Digital Negative is a new iPhone app which promises to save photos in Adobe’s DNG format. That is, it promises RAW images from your iPhone’s sensor. Leaving aside the debate of whether or not this is a good idea (more on that in a second), can an App Store app really get access to the raw, unprocessed data from the sensor? The answer is no, but to the developer’s credit, it goes just about as far as is possible.
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, taking a light source and putting it right up close to your subject’s face – as close as you can without getting it in frame – makes for softer light. Why? Because it makes the light bigger in relation to the subject. If that subject is a face, a bigger light can “wrap around” its contours and fill in its own shadows.
And the Photojojo Pocket Spotlight is a big light source for your iPhone.
According to those dandruff-shouldered, bad-breathed “experts” at camera clubs the world over, converging verticals in a photograph are “bad.” Converging verticals are the effect you see when you tip your camera back to capture to top of a building and the verticals appear to point towards each other instead of straight up.
Amazingly, these “experts” never complain about converging horizontals.
So if you are planning on entering a competition at your local camera club, and there will be buildings involved in your pictures, then you might want to take a look at Perspective Correct, an app to — you guessed it — correct perspective.
Repix is a universal app for editing your pictures. Stop me if you’ve heard that before. But even if you were to just on level of polish alone, Repix is already way above the competition. And if we take a look at what it does to your photos, we’ll see that the developer, Sumoing, has a potentially huge hit on its hands.
Fans of the great B&W-shooting iPhone app Hueless will be happy about the launch of Huemore, a color version of the app from the same developer, Curious Satellite. Huemore takes the simplified yet powerful, pared-down interface of its older brother and turns the color back up.
The National Geographic might have hit on something with its new “Found” service. Almost, anyway. Found is a Tumblr tmblg tumble-blog featuring photos from the 125-year history of the National Geographic magazine.
So far there are just a handful of pictures on the new Tumblr, but go take a look at it from the Tumblr app on your iPad be reminded that somebody already invented a time machine, and called it a camera.
Remember Blux Camera? Back in October of last year, I described it as “the camera app Rick Deckard would use.” I stand by that, only now Blux has gotten a little remote companion which makes it even more Blade-Runnerier to use.
Enhance!
Yeah yeah I know. Another damn iPhone tripod mount. And on Kickstarter no less. I hear you: “Come on Sorrel, you handsome beast you1. Can’t you pick something new to write about?”
Well, cynical but smart reader — this one’s different. I promise. And it’ll work with pretty much any camera-phone ever.
Path on is a super-slick new app for writing on your photographs. The gimmick, and the feature which sets it apart from all the other writing-on-photos apps in the store, is that you can put your scrawlings onto an arbitrary path. Hence the name, I guess.
Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.
Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.
Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company, has a rather neat take on Instagram-style retrification filters. Instead of releasing yet another photo-filtering app, Ray-Ban’s Ambermatic actually shoots your photos through a real pair of Ambermatic shades.
In the olden days, where getting the exposure of your photos right was much harder thanks to the fact that you didn’t get to see the result until your prints came back from the lab, people would sometimes rely on a separate incident light meter, which would measure the light falling on the subject, and not the light reflected by it.
Now, such a piece of hardware is being made for the iPhone…
Question: What’s the only (non-gimmicky) photographic filter that can’t be duplicated in software? That’s right, you smart genius you! It’s the polarizer. A polarizer will do two things for your photography: it’ll increase the saturation of the colors in your pictures, and it’ll cut out unwanted reflections from glass and water. And Photojojo will now sell you one that’ll clip right onto your iPhone.
What if you could go to university and learn the basics of photography for just $5? And what if that university specialized in the camera you actually have: the iPhone? If that prospect gets you jazzed, then welcome to Photojojo University’s Phoneography 101, a course that’ll learn ya to take pictures more better.
What could be less creepy than secretly snapping close-up pictures of people without their knowledge? Nothing, that’s what. Well, not unless you do it whilst dressed as a clown I guess.
The MirrorCase is a hefty box that hangs off the back of your iPhone and uses an optical-grade mirror to let you shoot pictures at right angles to the screen.
Problem: You use Lightroom for your fancy photos from your fancy camera, and you want to put the best of those on your iPad.
But you also shoot a ton of pictures on your iPhone, and you want to back those up to iPhoto on your Mac, and send the best of those to your iPad too.
It sounds like a mess waiting to happen, right? Thanks to two little features, though, you can do all of this without breaking a sweat.
Mextures are free 2000px x 200px images for adding textures to your iPhone photos. Mextures come from photographer Merek Davis, hence the name: Merek; textures: Mextures!
I consider Apple’s Lightning SD card adapter to be a step backwards – the original camera connection kit not only included an SD dongle and a USB port, but it also provided them in convenient, pocketable, non-be-cabled form.
Thanks to the fine folks at Photojojo, though, you can now relive the excitement of not using a cable to plug in your SD card with the Lightning SD Reader.
Many people thought that without Apple’s injecting blood directly into the arteries of Macworld, the expo would quickly shrivel and die.
They were wrong. Apple may not have participated in the event since 2009 but things are still going strong. Macworld has transformed itself from an Apple launch event where Cupertino announced products like the original iPhone and taught customers how to use them, to an event where people celebrate the culture that permeates Apple fans and binds them together.
In three short days, thousands of iFans across the globe will converge on San Francisco’s Moscone Center to celebrate everything that is great about Apple. It’s going to be a great show. Already, Macworld/iWorld 2013 is set to be one of the most entertaining Macworld conferences in recent memories. It’s going to be packed with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Will.i.am, while over 350 companies show off their new products to Apple fans who will love getting to hangout with each other and swap stories on everything Apple.
Here’s what to look forward to this week at MacWorld/iWorld 2013:
Photopoll is a sort of mashup between Instagram and Polldaddy, the super-useful poll tool we often use here at Cult of Mac. Just plug in some photos from Instagram, Amazon.com or your iPhone’s Camera Roll, and ask friends to vote for photos based on an accompanying question. Wild-yet-informative wackiness ensues.
What could possibly be dorkier than taking photos with your iPad? Taking those same photos with your iPad on a tripod, that’s what. So if you’re wearing a polo shirt and chinos, and have a phone holster on your belt, then this is for you: The iStabilizer tabMount.
Alien Skin makes the human-like disguises that the lizard creatures in “V” used to pass themselves off as humans, and… Kidding! Alien Skin makes high-end Photoshop plugins and Mac photo-processing software. It also makes an iPhone app called Alt Photo, which distills the features of its desktop app Exposure into an iPhone-sized package.
And now it is free.
Analog media are great and all – vinyl, film, paper – but they all suffer by living in a non-connected vacuum. Lomo’s new Kickstarter project aims to fix that, for film photos at least, by turning your iPhone into a 35mm film and slide scanner.
Finally, you can post photographs with genuine light-leaks straight to your Instagram.
EXIF data: It’s the unsung hero of iPhoneography, and digital photography in general. It’s where location data is stored so you can see your pictures on a map. It remembers when you took that photo, what ISO you used, along with all kinds of other handy data (focal length, flash on or off, even the white balance setting you used).
But on iOS, the EXIF data is mostly hidden from you. But with EXIF-fi, you can not only read it but edit it.
This is Canon’s Instagram camera. That’s right – this little point and shoot is designed to work with your smartphone, connecting via Wi-Fi and even pre-processing some of your pictures for you.