Apple launched its new Mac App Store yesterday, along with an App Store version of their popular photo editing program Aperture. The program costs $199 in a retail box and $159 through Amazon, but through the new App Store the price has been cut to a mere $80! It’s no wonder that it’s currently the top grossing app in the entire store. If you’ve wanted to start using Aperture but have always been deterred by the price, now’s a good time to jump in.
You can start using the Mac App Store by updating your Mac OS X to version 10.6.6.
The PBS documentary that we mentioned yesterday is actually available online in its entirety. If you’d like to see what it’s like being the official photographer to the President of the United States, then this 20 55 minute program will be very interesting to you. Check out the 20 minute excerpt embedded above or through the link below.
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.
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.
Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn’t it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There’s an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here’s the description:
Paddy radically improves the workflow in Lightroom 3.0 by allowing you assign any adjustment setting – including moving the sliders and applying a preset – to keys, your number keypad, external keypads, or a MIDI controller. This gives you all editing (and some other) tools of Lightroom at the push of one button. You do not need the mouse any more to get to presets or to adjust the sliders.
The software is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded here. Sadly, it’s currently only available for Windows. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s almost a given for new Canon DSLRs to have an HD video recording mode, but older Canons can also capture HD video with the open source software EOS Camera Movie Record. The program allows you to shoot HD 720p video with any Canon EOS camera that has LiveView capabilities. The software runs off of your computer and captures HD video from the LiveView of a tethered camera.
Photographer Peter Arboine has an article up at DIY Photography about how he uses the software to shoot video with a Canon 40D.
Obviously, the fact that your camera has to remain tethered limits use of this video feature largely to studio use, but it’s a neat workaround for Canon owners. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Canon program has been in the works for over a year, there’s still no Nikon equivalent.
French company Oloneo has just released a free beta for their product, PhotoEngine. The software is a straightforward HDR creator and non-destructive editor that allows you to quickly merge HDR photos. Additionally, it has features that can adjust specific light sources in the photo, to change the white balance or the exposure. This could come in handy when shooting HDR frames that have a variety of different light sources with different temperatures.
Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it’s not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).
Here’s a before-and-after example using a quick snapshot I took this past weekend with an outdated point-and-shoot camera:
If you have problems using the program on a Mac, try opening the Unshake.jar file directly at the last step. Larger photographs might also take much longer to “unshake”, while lower-res (i.e. 500px wide) photos were completed very quickly.
If you’re not naturally an organized person, then figuring out where certain photos are on your computer or external hard drive might be a pain. Adebis Photo Sorter is a free Windows program that uses the EXIF data in image files to automatically rename and/or organize your image files in a new directory, leaving the originals untouched. It supports pretty much all the popular image formats, from JPEG to Raw image formats, and can even help you include EXIF data in the new filenames.
For those of you who have been itching to try the new Content Aware Fill and Puppet Warp features in Adobe Photoshop CS5, today’s your lucky day. CS5 became available for purchase through the Adobe website, and you can now download a 30-day free trial of the software just to play around with the amazing new features if you’re not sure yet you want to upgrade.
If you’ve tried it out already, do you think the new features live up to the hype?
French company 
