Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 4 today. New features include support for location data through a map module, book making through Blurb, new video features, new shadow/highlight controls, simplified basic adjustments, new local adjustments, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. You can find a complete list of changes here. You can downloaded the program for free and use it until the beta version expires on March 31st, 2012.
HDR guru Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs has just released a new iPad app called Stuck On Earth that lets you travel the world through photographs. In addition to being a gorgeous way to view travel photos, the app serves as a high-tech travel guide, allowing users build and plan “trips” (collecting photos into groups). Read the rest of this entry »
500px, quickly becoming known as the “Flickr for artsy photographers”, has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.
The website has also been experiencing incredible growth. Traffic has grown over the past year by more than 20x to 3.4 million visitors per month, and continues to grow at 30% month over month. The service — which has 12 employees — currently stores 2.5 million photographs.
Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.
Does anyone know of any programs that does the same thing for the photos on your computer? That would certainly be neat, and much more applicable to photo-enthusiasts.
What if every photograph included a short video showing the few seconds that led up to the shutter being pressed? That’s the idea behind a new free iPhone app called GLMPS (pronounced “glimpse”). It’s a camera app that stores a few seconds of video with each shot, letting users share the background behind each picture (try clicking the photo above). Unlike normal iPhone photos, displaying a GLMPS photo/video requires a special embed code, make it somewhat inconvenient to share. Wouldn’t it be interesting if short videos could be stored in the metadata of photographs taken by all digital cameras? Seems kinda farfetched, but it might be possible as technology progresses.
Great news for PC users: Microsoft has finally released a free codec pack for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that allows you to view and work with the RAW files of more than 120 different cameras directly in Windows Explorer. Simply download and install the codec pack to get started.
One of the gripes some people have with Flickr is that it doesn’t offer an easy way to download your complete collection of photos if you ever want to move your images elsewhere (though, hopefully you’re not using it as your only backup). Furthermore, if your Pro account ever expires, you can’t even access more than 200 of your old images without resubscribing. Google’s Picasa users won’t ever have this problem with the launch of a new service called Google Takeout, which allows you to download all your photos (and any other data you have stored with Google) as a single ZIP file. Read the rest of this entry »
Flickr is a popular method of sharing photos, but the service doesn’t provide any easy way to download them in bulk. Flick and Share is a web app that creates simple download links for Flickr sets that you can send to family and friends, allowing them to quickly download a copy of the images you shot at an event. We’ve tested it out, and it works as advertised.
It seems every time we feature a fun or useful phone app, it’s for the iPhone. If you’re an Android user (there’s more and more of you out there), here’s one for you: Photo Tools is a free app that offers a pretty large number of useful photography tools bundled into a single application. In it you’ll find everything from a digital gray card to a sunset/sunrise calculator.
If you’ve ever tried saving a layered file in Photoshop CS5 that’s more than a 1GB in size, you’ve probably experienced pretty sluggish performance. This is because the program always does image compression on the file that shrinks the file size at the expense of your workflow. If you’re rich in hard drive space but short on time, Adobe has released a plugin called that lets you disable image compression, speeding up the saving of large layered files by 20x!
