Articles about Photography

At 11 AM EST, Nokia's highly anticipated press event, called "Zoom. Reinvented", kicks off in New York. Despite the previous "41 million reasons to zoom in" innuendo, official details are scarce ahead of the upcoming keynote.

There, the Finnish maker's followers expect the company to unveil a Windows Phone version of the year-old 808 PureView handset, which features a critically acclaimed 41 MP camera. But, speculation aside, we're are certainly looking forward to what will be revealed during the fast-approaching keynote.

Continue reading →

"You give us those nice bright colors. You give us the greens of summers". Sorry, wrong camera, but these trips down memory lane can get confusing as we grow older. No, the old Kodachrome may be dead, but Polaroid looms large in our nostalgic history and memories. It was a must have in its day, and remains today as an image (pun intended) of those bygone days of our youth -- okay, my youth, you may plead the fifth if you wish.

Now Appadana wants to confuse us old geezers by bringing back those days of yore with a Polaroid app for Android devices. Polamatic aims to recapture the good old days when muscle cars ruled the roads and disco took over the airwaves. Queue up your Donna Summer -- or Cheap Trick if your prefer -- and head over to Google Play for the opportunity of doing something you could have easily done years ago -- though for much more cost.

Continue reading →

Open-source image editor GIMP 2.8.6 FINAL has been released for Windows and Linux. This popular -- and powerful -- image manipulation tool, which is also available for Mac, is primarily a maintenance release, but does include some interesting feature tweaks, many of which improve the program’s single-window mode that was introduced in version 2.8.

Chief among these changes is the increase in the supported maximum size of clipboard brushes and patterns to 1,024×1,024 pixels. Also improved is how users switch focus back to the canvas screen in single-window mode, with the [Escape] key now used for that task.

Continue reading →

Time-lapse images can be a great way to capture movement in the sky, countryside, cities and more. But if they have a small issue, it’s that your usual viewpoint is always entirely static: the camera is fixed, while the world moves around it.

Panolapse is a free (for personal use) tool which can change all this, by adding motion through custom panning and zoom effects. This isn’t the simple flat movement you might get with a video editor, either: Panolapse uses perspective correction to produce far more realistic results, so that it actually looks as though your camera is moving around within the scene.

Continue reading →

Android continues to slowly insinuate itself into the camera market, from whence it began -- it is a slow process, but the phones started that way as well, so look out. The latest announcement is a new Galaxy NX camera that pushes this to the next level from the past version of this experiment.

The Galaxy NX sports a 3G/4G LTE connection along with WiFi, as well as an array of interchangeable lenses. The 20.3MP APS-C Sensor produces images which Samsung claims are bright and detailed, even in low light conditions, while the DRIMe IV Image Signal Processer delivers the speed and accuracy which today's photographers are looking for. In addition, Samsung touts an Advanced Hybrid Auto Focus (AF) System which ensures accurate phase and contrast detection for your shots and a 1/6000 sec shutter speed and 8.6fps shooting that lets you capture the action as it’s happening.

Continue reading →

My favorite mobile camera app adds a new feature, but it has nothing to do with your actual image quality. This time around the company plans to head in a completely different direction, with a unique new addition to its popular Camera360 app.

The company claims that "Camera360 has been the focus of much success lately, including being named as the No.2 Best Startup at the 2013 Fortune Global Forum and achieving a user base of over 120 million people from across the globe". Now the app maker heads into the audio world.

Continue reading →

Microsoft just released the second major iteration of its Blink Windows Phone 8 app which now introduces GIF (the pronunciation is still open for debate) support, new features and improved functionality.

The app, which is built by Microsoft Research (the software giant's research arm), allows users to take advantage of its burst shot feature to combine multiple pictures (the number is user-selectable) into a GIF image. The GIF can be viewed directly after creating it and can be shared via email and three social networks -- Facebook, Microsoft's Socl and Twitter. (It's time to test this with the help of your pet and post the results, for posterity's sake of course.)

Continue reading →

When you save a JPEG it’s easy to just accept your default image options, click File > Save and get on with your next task. But that probably means you’ll always be using the same JPEG compression level, and unless you’ve tuned this to an optimum figure, your final images could be anything up to ten times larger than they need to be.

