editing

Google Photos is getting some incredible new features

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Google Photos sharing
Sharing have never been easier.
Photo: Google

Google Assistant may have just made its way to iPhone, but it’s not even close to the most exciting thing to come out of Google I/O today.

That would be all of the incredible new features coming to Google Photos, including new sharing options, stunning Photo Books you can build in just a few taps, intelligent photo editing, and Google Lens integration.

Everything that’s new in Final Cut Pro X 10.3

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Final Cut Editing
Apple packs a ton of updates into the new FCPX.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

If you watched the most recent Mac media event, you already got a preview of Final Cut X — thanks to the on-stage demo showing how it worked in conjunction with the MacBook Pro’s new Touch Bar. But there’s a whole lot more to the Final Cut Pro 10.3 update than that.

To check out what you’ll find in the latest update for Apple’s video-editing software, check out our comprehensive video below.

Use free Snapseed on iPad to tune your photos to best effect

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Snapseed lets you tune up your photos with ease.
Snapseed lets you tune up your photos with ease.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Snapseed is a free image editing app from Google that has some fantastic editing tools to make any photo even better.

The killer feature here is the set of Tune Image tools that let you take a good photo and turn it into a great photo, right on your iPad, with very little effort.

Here’s a quick intro to these fantastic tools and how to make them tune your photos to best effect.

Leave Instagram behind with AfterLight’s massive toolset

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You'll be the envy of all your Instagram buddies with AfterLight's amazing set of tools.
You'll be the envy of all your Instagram buddies with AfterLight's amazing set of tools.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Instagram has a fair amount of filters, but boy everyone uses them all the time. You know a photo’s come from the photo-sharing social network when you can call out the filters on it: X-Pro, Hefe, Clarendon!

If you’re looking to stand out from the crowd, check out AfterLight, a sweetly-priced iOS app for iPad (and iPhone) with over 74 amazing filters and effects (and that’s just the free ones) to make your photos the envy of all the other basic Instagram users out there.

Here’s how to make best use of AfterLight’s massive toolset.

How to make your photos pop with VSCO on iPad

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VSCO on iPad is a fantastic, free option for photo editing.
VSCO on iPad is a fantastic, free option for photo editing.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

VSCO is a fantastic photo app for iPhone and iPad, and it lets you shoot some killer photos as well as edit them directly in the same app once you’ve taken your masterpiece.

The app is universal, which means it works well on iPhone and iPad, natively. The extra screen real estate, however, makes VCSO on iPad a fantastic choice just for editing any photos you like, whether you took them with your iPad, iPhone, or any other camera you might have.

Here’s how.

How to speed up slo-mo videos on your iPhone

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Dogs are good for slo-mo video.
Dogs are good for slo-mo video.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Your iPhone’s slo-mo function is a ton of fun to use when you’re taking action video of yourself or your buddies as you ski down mountains and base-jump off cliffs. If you’ve got an iPhone 5s or later, you know the joy of capturing all the action in a much slower timeframe and then using it to make fun of the faces your friends make when doing extreme sports.

But what if you want to un-slow all that down, maybe to focus less on the funny faces and more on the fast action?

It’s pretty simple to do, though you might not notice how at first. Here’s how to speed up the slo-mo videos you’ve taken with your iPhone.

5 super-quick iPhoto tips to make your photos even better

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Don't overlook this great bit of free software for your photos. Photo: Stephen Smith/Cult of Mac
Don't overlook this great bit of free software for your photos. Photo: Stephen Smith/Cult of Mac

iPhoto is a free download for everyone these days, making it a basic bit of kit for anyone dealing with the deluge of photographic data we seem to collect. Still, it’s often overlooked by the best of us because of its limitations.

That’s unfortunate, because the simple program offers some pretty useful features that can quickly let you get on with enjoying your photos rather than tweaking them.

Here are five simple tips for using Apple’s built-in photo “shoebox,” letting you make your photos better and more organized even more quickly.

How to use two powerful tools to collaborate on writing projects

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scrivener
Literature... and latte. Photo illustration Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

 

These days you can easily share data and collaborate on almost anything, from Rdio playlists to photo streams. But when it comes to plain old written text, your options are terrible. You’re pretty much caught between working on a shared file in Google Docs or shuttling versions of your work back and forth via email. Add more than one collaborator and this becomes a total nightmare.

Thankfully, tools exist to smooth the process of collaborating on writing projects. I’m currently editing the second draft of a novella, and I’m looking for a way to work with “beta” readers. I’m testing several pieces of software, and so far one called Draft is in the lead. Not only does it let you share a document with other people, it lets the team comment on any part of the source document and also allows them to edit a copy. Then, when they submit their versions, you can preview any changes before accepting or rejecting them.

Better still, because Draft can sync with a document in Dropbox (as well as several other cloud services), you can sync the edits from your beta team with a local app, like Scrivener. Here’s what you need to make the collaborative magic happen.

