There are plenty of presets out there that attempt to make your digital images look like they were shot with film, but VSCO Film by Visual Supply Co is different: it’s a Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW add-on that uses film profiles to change how the RAW files are interpreted rather than simply perform standard adjustments on the images. The video introduction above shows some examples of what the various options can do. This patent-pending method of film emulation doesn’t come cheap — it costs $120 each for Canon or Nikon profiles, and $200 for both.
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.
What if all advertising photos came with a number that revealed the degree to which they were Photoshopped? We might not be very far off, especially with recent advertising controversies and efforts to get “anti-Photoshop laws” passed. Researchers Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth have developed a software tool that detects how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered compared to the original image, grading each photo on a scale of 1-5. The program may eventually be used as a tool for regulation: both publications and models could require that retouchers stay within a certain threshold when editing images.
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.
For the first time ever, an Adobe program is available through the Mac App Store. Yesterday, Adobe began selling Photoshop Elements 9 there for $80, a generous 20% off the regular $100 price for the boxed version. It’s a pretty big deal, because Adobe — along with Microsoft — is a company that would love to keep its software out of Apple’s App Store. It generates significant profits by selling its popular programs in the traditional boxed format, while businesses that sell through the Mac App Store must fork over 30% to Apple (which may soon become the most valuable company in the world). This news shows that Adobe is at least testing the waters, and may eventually expand its offers in the Mac Store to reach Apple’s rapidly expanding customer base.
Here’s a quick tip for making Photoshop faster: change Preferences->File Handling->Image Previews to Never Save. This keeps image preview data from being stored in the file every time you save, and gives you smaller files for uploading to the web!
Photoshop is a pretty resource intensive program that can slow down to a crawl when you’re working with large and/or many files. Aside from beefing up your hardware specs to provide the program with more memory or disk space, there’s also a number of Photoshop and operating system preferences you can adjust to make sure the program runs as smoothly and quickly as possible. The Photoshop performance team recently published a helpful guide with 19 adjustments you can make, which range from optimizing cache level to turning off thumbnail display.
Tag clouds are a neat way of visualizing what content is about, and Tagerator is a simple program that generates them for your Flickr photo tags. Created by Jeremy Brooks (the guy behind SuperSetr), the simple Java app will run on any computer that has Java 1.6 installed. Besides its ability to generate the tag clouds for you, it stores the tag information gleaned from your account to disk, allowing you to use the tag/count information however you’d like.
AmoK Exif Sorter is a program written for photographers obsessed with organization, allowing a collection of photographs to be renamed and organized based on the EXIF data embedded in each photo. In addition to the obvious choices for details to include in the file name (e.g. time and date), you can also use any other piece of EXIF info you wish, including things like camera model, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. For organization, the program allows you to copy or move files into whatever folder structure you’d like (i.e. /year/month/day/image.jpg). The program is free, Java-based, and can be downloaded here.