Could this be a problem for you? The open source Caesium provides an easy way to find out. Point the program at a selection of images (PNG, BMP and WMF are supported, as well as JPG) or an entire folder, and it can quickly recompress them all with a lower quality setting, before reporting on any savings it’s achieved.

Continue reading →

Does the world really need another image viewer? It’s tempting to say no, as even Windows Explorer does a reasonable job of helping you browse your pictures, but nomacs is a cross-platform viewer which is aiming to change your mind. And it just might be good enough to succeed.

The program opens much like any other image viewer. You can display individual files or complete folders, for instance (there’s support for viewing all the main formats, including many RAW file types). A thumbnail browser helps you manually navigate to the images you need, or you can use the Player to create an automatic slideshow.

Continue reading →

If you thought the Galaxy S4 lineup could not grow any bigger you would be wrong. South Korean manufacturer Samsung announced, on Wednesday, the fourth member in its upscale smartphone family -- the Galaxy S4 zoom. The handset differentiates itself from the pack by offering a whopping 16 MP back-facing camera with 10x optical zoom. Yes, it's rather large and heavy because of it.

"As communication continues to become increasingly visual in nature, people wish to capture and share their moments in the highest quality possible, but often do not have the space or inclination to carry a dedicated camera for this purpose", says Samsung CEO JK Shin. "The Galaxy S4 zoom changes this forever, combining the industry leading functionality and connectivity of the Galaxy S4 with the high quality photographic experience you’d expect from a compact camera. The result is truly the best of both worlds, without compromise". Surely, the "without compromise" part sounds too good to be true.

Continue reading →

Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry just rolled out a new version of its Facebook BB 10 app, bringing the latest iteration one step closer to its Android and iOS counterparts. This is the second major update in the past couple of months.

The new Facebook app for BlackBerry 10, now at version 10.2.0, focuses on design and functionality improvements. In the former department, the app sports a new "refined" look for the newsfeed, adding a couple visual tweaks. The most noteworthy enhancements, however, are related to photo management and tagging.

Continue reading →

Veteran US developer Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 for Windows and Mac. Photoshop Lightroom is aimed at improving digital photographs, and version 5 debuts some major new features, including an Advanced Healing Brush for removing unwanted elements from photos.

Other new features include Upright, a smart straightening tool, Radial Gradient, smart previews, video slideshows and the promise of better photo book creation.

Continue reading →

Undoubtedly, Twitter deems Windows Phone 8 as a second-class citizen. The popular social network introduced filters for its Android and iOS apps nearly six months ago but only late-yesterday did the feature finally arrive on the tiled mobile operating system.

Similar to its Android and iOS counterparts, Twitter for Windows Phone 8 introduces eight filters -- Vignette, Warm, Cool, 1963, 1972, Golden Hour, Antique and Black & White -- which can be applied to new pictures or already existing ones from the Photos gallery. Adding filters is straightforward -- select the picture and either scroll to the right or hit the "filters" button to choose the desired effect.

Continue reading →

Windows users are spoiled for choice when it comes to photo editing tools. The offerings range from very powerful and expensive suites like Adobe Photoshop, to basic yet free applications like Microsoft Paint. CyberLink, a company best known for its video software, entered this market a couple of years ago with PhotoDirector, an excellent but affordable tool which can be used to manage, enhance and share photos.

PhotoDirector is very easy to use, mostly due to its neatly-organized interface. It groups the available functionality into five tabs -- Library, Adjustment, Edit, Slideshow and Print -- which allows users to import and organize photos, tweak various elements (color, lighting and contrast among others), "beautify" people (make teeth whiter, remove wrinkles, etc.), create slideshows and even share them on YouTube afterwards.

Continue reading →

Eye-Fi memory cards can automatically copy photos from your camera to a wireless enabled device, such as your PC, whenever you get in range. The new Mobi card, announced today, is designed to transfer photos from a camera to any iOS or Android handset.

All you have to do is insert the Mobi card into your camera, and use it as you would any ordinary SD card. Install the free app on your phone and pair it to the Mobi by entering a unique 10 digit code. Once paired, photos and videos can be copied over automatically.

Continue reading →