Photography

PanoPerfect moves to the iPad and adds web galleries

Since our first look at PanoPerfect for the iPhone, it has become more widely accepted as a great way to share only panoramic photographs. I am a big fan of the ability to take panoramic photos with my iPhone and it only makes sense that HalfPeeled provides a great new way to view and share them. As featured in the App Store's "New and Noteworthy" section, PanoPerfect lands for the iPad and boasts a new web browsing feature...

Photoshop Touch finally lands on the iPhone

After what has seemed like nearly an eternity, a useful version of Adobe Photoshop has finally landed on the iPhone. Officially dubbed Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPhone, the app is largely the same as the original iPad version, which was released some time ago.

For those of us that have to alter images on a day-to-day basis, this is a welcomed addition to the App Store library.

Instagram surpasses a hundred million active users

Facebook-owned Instagram, despite negative publicity surrounding the controversial terms of service brouhaha, continues to grow its installed base. Today, the company announced a major milestone: Instagram now has over a hundred million active users across mobile platforms. That's ten million more active monthly users since it announced the 90 million milestone on January 17. By comparison, Twitter over a six-year time span hit 200 million active users, as of end of 2012.

Commenting on the development, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom shared an anecdote in a blog post about how he realized Instagram was going to be different when fans at the Giants Stadium starting posting their Instagrams after another co-founder "with a few quick commands at his terminal" filled the service with images of the game...

Another try at group photo sharing: Albumatic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVfXuuLrnOI

A new iPhone app called Albumatic hopes to succeed where the likes of Color and Highlight have failed, to make sharing between groups of people easy and fun. It has a clean minimalistic interface that lets you easily start an album and add photos for others to see. Whenever you add a new photo, all the folks you've shared an album with get notified.

Folks nearby can join the album and add photos of their own and those that are farther away are only allowed to view the album, but not interact with the photos (likes, comments, etc.) We've seen this location-based photo sharing focus before and it didn't work out well (hint: Color), but Albumatic nonetheless bets party-goers will use it to share embarrassing cocktail snaps between themselves, Galaxy S III style...

Flickr updated with comment alerts, @username tags, volume shutter and more

After a long time, I recently fell in love with Yahoo's Flickr service, all over again. I mean, not everyone is on Facebook. More importantly, Instagram leaves a lot to be desired in terms of screen resolution so Flickr, which stores original-res photos, is becoming increasingly relevant to my iPhoneography workflow. The freshly updated software now supports @username tagging (with tags linked to users' photo stream) and can notify you via push alerts when someone tags you in their comment.

And if you happen to find the volume shutter feature of the stock iOS Camera app useful, you're going to love this update as it lets you snap a photo using your iPhone's volume up button. The program also includes a few other improvements, mentioned right below...

Conceptualize your compositions to improve your iPhone photography

In today's lesson in iPhone photography, we will be digging a bit deeper into the mystical ideas of composition. Remember, before you consider the post processing of an image you need to expose and compose properly. In previous lessons we examined the Rule of Thirds. It is pretty straightforward and a great creative technique to have in your tool box. However, we never explored why, or how, it works. In this lesson, to better understand it, as well as other compositional guidelines, we will explore the idea of static vs. dynamic compositions.

Before we explore the ideas of composition, it's important we understand the concept of 'visual weight' (or strength). Every elements in our compositions have varying weight/strength associated with them. It could be heavy, light, dark, strong, soft, etc. Obvious properties that influence a subject's weight (or strength) are its size and position. Is the element in the background or in the foreground? Is it big or small?

Quickly snap photos from Notification Center with Kamera

Do you hate it when you're trying to take a picture, you load up the Camera app, and the wrong camera is active? In photography, every moment counts and the delay in fiddling with camera modes could cost you that perfect shot.

Kamera is a Notification Center shortcut for the native Camera overlay in iOS 5 and 6, allowing you to take pictures from anywhere. What makes Kamera special is it allows you to start the overlay with either the front or rear camera active, depending on the button pressed...

Photo Organizer let’s you easily edit the Camera Roll and Albums

The developer who goes by the name of Lordscotland should call himself LordOfAwesomeTweaks. His backlog of jailbreak apps includes incredibly useful freebies like Safari Download Enabler and PDF Printer for Safari. His latest tweak is called Photo Organizer, which provides users with more control over all their photo albums including the Camera Roll.

Want to reorder photos and videos in your Camera Roll? Delete photos from your camera roll without removing them from every other album? Move photos without constantly making duplicates and wasting space? If so, Photo Organizer shows us that Apple's default methods aren't always best...

Instagram launches photo stream on the web with comments and likes

Good news for iPhone photography buffs who love to show off their snaps on Instagram. The Facebook-owned photo sharing service announced Tuesday that people can now view their entire feed of photos in any web browser, including Instagrams shared by the folks they follow on the service.

Commenting and liking is supported and the web app is optimized for both desktop and mobile browsers.

With these new capabilities, users can bypass the mobile app and instead interact with their followers using any device that runs a standards-compliant web browser. That's a new territory for Instagram as it was dependent on the free iOS/Android app. There's one thing missing from the new web app, however...

Instagram says it has 90M monthly active users, releases other stats

Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram today for the first time revealed some hard numbers on its performance and user base. Instagram has passed 90 million monthly active users, which is a huge number for any casual photo sharing service, no matter how you look at it. The company also confirmed that it is serving 40 million photographs each day, averaging to a little more than two photos per user shared each day. Wondering about how many likes and comments people post each day?

How to copy Instagram photos to Flickr

Instagram's exploding popularity is having long-time iPhoneography buffs pay notice and watch in horror as mainstream users cannot get enough of its filters and max 1080 pixel wide resolution. And with Facebook and Android now in the picture, no wonder some early adopters go to the extremes of closing their account while others, like Apple's marketing honcho, stopped using Instagram for it "jumped the shark".

To the most ardent fans, the last straw was Instagram's confusing handling of the recent terms of service changes - even if it was much ado about nothing.

If you've been seriously contemplating importing your Instagram photos over to Flickr but were put off by the tedious manual uploads - worry not, turns out there are a few ways to get that job done without too much fuss. iDB has you covered with this quick guide to bringing in all your Instagram photos to Flickr with just a few clicks.

White balance: the iPhone photographer’s little secret

I hope you have enjoyed the last few weeks exploring the creative possibilities of exposure. I wanted to continue on our adventure back to the basics of photography. Something I'm sure you have seen at some point in your photographic pursuits is a dial, slider, or some other control annotated with a cloud, sun, flash, shade, and light bulb. Although, camera companies have done a great job researching the iconography that best represents 'it', they really don't explain what 'it' is. In today's lesson we will quickly learn what 'it' is and then explore creative ways to use 'it' to our advantage!