Last week Alexandre Oudin’s creative Facebook portrait idea spread like wildfire on the Interwebs, and was even featured by CNN. If you’d like to do the same thing with a portrait or photograph of yours but don’t have the time or technical know-how to do so, there’s a new website called Pic Scatter that does all the work for you. All you need to do is upload and resize and reposition the image to your liking, and the website will allow you to download all the individual photos for the “hacked” profile pic. The only downside is that a “Made with picScatter.com” bar is added to your image. Read the rest of this entry »
In addition to slowly replacing the need for compact cameras, the cameras found on mobile phones will also have a huge impact on how we live our lives in the area of augmented reality. Word Lens is a crazy new free app for the iPhone that translates between Spanish and English in real-time in the video feed, allowing you to read the world in your language through your cell phone. As this technology becomes available for more and more languages, it will change the way people survive in foreign countries.
The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.
As photo-making devices become more and more location aware, many people unwittingly give up a lot of privacy by publishing location-tagged images online. If privacy is something you care about and you’d rather not broadcast location data along with your photography, a free Windows program called Geotag Security can help you scrub the geotag information from your pics. All you do is select a folder to scan, and the program will check the images within for location data and remove it.
Back in September we featured a creative technique that used an iPad to “light paint” 3D objects and text. Now there’s an app called Holographium that allows anyone to light paint words with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. All you do is provide some text, start taking a long exposure photo, and then drag your iPad (or whatever iDevice) through the photo while the app slowly displays the various slices of the text. The resulting photograph will show the text spelled out in 3D and floating in the air. Read the rest of this entry »
Light Studio is a new iPhone app designed to teach you the basics of studio lighting for portraiture. In addition to sections with examples of setups and tutorials, there’s a 3D modeling feature that allows you to position up to three hard light sources and watch how the lights affect the 3D face model. The app is available for $1.99 in the App Store.
The expression “shooting from the hip” might soon become “shooting from the ear” for iPhone photographers. There’s a new app in town called Camera Camouflage that allows you to sneakily photograph while appearing to be engaged in a phone conversation. The app can activate your phones ringtone, allowing you to “take a call”, and then snaps photos whenever you talk (it’s voice activated). On the iPhone 4, the app deactivates the flash by default, helping you avoid potentially embarrassing situations.
For some stealthy street photography, you could simply chat on your phone while strolling down the sidewalk. Taking portraits of people becomes as easy as stopping in front of them, turning your head to look at something to the side, and saying something random.
You can get your hands on Camera Camouflage for $0.99 in the App Store.
SortMyPhotostream is a tool that most Flickr users will have no use for, but one that some might find invaluable. It all depends on whether you would like your Flickr photos’ upload dates to reflect the day they were actually taken. For example, if you’re doing a Project 365 and would like each photo to show up on the day it was taken in your calendar view, then this app can help you make that happen.
All you do is give the app permission to access your Flickr account, and it automatically changes the “Uploaded on” date of each photo to the “Created on” date found in the EXIF data. If this isn’t the kind of thing you need, don’t play around with the app — changes made by it are permanent.
Instagram is a new iPhone photo app developed by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that offers Hipstamatic-style filters for your photos, easy uploads to popular services, and a Tumblr-esque community built right in. While photo sharing apps in the App Store are a dime a dozen, there are a few things that set Instagram apart. Read the rest of this entry »
Photoshop CS5′s Content Aware Fill feature was quite a hit when it came out earlier this year, but what about free alternatives? Webinpaint is a web-based photo app that aims to do just that. You simply open up an image, paint over the area you’d like removed, and click the “Inpaint” button for the app to do its removal magic.
From tests I’ve done with the app, it’s pretty clear it doesn’t come close to the power of Content Aware Fill. However, for simple photographs without much texture or clutter, the app actually works quite well. Read the rest of this entry »
