Posts Tagged
photography
For many of us, our computer’s hard drive has become a vast repository of digital images. Everyday, we snap photos with our smartphones and digital cameras which are then deposited into countless folders. But let’s face it, when our hard drives start to get full, who enjoys the tedious process of navigating these folders searching for duplicates files and miscued shots? How often do we pause and ask ourselves, “Do I really need all 12 shots of that coffee table?”
Organizing and tidying up our photo libraries can be a time consuming project, one that some of us may never embark upon. Fortunately, getting a handle on this task has been made significantly easier. Enter Photosweeper, a robust photo organizing application that will assist in cleaning up and putting in order any photo collection. Whether it’s a hundred megabytes or dozens of gigabytes, Photosweeper will quickly and effectively sort images and help reduce the size of your collection, resulting in more usable disk space.
I recently acquired a Wacom tablet. I love using it, but being the software geek that I am I was eager to find some software to use the tablet with. Now, keep in mind that the tablet can typically be used as a mouse replacement and can be used with any program you desire. In fact, playing solitaire or mahjong with the tablet is a great way to get used to using a new tablet.
With that in mind, I tried to stick to programs where pressure sensitivity is used, or where having a tablet is exceptionally helpful, even without pressure sensitivity. I’ll cover the basics that you most likely already know of if you have a tablet, give you some freeware apps to check out and then show you some new and exciting apps that you might not have thought to use before.
Thanks to the advent of point and shoot digital cameras and megapixel rich smartphones, many among us have collections with as many pictures, or even more, than a professional photographer’s. It’s true that digital photography makes freezing those wonderful moments in life with so much ease, but handling, categorizing and archiving them has become a daunting task.
Apps that help organize photos come in all kinds and sizes. Great apps like Picasa are available for free. However, if you are someone who take your image collection seriously, a full blown organizer is the right way to go. ACDSee Pro has been around for a long time and has carved its own niche in the photo organizer vertical. After the break, we’ll check out how the app can put your photography workflow into overdrive.
Analog is a new retro photo processing app from rockstar Mac developers Realmac Software. In just a few clicks you can apply cool effects and borders, crop, rotate and share photos on your favorite social networks.
As the little niche of retro photo apps grows, can Realmac jump into the fray and come out with a success or will Analog just be another lackluster entrant? Let’s take a look and find out!
If you scan the features page on the Adobe Photoshop CS5 website, you’ll find descriptions for almost 70 different features, everything from “Automatic lens correction” to “Fluid canvas rotation” to “Puppet warp.” But anyone who’s ever used Photoshop knows that 70 features is just the tip of the iceberg, and when you start to add the various options for each of those features, you’re talking about such a beastly bit of software that it sinks the hopes of any amateur who dares open it.
That’s where the Mac App Store comes in. With the Mac App Store’s democratization of the Mac software market, image-editing amateurs like me have access to a whole new range of “one trick ponies,” niche software that will do the one thing you’re looking for, and not a darn thing else.
Colorize is one such one-trick pony.
Apps that make your pictures look more interesting by adding filters and effects to them have become a really popular niche in the mobile app market recently, especially with apps like Instagram that just keep getting bigger. That’s why today we decided to bring you a few of the best apps for achieving these and other types of effects, but on your Mac.
Come take a look at our favorite effect and filter apps!
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Pro photographers know the drill: plug in digital camera, import to Lightroom/Aperture, spend hours getting that image to look just right, and the results speak for themselves.
However, if you’re an amateur photographer, hobbyist, scrapbooker or just trying to make use of the camera you got for Christmas, you might find yourself less than satisfied with this complex and often time-consuming routine.
With an intuitive interface, powerful features, and speedy performance, Flare promises to give you great looking results without breaking the bank (or your sanity). Let’s take a look and see how it stacks up!
Perhaps you have more than one Mac in your life. I know several people that have an iMac in their house, a work machine, and also their own Macbook for travelling around. If that’s the case, then it can be hard to avoid a “media mess” spread all over your different machines. Now, you can fix this by using web services like Dropbox, but if you want something more specific and easier to setup, this might not be a good fit.
That’s where applications like iPhotoSync come in. This one in particular aims to offer an easy iPhoto synchronization process across different computers, so that you can automatically have the same photographs available on all your machines. But does it deliver?
With more than five billion photographs uploaded, Flickr is a global go-to site if you’re looking for images. There are all kinds of interesting ways of interacting with the site – I love searching for photos of an unknown destination before I travel there, and it’s always interesting subscribing to the RSS feed of photos tagged with your hometown, as you’re likely to come across unexpected ways of seeing your familiar environment each day.
If you have reason to search for images regularly, or if you simply enjoy hanging out on Flickr, then you might be pleased to learn about Viewfinder. The app comes from the hand of Fraser Spiers and his company, Connected Flow, who have also given the world of Mac apps the excellent FlickrExport for iPhoto and Aperture, and currently costs just £15 (though that’s set to increase to £18 when the next version ships).
Whether your interest is simply in seeing other photographers’ take on subjects you’re keen on, or you’re after images to use in your own blog posts and design projects, Viewfinder makes searching Flickr a simple and enjoyable process. Join us after the jump to find out more!
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting MovingPhotos3D. The developer describes MovingPhotos3D as being able to effortlessly send your photos flying around in three dimensions. You can see hundreds of pictures form cities, spheres, and other shapes.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