Handy Photo 2 Editing App Really Is Handy

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After Facebook snapped up the Oculus Rift, a VR headset maker, we wondered what companies Apple should buy before Mark Zuckerberg or Google got their hands on them. Which of these companies should Apple buy with its mighty cash horde?  Fitbit, Sonos, Telegram.org, Square, Leap Motion, Zstat, Here
After Facebook snapped up the Oculus Rift, a VR headset maker, we wondered what companies Apple should buy before Mark Zuckerberg or Google got their hands on them. Which of these companies should Apple buy with its mighty cash horde? Fitbit, Sonos, Telegram.org, Square, Leap Motion, Zstat, Here

Handy Photo has gone from v1 to v2, and has changed from an app I apparently installed and then discarded to something that looks very useful indeed for the mobile photographer.

The update brings iOS 7 support, a complete redesign of the interface, and some sweet new features.

How To Use The iOS 7 Photos App To Edit Right On Your iPhone [iOS Tips]

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Sure, you can use something like iPhoto to really dig in and edit your iPhone photos, but if you just want a simple, no frills simple edit or two–plus some nifty filters if you have an iPhone 5 and up–the built-in Photos app in iOS 7 is a pretty great choice. It’s easy to use, and you already own it.

We showed you how to apply the new iOS 7 filters in yesterday’s tip post, so let’s look at the other four options available to you: rotate, auto-enhance, red eye, and cropping.

Promise Technology First To Announce Thunderbolt 2 Peripherals

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We know that the new Mac Pro — and as we learned earlier this week, the new MacBook Pros — sport new Thunderbolt 2 ports, which double the speed of the initial version to a maximum throughput of 20GB/second.

All that speed is academic without peripherals designed specifically for Thunderbolt 2. So today, Promise Technology is the first company to announce Thunderbolt 2 stuff — namely, their Pegasus2 RAID storage boxes and SANLink2 Fibre Channel-to-Thunderbolt 2 SAN device bridge.

Cameo Is Vine, But All Grown Up With Muscles, A Flashy Wardrobe And A Hip Music Collection [Daily Freebie]

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I remember a few tech bloggers going nuts over Vine when it hit the street back in January. I wasn’t convinced; it seemed too limiting, felt too gimmicky. Vine turned out to be a more creative tool than I’d imagined — at least for others. But the concept never really hooked me enough to want to use it.

Cameo, on the other hand, had my juices flowing almost immediately. Like Vine, Cameo shoots short, six-second HD (720p) clips that can be uploaded to Cameo’s website or shared via social media and email. Unlike Vine, multiple six second shots can be combined into a two-minute (maxiumum) clip, with light editing tools, effects and music added to the mix. And Cameo even lets you collaborate with friends.

JPEG Rotation And Lossless Editing In iOS

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wpid-Photo-16082012-1521.jpg
A JPG rotated 900 times. Who says digital files don't rot?

Back up your photos. Always shoot in RAW. After a while all the good advice starts to sound like the adults speaking in Charlie Brown cartoons. Wah-wah-wah-wahwahwah.

Especially now iCloud manages our backups and our iPhones only shoot JPGs.

But one piece of advice is still worth listening to: “always rotate JPGs losslessly.” What?

Vival App Turns Your Video Into Montages As You Shoot

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I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.

Highlight Hunter Hunts Your Movies For Highlights

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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=T_P5H3XZ1-Y

I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.

Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.

Laminar Is Like A Little Lightroom For iPad

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Unlike Hong Kong Phooey, Laminar isn't quicker than the human eye, but it's close
Unlike Hong Kong Phooey, Laminar isn't quicker than the human eye, but it's close

Just a week after we got Photoshop on the iPad, along comes an app that looks like we all expected Photoshop on the iPad to look. It’s called Laminar, and the best way to describe it is as Lightroom lite.

Popular iOS Photo Editing App Snapseed Is Making Its Way To The Mac App Store Very Soon [CES 2012]

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LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — After recently winning Apple’s “App of the Year” award, the popular photo-editing app, Snapseed, is making its way to the Mac to provide the same amazing functionality for OS X that iPhone and iPad users have grown to love. We had a chance to meet up with Nik Software (developers of Snapseed) and see the app in action, and we have to say, we’re pretty stoked that the Mac is getting this awesome app.

Snapheal Mac App: Super-Impressive, Dead-Easy & Ridiculously Cheap Photo Manipulation [Review]

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Do you really need to spend a lot of money to get grade-A photo-editing tricks? Apparently not. With Snapheal ($20), developer MacPhun has taken arguably the coolest Photoshop feature in recent years, made it dead-easy to use and packaged it with all the basic photo-editing tools you’ll need — and more. And all for a fraction of what it should cost.

You’ve Got to Check Out CameraBag’s Stunningly Fantastic Mac Beta

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4glrQmSeCJw

We absolutely love the CamerBag iOS app; some of us, including me, believe it to be the best photo filter app on the iPhone. But take a look at the free beta version of CamerBag 2 for Mac, the desktop version’s forthcoming update — because it takes things to a whole new level of awesomeness.