Articles about Photography

Instagram sure knows how to feed the frenzy. Shortly after the photo-sharing social network revised the rights policy, interpreted by many people as a sign of major changes regarding handling of user content and ownership, the company issued a response to the numerous complaints, blaming legal speak for the misunderstanding.

"Many users are confused and upset", so Instagram's co-founder, Kevin Systrom, took it upon himself, on behalf of the Facebook-owned social network, to inform concerned Instagrammers that everyone got it wrong. Systrom states: "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", which basically implies that the problem is with reading the rights policy in the appropriate manner and not with the rights policy in itself. That's not overly reassuring, however, considering that what is basically a major change in philosophy can be so easily subject to interpretation.

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If you're planning to Instagram lots of photos this holiday, think again. They might be in next year's commercial marketing -- your embarrassing candid plastered on billboards everywhere -- and you have no real say about it. Big companies use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to keep you from sharing stuff. Instragram takes away such recourse for you, overnight announcing one of the biggest rights policy changes of the contextual cloud computing era. The photo-sharing site claims the right to sell your content, offering you absolutely no compensation for the privilege.

The change is snakey sneaky: "Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service", but "Instagram Content is protected by copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret and other laws, and, as between you and Instagram, Instagram owns and retains all rights in the Instagram Content and the Service". You give up your rights to ownership simply by using the service, which gives you nothing.

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Within the past few days Instagram has divorced Twitter and added a new filter, Twitter got into the Instagram game by adding photo filters and now Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr has joined the fray with its new iPhone app update. You can probably guess where this announcement is going.

Yes, Flickr has added a set of filters that users can access upon snapping a photo. Like Instagram and now Twitter, there are a standard set of filters including black and white and 15 others that are now part of the built-in editor, which also allows you to crop your image right on the spot. You can then share it via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or email.

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Let’s be frank: most free image editors are dull. They tend to offer the same style of interface, the same basic functionality, with little to distinguish them for the competition. That may be fine for beginners, but if you’re a more experienced user then you might sometimes wish for something more.

There are more interesting alternatives around, though, and Image Analyzer is a particularly good example. It’s far from perfect, but if you’re looking for a photo editor with a little extra features and functionality then the program could keep you busy for a very long time.

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Keeping your digital photo collection in order usually requires a great deal of self-discipline and effort. Or, failing that, a heavy-duty image organiser.

If you’re distinctly lacking in all these areas, though, you could just turn to PhotosTree, a tiny (17KB) command-line tool which quickly arranges your JPEGs according to the date they were taken.

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Thanksgiving is now over for those of us in the United States and Black Friday is well under way. While we won't know retail sales figures for the number one shopping day of the year for a few days, we do now have a staggering figure from the holiday itself. Thanksgiving was a big day for photo-sharing service Instagram. In fact, it was the single biggest day in the service's history.

Instagram, which became popular with iPhone users and then expanded to Android before being purchased by Facebook, has grown steadily, but the recent holiday provided a huge boost to the service and I am proud to say that my daughter and I were both contributors to this monumental moment (my humble contribution to the record is posted above).

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Anthropics Technology Ltd. on Wednesday pushed out a major update to its Portrait Professional "airbrushing" software, including new touch-up functionality, better handling of multiple faces in a single image, new face modeling and 3D skin processing, and much more.

There are a lot of solutions available to the consumer looking to gently touch-up photographs. Some are built into smartphones, some are available as freeware, some are available as plug-ins to common desktop software. It's all kid's stuff compared to Portrait Professional.

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This morning Amazon quietly pushed out a brand new app designed to let Android devices interface with their popular Cloud Drive storage service. Amazon, of course, has a horse in this race with their Kindle Fire HD tablets that have seen increased sales in recent days, ironically at what appears to be Apple's expense. The app is specifically designed for photos, so let's take a walk though and see what it can do.

First, it's a free install and is available from both Google Play and the Amazon AppStore for Android. Once you have downloaded it to your device you are presented with a sign-in screen that requires you to have, or create, an Amazon account, which is something that the vast majority of people probably already have anyway. Users automatically have 5 GB of free storage, but more can be purchased for prices comparable to those offered by Google Drive or SkyDrive.

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If your digital photo collection is something of a mess, leaving you rarely able to find the images you need, then you’re not alone. The standard Windows tools just aren’t up to the task of managing large numbers of photos, leaving many people looking for third-party tools to help them restore order.

There are at least plenty of free photo managers competing for your attention, though, and the latest contender is Lunarship Software’s Phototheca, an interesting tool with a range of useful features.

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Just about every photo editor includes a simple “sharpen” function, which analyses the pixels of an image in an attempt to reduce blur and recover a little detail. But although the standard sharpening technology is fast and easy to use, it only really works with mild blurring; if your image is seriously blurry then you’ll probably get nowhere at all.

The solution? Forget basic sharpening, to deal with significant blurring you need a far more powerful tool. And SmartDeblur is an excellent free candidate.

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Yesterday, when reporting about Nexus 7 32GB showing up on Office Depot shelves, I asked: "Why wait?" Google may have cancelled today's Android event because of Hurricane Sandy, but there are many good reasons to announce anyway -- and stealing thunder from Windows Phone 8's launch is one of them.

Google went ahead, today announcing the long rumored Nexus 4 smartphone, Nexus 10 tablet and Android 4.2. It's no Key Lime Pie but more Jelly Bean. Make no mistake, despite the point-one update and nomenclature, this is a big upgrade.

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Editing lots of digital photos in a single session is generally a tedious and time-consuming business, as most image editors still assume you’ll only ever want to carry out actions on one picture at a time.

Fortunately there are plenty of third-party batch processing tools around who are trying to fill this functionality gap, and COOLTWEAK is the latest, allowing you to resize, watermark or share multiple images (on Facebook, Picasa and Twitter) directly from the right-click Explorer menu.

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Months after releasing the Wi-Fi controller pack for its Hero2 action sports cameras, GoPro on Tuesday finally released the first version of the mobile app to go along with it.

The GoPro App gives users full control of all camera settings, a live video preview window, and access to GoPro's "social-ish" Photo and Video of the Day site. The app is free and compatible with iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S (iOS 4.3 & 5), iPod Touch 4 (iOS 4.3 & 5), and iPad 1, 2 & 3 (iOS 4.3 & 5). It is available in the iTunes app store right now.

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If the colors of your latest digital photos are less than accurate, then most photo editors will allow you to try and resolve this manually. Tweak RGB here, maybe HSV there, and with a little work there’s a good chance you can improve the situation. If that sounds too much like hard work, though, you might prefer a tool like CastCor, which aims to correct color problems almost entirely automatically.

There’s nothing too special about this, of course -- most photo editors include at least some automated correction tools -- but CastCor delivers more than most: “White Point Auto”, “Grey Point Auto”, “Contrast Auto”, “Auto Color Enhance”, “Highlight-Shadow Enhance”, “Adaptive Equalisation”, “Luminance Correction”, and more.

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Apple tends to have unintentionally witty responses to most problems associated with the iPhone. Cofounder Steve Jobs told a user "you're holding it wrong" in response to "Death Grip". Now comes similar response to the purple haze in pictures taken with the iPhone 5.

Apple updated a knowledge base article in which it acknowledges the discoloration issue with the iPhone 5 camera, represented by a purple haze, flare or spot that appears due to the position of the light source. According to the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation the problem isn't new and affects all iPhone generations.

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