or more compact interchangeable lens cameras, or 41-megapixel smartphones; but why not cameras that are wirelessly tethered together? Thats what SynchroCam can do, and for a free app it's pretty cool.

The "Content Aware Fill" tool was one of the most lauded advancements in Photoshop CS5. Of course, the tool wasn't without its occasional glitches, but the ability to select a section and have the program clone it out automatically was still very impressive. But what if that's the only tool you want to use? What if you're a casual photographer who wants to remove unwanted sections in your composition without buying and learning a whole editing suite?

The GNU Image Manipulation Project, more popularly known as GIMP, has just released version 2.8; the first complete GIMP overhaul since 2008. For those who don't know (and there probably aren't many) GIMP is famous for being a slightly more complicated (and a lot more free) alternative to Photoshop with fewer features. And it seems that, right on cue with the Adobe CS6 release, GIMP is trying to close the gap between the two products that's been widening these last 4 years.

A few years ago, graphic designer Grey Jay was asked by a company to create a Photoshop action that would emulate a "toy camera" look for photos. He came up with an action he calls the "Holgarizer" and, after some tweaking and adjusting, has made it freely available to the public. If a messy cross-processed look is what you're after, Jay's filter does the job. You can download the ZIP file here.

The big news spreading across the internet is that Adobe CS6 officially released today. The announcement, which confirms previous rumors of a May 7th ship date, came late last night and means that we can all finally get our hands on Content-Aware Move and all of the other features we've been dying to try.

The 1-bit camera app is definitely not for people who love to mess around with filters and tweak high-quality images on their iPhone, there are plenty of other apps for that. Instead, the 1-bit camera is for those of us who remember using the old Nintendo Gameboy Camera; for those of us who don't mind paying $0.99 for a dose of good ol' fashioned nostalgia.