Easy Release is a new iPhone app designed to make it easy for you to secure model and property releases.

It was designed by Robert Giroux, a photographer of over 24 years who spent eight years on the staff of Getty Images, and uses the same format and legal language as the release forms used by major photo agencies.

The application replaces traditional paper based releases you would otherwise have to carry around with you by packing all of the forms and required fields inside an iPhone application. All the necessary fields are presented in a step-by-step wizard-style interface, and the signatures are entered directly into the application via the touch screen.

Once the release forms are completed, you can email a PDF or JPEG version of the form to yourself.

The app is available from the iTunes Store for $9.99.

(via PhotographyBLOG)

One of the best online photo editors is now completely free to use. Aviary has decided to offer its entire suite of online apps for free, including its popular Phoenix image editor.

The application used to cost $25 per year, and those who subscribed in the past 30 days can request refunds. While there has always been a free version of Phoenix, everyone can now save files privately on Aviary’s servers, watermark their images, and access the tutorials that previously required a subscription.

Offering the service for free should help Aviary better compete with Adobe, which offers its online version of Photoshop for free as well (up to 2GBs).

I wonder if (or when) online editors will rival traditional programs in terms of power and functionality. Any guesses?

(via Lifehacker)

We’re not sure whether it’s worth it in terms of cost, but here’s a way to print your own gigantic photograph posters using your ordinary photo printer. Easy Poster Printer is a free program by GD Software that automatically prints out a poster of any size (maximum is 20×20 meters) in individual pieces using your photo printer.

Obviously you could do the same thing using an ordinary program like Photoshop, but this program takes all the work out of the process, doing all the slicing and printing for you. The 6MB program is for Windows only (sorry Mac people!) and can be downloaded by clicking here.

This morning Apple introduced the latest version of their photo editing software: Aperture 3. The $199 program ($99 for existing users) adds over 200 new features to the previous version, including the Faces and Places features that were popular in the latest release of iPhoto. In addition, there is now a Brushes feature that allows you to “paint” adjustments onto photographs, much like the feature that was added to Adobe Photoshop CS4. The new version will also run in 64-bit mode, which Apple claims will allow it to run an “order of magnitude” faster.

The journalism industry is going through particularly tough times, with revenue from ads and subscriptions declining considerably.

However, during the harshest economic climates, innovative ideas flourish more than ever, and news outlets are tapping into the power of convergence: mixing forms of communication to create multimedia packages that deliver stories that are accessible by the “Web 2.0″ generation.

Fortunately for photographers, visuals are an integral part of the multimedia wave.

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to check out our August post on some of the best newspaper photo blogs out there, as well as some of the multimedia features on most newspaper sites, like the New York Times, SF Gate, the San Jose Mercury News, and some college newspapers, including my alma mater, the Daily Bruin.

Many sites feature audio slideshows, which are one of the simplest and easiest forms of multimedia storytelling–if you’ve got the right tools and elements:

1. Photos that tell a story.

Whether you’re photographing a family holiday, sporting event, or documentary news, try to shoot a variety of images from different angles of different moments. Take close-up and wide photographs.

After the shoot, pick photos that have a narrative or chronological order of events and happenings.

2. A recorder and quality audio that matches the story.

Use a digital recorder that can transfer sound files onto your computer. I usually use a MicroMemo attached to my iPod video (ancient, I know). I’ve also had some hands-on time with the Olympus DS series, which capture very crisp audio. The higher end model, the DS-61 has different modes to capture directional sound, which is very useful when recording specific types of sounds such as ambient noise versus a single person speaking.

When recording audio, find a quiet place to capture interviews and voices, to reduce distracting background noise.

3. Audio editing software.

Audacity is a free audio editing program that can be used to cut, edit, splice, and record audio–all very straightforward.

You can also use programs like Adobe Audition for more in-depth editing.

4. Slideshow software.

Several publications use Final Cut Pro to put together an audio slideshow. iMovie also can do the job.

For fast production and ready web publishing, try Soundslides. A free demo is available on the site.

Soundslides is a very intuitive program for uploading photos and audio, and adjusting timing points and transitions. It also has a feature for exporting to web if you have an FTP set up.

5. Share.

Share your project on your website. If you don’t have one, check out Weebly.com to make a free customizable site.

6. Be inspired.

Check out some of the links above and explore a bit for ideas.

One of my favorite examples of the simple, yet powerful integration of photography with another medium is the package by New York Times, One in 8 Million.

The project tells one story each week, focusing on one central character, someone you might brush shoulders with on the subway of New York. The subject describes, in his or her own words, anything from their own personal struggles, triumphs, daily life or something that defines them. The images work to visually capture the story with a timeless quality, in black and white.

Together, the two mediums form a very intimate local human-interest story that fosters a sense of community–which is quite an impressive undertaking considering the expansiveness of New York City.

If you’ve got a favorite multimedia site or an audio slideshow to show off, share a link!

Image Credits: Shure SM58 by laffy4k, Shot Glass by S. Su, rage by murplejane, IMG_0864 by emkladil

Have you ever come across a website where the colors of the page are based on the photograph being displayed? Here are some examples of what I mean:

Notice how the background color of the gallery isn’t fixed, but instead depends on the dominant color in the particular photograph being displayed. Now, you could use the colors extracted from photographs for a variety of purposes depending on your level of expertise and the purposes you have in mind.

In this post I’ll briefly cover a few ways you can extract useful web colors from your photos.

The Color extract PHP Class

Difficulty: Hard

If web development is you’re thing, and you’re comfortable with PHP, there’s a great PHP class over at phpclasses.org that you can download called Color extract.

Download it, upload it to your web server, include the class in your PHP file, and it can turn an image file path that you give it into an array of the most dominant color tones that appear in your photograph.

You can then use these color tones however you’d like. In the examples above, I simply took the most dominant color tone, as determined by Color extract, and used it as the background color for each page.

Though this is one of the more difficult ways to extract colors from your photographs, you can use it to make your web pages dynamic, automatically setting the background colors based on the colors in your photographs.

Similar classes or functions probably exist for your scripting/programming language of choice. Just do a Google search to find them!

Manual Extraction

Difficulty: Medium

A second way you can extract web (hex) colors from your photos is by eyeballing it and doing it manually. If you have Photoshop, you can use the eyedropper tool to select a color, and then open up the color picker to view the hex color code of that color.

Most image editing programs should have a way for you to view the hex color of selected colors. Another option for manual extraction is to use a lightweight program designed specifically for extracting colors. Do a quick search on download.com for “color picker“, and you’ll find what you need for your operating system.

The downside to this method is that it might be more difficult to find a suitable color that works well, since colors can differ greatly from pixel to pixel. On the other hand it gives you a much greater degree of flexibility in choosing the color you’d like, since automated methods often fail when the color distribution in photographs is abnormal/non-uniform.

ColorSuckr

Difficulty: Easy

Finally, there’s quite a few web services that are more than happy to do all the work for you. ColorSuckr is one such service. All you need to do is enter the URL of the image you’d like suckr the colors from, and the service will return the hex color codes of the dominant colors.

If you extract web colors from your photographs in ways I didn’t mention in this article, please share it with us in the comments!