photography - page 4

Google Photos can now adjust background blur on Portrait Mode pics

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Google Photos library backup on iPhone X
Google Photos is the photo and video backup app we all wish Apple would give us.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

You no longer need to buy the iPhone XS or XS Max to take advantage of one of the best features on the new devices’ camera.

Google Photos pushed out an update this morning that allows any iPhone owner with a Portrait Mode camera to adjust the background blur after a photo has been taken.

RAW Power brings new powerful photo editing tools to Mac, iOS

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RAW Power
RAW Power for Mac 2.0.
Photo: Gentlemen Coders

Photographers who use the RAW Power software get a new slew of tools today with the release of a 2.0 version for both Mac and iOS.

RAW Power 2.0 brings new adjustments for chromatic aberration, perspective, a monochrome mixer and a new set of features that deepen the richness of photos called Enhance.

New line of free Apple seminars will make your brain bulge

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Today at Apple
Apples Stores will sell you the iPads and Apple Pencils. "Today at Apple" will show how to use them.
Photo: Apple

More than 60 new sessions to teach Apple users how to get the most creatively from their apps and devices will be added to the “Today at Apple” program, the company announced in New York today.

Held at Apple Stores around the world, the sessions offer primers on essential hardware and software in the Apple ecosystem. Each workshop is headed by local creative professionals teaching coding, digital drawing, photography, video and making music.

Halide fixes iPhone XR’s Portrait Mode

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Best iPhone photo accessories
Halide unlocks Portrait Mode on the iPhone XR.
Photo: Chroma Noir LLC

Apart from the screen, the big different between the iPhone XS and XR is the camera. The XS has two, and the XR only has one. This means that — like a one-eyed person — the XR camera can’t calculate the depth of objects in a scene, and therefore can’t use the Depth Blur feature to blur the background. It works around this by using clever facial recognition tricks to allow Portrait Mode with people, but that’s it.

Until now, that it. In its latest update, camera app Halide adds back this functionality to the new iPhone. That’s right. With Halide, you can take depth-effect pictures of anything with the iPhone XR.

Use iOS 12’s smart albums to clean up your photo library

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Here's a photo that could totally be in some smart albums
Here's a photo that could totally be in some smart album.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Grab your iPhone, if you’re not holding it already. Then open the Photos app, go to the Albums tab, and scroll down. On iOS 12, you’ll see a list showing pretty much every kind of photo you have: Live Photos, Panoramas, screenshots, and a lot more. This is powerful stuff, so let’s check it out

How to remove annoying objects from your photos

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How will TouchRetouch manage with this delicious breakfast?
How will TouchRetouch manage with this delicious breakfast?
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

We’ve all taken the perfect photo, only to have to have it ruined by some unwanted element. A pole sticking out of someone’s head. A passing car in the background of an otherwise-perfect street scene. Or a political enemy in one of Stalin’s portraits.

But whereas the Soviet regime employed a team of photo retouchers to chop the gulag-bound dissidents from Stalin’s selfies, iPhone apps can remove clutter in seconds. Today we’ll see how to use my favorite: TouchRetouch.

Leica’s new camera replaces rear display with your iPhone

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M10
The Leica M10-D has old school style.
Photo: Leica

Leica had decided to give one of its most popular new digital cameras an analog redesign. And the iPhone plays a crucial role.

The camera company revealed a new variant of the M10 today. It completely ditches the rear LCD display and replaces it with your smartphone via a new app, making it free of digital distractions so you can just shoot.

Download Instagram photos with this Siri shortcut

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Download Instagram
You can download any Instagram photo -- even this one.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

If you like a photo or video on Instagram, you can like it, or you can save it to your collection. But what about just saving it? You just can’t download Instagram photos.

This week, a friend of mine posted some awesome videos he shot on tape back in the 1980s. I don’t want to dig around in Instagram’s ever-more-convoluted app just to watch them. I want to save them to my iPhone’s Photo Library. Instagram doesn’t let you save an image. Even if you copy the Instagram link using the share feature, then open that image in iPhone Safari, you can’t get at the image.

So I made a shortcut to do it for me. Check it out.

Adobe shows off ‘real’ Photoshop on iPad

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Photoshop on iPad
“Real Photoshop” is coming to the iPad this year.
Screenshot: Adobe

Adobe is bringing Photoshop CC to iPad in 2019 and in its announcement this morning, it placed emphasis on one word: real as in real Photoshop.

Photoshop on iPad will have all the might of the desktop version but with the pencil and touch workflow of the tablet. The work will automatically and seamlessly sync to the desktop.

Use Shortcuts to share a beautiful grid of your photos

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Shortcuts created this photo grid with just a few taps.
Shortcuts created this grid with just a few taps.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Today we’re going to make a Siri Shortcut that takes a bunch of photos you took — today, or any day — and combines them into a great-looking photo grid. It then shares that grid with friends. All you have to do it tap a button or speak a Siri command.

This is a really great way to share photos of an event, a trip to a fancy restaurant, or just an overview of your day. It also shows how easy it is to build a powerful shortcut to perform a task that would take forever to do manually in Photoshop. Let’s check it out.

Instagram wants to tap out on infinite scrolling

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Instagram lawsuit
A Chrome extension can bring your hidden "Likes" out in the open.
Photo: Pixabay

The days of scrolling through your entire Instagram feed may soon be coming to an end.

