Photowerks is a Smart Album app for the iPhone and iPad that you will actually use. Unlike previously-written-about SmartAlbums, Photowerks uses easy spinning dials to set criteria for your saved searches, and it is also quick and very nicely designed.
There’s one great feature of the Lightning cable that I didn’t notice until just now: Its thinness compared to the old 30-pin plug means that it’s a lot easier to squeeze through small holes. And that in turn makes custom docks a simple, Dremel-free experience.
Take a look around you and see if there’s anything that could be improved by running a little cable through a hole in the top. That’s just what the folks at Photojojo did, and — almost inevitably — their eyes rested on a vintage film camera.
Developer tap tap tap just announced the details on its latest Camera+ update for iPhone and iPad. The folks behind one of the best camera app replacements out there add the ability to layer effects in editing, letting you quickly and easily add and remove a multitude of effects per photo, stacking and re-arranging the order of the effects to attain your own unique look and style.
If you’re not into doing all the micromanagement, Camera+ is also releasing two new filter packs.
Today the GoPro iOS app hit version 2.0, and the update includes several additions that make it easier to interface with the GoPro camera from an iPhone or iPad. The app is way more than a remote control now.
The biggest feature is the ability to wirelessly transfer photo and video from the camera to a dedicated album in an iOS device’s camera roll. Once the you download version 2.0 of the iOS app and the most recent software update for the camera itself, you can browse, view, and delete media right from the camera’s memory card. Photos and videos that have been wirelessly synced over to your iOS device from the camera can be shared through email, text, or other apps like Instagram and Facebook.
GoPro users are going to love today’s update, so grab it now.
Source: App Store
Afterlight is one of the most popular photography apps in the App Store, but until now it’s only been optimized for the iPhone. Today’s update brings full support for the iPad, meaning you can edit in a native interface for the iPad’s larger display.
If you’ve seen pics in your Instagram feed that are framed creatively or look like they aren’t filtered in Instagram itself, chances are they were probably edited in Afterlight. It’s nice that the app officially supports the iPad now, but the interface is basically just a blown up version of the iPhone app. Some iPad-only UI tweaks or features would be nice for future updates.
Afterlight costs $1 as a universal download in the App Store.
Source: App Store
MyShoebox is yet another cloud photo storage service which syncs your pictures between all of your devices. It’s been around for a little longer than newcomer Loom, and also goes up against Everpix.
Loom is yet another app that promises to organize your photos for you, just like the amazing Everpix. Unlike Everpix, though, which shows the Apple heritage of its engineers in its oversimplified and sometimes frustratingly opaque user interface, Loom looks to be a little more accessible. And controllable.
Ever wish you could get a tourist photo that looks exactly the same as everyone else’s photo, only it has you standing in front of the monument/mountain/[insert cliché here]? No, of course not. But apparently there are plenty of people in Japan who do, and they can now use special camera stands, located at popular tourist spots, to do it.
At some point in the recent past, Lomo went from being the resurrector of crappy Soviet-era plastic cameras to a niche manufacturer of some very interesting lo-fi photography kit. Today’s surprise is that Lomo will be making the Petzval lens, a lens invented in 1840 in – yes – Russia.
It’s hard to see why the folks at Barcelona-based Honest&Smile built this crazy contraption into a Moleskine notebook, but that doesn’t make it any less neat — after all, Doc Brown built a time machine into a DeLorean. When closed, it looks like any other overpriced book of blank paper. When opened, it reveals a kind of analog Instagram playground.
The Olloclip must be one of the most useful iPhoneography accessories around. It’s a tiny clip-on widget which adds three additional lenses to the iPhone: macro, wide-angle and fisheye.
And until now, the only thing it was really lacking was a telephoto – after all the more-or-less 35mm equivalent lens on the iPhone is already wide enough for most uses. Olloclip has fixed that with this new lens, and added another handy accessory in the box: A circular polarizer.
Landcam comes from the folks behind Currency, a currency-converter app which manages to be more beautiful, easier to use and – somewhat paradoxically – more information-rich than its rivals.
The legacy is clear. Landcam is also beautifully uncluttered, and yet easily as powerful as most other iPhoneography apps in the store. And all this for $1.
Instants is a great new iPhone app for browsing your photos. It brings several of iOS7’s organizational ideas to the current iPhone, but does it in a much cleaner and more intuitive way. Plus, it’s free (with an in-app purchase for one extra feature).
Briefly gets the award for most-appropriately-named app of the week. It lets you create neat little videos from your photos, and it does it really, really briefly.
Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.
I’m on the verge of giving up on using my iPad as my main photo machine, but one brand new app is keeping me from switching back to the Mac. It’s called Photospector, it lets you organize and edit your pictures, and it’s pretty much the iPad photos app Apple should have made all along.
Muku Shuttr is a tiny, keychain-sized (and keychain-mountable) remote shutter release for your iPhone. OR your iPad. Or your giant Android “phablet.” For just $29, you’l never have to see another “selfie arm” disappearing from the side of your self portraits ever again.
Manfrotto’s new Pixi tripod is built to supports hefty compact cameras, but will be equally at home when shoved under your iPhone (via a case with a tripod screw mount, of course). In fact, it’s almost perfect for iPhoeography as it doubles as a handgrip letting you shoot much steadier video than you could with the iPhone only.
Tangent is a new iPhone app for dickering with your photos. It comes from Ben Guerrette, the brains behind Deco Sketch for the iPhone and iPad, and it is similar in intent. Tangent overlays geometrical patterns onto your photo, and then lets you adjust them.
If we’re guessing about improvments coming to the next iPhone, then a better camera is a pretty safe bet. Each iteration of the iPhone has bumped the megapixels and improved image quality, low-light performance and added featres like HDR and panoramas. Many other makers (cough Samsung cough) have attempted to match the iPhone’s camera, but only one has really come close – Nokia. And the new Lumia 1020 looks even more amazing yet.
Fact: The photographer never appears in group photos. It used to be that we’d hand the camera off to a stranger to snap a picture of us and our friends, but while I was happy to give my camera to a person picked almost randomly on the street, there’s no way in hell I’m giving them my iPhone.
And so does the march of technology further distance us from our fellow human beings. The latest tool of alienation? Groopic, an app which puts the photographer back into group shots.
If you never used a reflector to help out the lighting in your photos, you’ll probably be pretty surprised at just how big a difference they can make. A reflector can kick back light into the shadows of your subject, taking a standard boring portrait and turning it into something that looks way way better, eliminating the unflattering pools of darkness lurking in the faces imperfections.
But only a pro would bother tossing a big reflector into their camera kit, right? Photojojo thinks not, and will now sell you a perfect pocket-sized reflector for your iPhoneography.
I love my Olloclip, but there’s one thing I find myself wishing more and more often: that it came with a telephoto lens. Well, as you can probably guess that this post is about just that – a new telephoto from the makers of probably the best add-on lens for the iPhone.
On-camera flash is usually a terrible idea (with just two – maybe three – exceptions I can think of). It lights up your subject, sure, but it totally kills the mood that made you want to take a photo in the dark in the first place.
But if you’re a fan of shiny, overexposed faces, red eyes and disappearing backgrounds then why not grab an iblazr, the world’s first all-lower-case iPhone flash. Kidding. It is all lower cae, but that’s not really its tagline. It’s real tagline is “is the first universal LED flash for smartphones and tablets.”
Lame.
See if you can guess what the app External Flash does. Hopefully you guessed “It’s an app that lets you control the LED lamps from up to 16 other iPhones and fire them in sync with your own iPhone’s camera," because then you’d be correct. If you guessed anything else, then you’re totally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.