Knobroom is a free add-on for Lightroom that lets you use the knobs and sliders on a MIDI Controller to edit photos in Lightroom. Unlike PADDY, which we featured last year, Knobroom is also available to Mac users. The brief demo above shows Lightroom being controlled with a Behringer BCF2000. Freelance photographer Max Edin has written up an informative review on setting up and using the add-on.
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).
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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.
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.
Photo Tools (via Reddit)
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!
Save PSD, PSB images without compression (via Mac Performance Guide via Rob Galbraith)
Image credit: Speedometer by RevTimMedia
DOF Calculator is an app for Android phones that helps you easily calculate depth of field and hyperfocal distances. Simply tell it your camera, lens, and aperture setting, and it’ll spit out the numbers you need for optimally sharp landscape photographs. You can download it for free by searching for “DOF Calculator” in the Android Market.
For a quick video tutorial on how hyperfocal distance works, check out this post.
DOF Calculator (via Lifehacker)
iPhone photography continues to grow in popularity, but transferring photographs to your computer can be a hassle. If you’re sick of having to plug in your device via USB every time you want to sync your photos, you might want to take a look at Cinq, a free app that allows you to wireless transfer full-resolution photographs to your computer as you take them. You simply download the app to both your computer and your phone, and photos taken through the app will automatically be sent to a folder on your computer. The free version is ad-supported, while there’s an ad-free $2 version.
(via Wired)
PhotoSync for Lazy is an app for iOS devices that automatically syncs photographs with a PC folder over wi-fi. Once the program is installed on the a Windows PC, a special folder is monitored, and when the app is opened on the iPhone (or other iOS device) it will automatically update to reflect the contents of that folder. This can be a good way to keep your phone for sharing photos on the go, or for having your latest portfolio pictures with you at all times. It’s not currently available for the iPad, but will be soon. You can have 50 photographs synced with the free version of the app, or buy the paid version for $3 for unlimited photos.
An alternative way you can sync photos is with Dropbox. It works over the Internet rather than wi-fi, but the good news is that it’s completely free (up to 2GB) and works on Macs and iPads. It also works in both directions — you can have your iPhone photos synced to your computer.
PhotoSync for Lazy (via Lifehacker)
If you use GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, but would like a free program to handle the processing of Raw image files as well, check out RawTherapee. It’s a free raw image processing program that has a polished user interface and a solid list of features. Unless you want to compile the source code yourself, you can download the latest version of the program from this page. It’s available for Linux and Windows, though Mac OSX versions are available too (though they might not be as stable).
Photo Magician is a free and lightweight (less than 1MB) program for Windows that allows you to batch convert a directory of photographs. It’s similar in functionality to Photoshop’s “Image Processor” feature, with one difference being you can’t select the output quality like you can using Photoshop.
The program also features a “Quick Convert Mode”, which minimizes the program to a little box onto which you can drag and drop folders of images. If you’ve been looking for a quick way to resize images in Vista (like the Image Resize PowerToy allowed you to do in XP), then you might want to check out this program.
Download Photo Magician 1.0.0.3 (via Lifehacker)
P.S. For a more powerful free program that’s even more similar to Photoshop’s Image Processor, you can check out BIMP Lite.
