Hands up anyone who knows what a light meter is? You at the back… speak up… No, it’s not a way to tell how much electricity you use to illuminate your home. Fine, I’ll tell you: it’s what we used to use to measure light and set the exposure on our cameras, back before they were so good at doing it themselves.
Oddly enough, this weekend I found myself in need of one. And then what do I see in my inbox? The Lumu, a light meter for the iPhone.
Bonzart’s Ampel is a cool-looking — and cheap — digital camera styled on the TLR (twin-lens-reflex) cameras of old. But the retro case design isn’t just a gimmick: the Ampel actually packs some great featurres into the old-fashioned shape, including a dedicated tilt-shift lens.
Even with a bad digital zoom, you can still tell this is Elvis dressed as Jesus.
It looks like iOS 7 adds a digital zoom to the video-camera app. You’ll need to be running it on an iPhone 5, but if you are, you can zoom in 2–3x as you shoot. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be the crappy digital zoom used for stills.
Lightroom-using, iPad-owning readers might remember an app called Photosmith. It promised to let you sync your photos ’twixt iPad and Lightroom and let you add tags, keywords and metadata, as well as selecting picks and rejecting the crud before syncing everything back again.
The trouble was, it was confusing as hell, and crashed every few button taps. Now we have version 3.0, and it is everything the original tried to be. In fact, it’s pretty great.
Yahoo has bought the developer of the fantastic iOS apps PhotoForge and KitCam. Ghostbird’s software team will now work for Yahoo, helping to make Flickr even better. And – as ever with these things – development on both apps will stop.
You know what’s great? Magnets. You know what’s equally great? Filtered photos. Which makes this little DIY project – using both magnets and homemade filters – double great, right? Right guys?
It looks like the new photo filters in iOS 7 are lossless. That is, the original, untouched image file is saved as is, and the effect is applied on-the-fly. This is how non-destructive editing apps like Lightroom and Aperture do their thing.
Shared Photos Stream in iOS 7 are turning out to be a much bigger deal than I first thought. After playing with them for a few hours it’s clear that they might actually be Apple’s first successful social network. Why? It’s all down to a little “Activity” tab inside the newly-named “Shared Streams.”
IOS 7 looks fantastic, and the good news is that photographers haven’t been left out of the updates. There’s new stuff in both the Camera app as well as Photos: a neat combination of flashy new features and great little fixes that will make both apps what they probably should have been to begin with.
![Great Alternatives To iPhoto [Feature]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Screen-Shot-2013-06-06-at-1.17.43-PM.jpg)
Even if you take crappy photos, Pixa doesn’t care.
I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.
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