Instagram is reportedly testing a new feature that would allow users to move through posts by tapping on the screen. The feature works similar to the way you currently navigate through Stories and could make people spend even more time in the app.

How to shoot stunning black-and-white photos on iPhone

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This wasn't taken on an iPhone, but it could have been.
This wasn't taken on an iPhone, but it could have been.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Black-and-white photos aren’t just regular photos with the color taken out. Or rather, they are exactly that, but they are also more than that. A B&W portrait can seem to say more about the subject than a colorful version, for instance. B&W is also ideal for showing more graphic images. Take a color photo of scaffolding and it looks super-dull. Take the same photo in B&W, jack up the contrast, and it becomes a stark grid — way more interesting to look at.

There’s much more to taking a B&W photo than just removing the color. For instance, did you know that a color filter will have a startling effect on a B&W photo? Let’s take a look at some of the tricks to capturing and editing stunning black-and-white images.

Google takes on Apple with Pixel 3, Pixel Slate and Home Hub

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The new Made by Google products.
The new Made by Google products.
Photo: Google

Google unleashed its latest wave of hardware designed to take on Apple and Amazon by combining its powerful software with custom-designed hardware. And it actually looks pretty good.

Three new products were unveiled at Google’s event in New York City this morning: the Pixel 3, Pixel Slate and Google Home Hub. All three pack some interesting new features that some of Apple’s own products can’t match. But there are also glaring weaknesses in the new Google products. Like the horrifically huge notch on the Pixel 3 to start with.

Take a closer look at all the new products:

Hundreds of people are dying from selfies

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iPhone X portrait lighting ad
Be careful where you selfie.
Photo: Apple

Think twice before you take your next selfie because it could be your last.

Selfie-related deaths are on the rise, according to a new study that found there were over 250 reported deaths from October 2011 to November 2017 that happened while the person was trying to snap a selfie.

Beautygate: Top camera developer debunks iPhone XS beauty filter

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Beautygate
Some people get better looking with age and some get better looking with the iPhone XS.
Screenshot: Unboxing Therapy/YouTube

Turns out the entire “Beautygate” controversy has been much ado about nothing.

Corners of the internet have been up in arms over a perceived flaw in the iPhone XS camera that makes people in selfies look better than they should. Apple is supposedly looking to “fix” the undisclosed beauty filter, but developers behind one of the best iOS camera apps revealed today that such a filter does not exist.

Crazy Rich Asians director shoots poor short film on iPhone XS Max

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dancer
One of the best B-Boys in the Hollywood busts out his moves for iPhone XS Max.
Photo: Jon M. Chu

Need more proof that the iPhone XS and XS Max are the most amazing cameras Apple’s ever made?

John M. Chu, director of the breakout hit movie Crazy Rich Asians was enlisted to shoot a new short film shot entirely on the iPhone XS Max. This is not the first time an A-list director has only used the iPhone to make a movie, but what stands out about Chu’s short is he used zero equipment. No lenses. No lights. No stabilizers. Just the iPhone in his hand.

Watch the full short film right here:

iPhone XS camera design proves even more impressive than we thought

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iPhone Xs cameras
Apple's new iPhone cameras.
Photo: Apple

The new camera sensors on the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max could be worth a $1000 upgrade all their own.

Early reviews of the new cameras are overwhelmingly positive. Even though we already knew Apple made the pixels larger and the sensor bigger, we now have a better idea of the crazy engineering that went into making it the best iPhone camera ever.

Instagram now lets users apply to be verified

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Instagram lawsuit
Instagram is letting everyone apply for verified badges.
Photo: Pixabay

Getting verified on Instagram just got a little bit easier. The social photo sharing app revealed today that it will now let users apply to get a little blue check by their profile so followers know if you are really a public figure, celebrity or global brand.

Everything you need to know about white balance for your iPhone camera

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This is an almost impossible lighting situation for most automatic cameras.
This is an almost impossible lighting situation for most automatic cameras.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

White balance is one of the most important settings on any camera. It can make the difference between vibrant, accurate colors, and a muddy, flat mess. It is also the setting least likely to be tweaked manually by casual photographers. There’s not even a good way to adjust white balance in the iPhone’s own Photos app.

But don’t despair. Today we’ll learn everything you need to now about how white balance works, and what to do with it.

Photo fakery in smartphone ads shows genius of ‘Shot on iPhone’

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Shot on iPhone
A picture and three words are advertising gold.
Photo courtesy of Jen Pollack Bianco

Within a week’s time, two of the Apple’s biggest rivals got caught using misleading photos in ad campaigns that promoted the quality of their smartphones’ built-in cameras.

The embarrassing screwups of Samsung and Huawei showcase the simple brilliance of Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign.

How to enable iPhone Photos extensions

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Photo filters can be subtle or … not.
Photo filters can be subtle or … not.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Apple’s Photos app offers a very good set of editing tools. On both Mac and iOS, you can pick filters or perform a quick fix with the auto feature. You can also really dig in with some tools that are easily as comprehensive as anything on iOS.

These tools rival many desktop photo apps, but sometimes you want to do something extra-fancy. Maybe you have a favorite filters app. Or you want to combine two photos side by side in one frame or overlay one picture on another. Or use an app that lets you remove distractions in the frame, like power lines, cars or trash. Then you need to turn to Photos extensions.