Lightroom

Avalanche uses AI to convert from Aperture to Lightroom (and preserves your edits)

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Avalanche is a universal translator for photo apps.
Avalanche is a universal translator for photo apps.
Photo: CYME

Do you still have all your photos stuck in an Aperture library? Aperture won’t even launch in macOS Catalina, so you’re going to have to do something about that. The long-time answer has been to move to Adobe’s Lightroom, but then all your carefully crafted RAW edits are lost, or at least frozen into JPGs, never to be reversed.

Avalanche is a new Mac app that can convert your old Aperture library into a Lightroom library. What’s more, it uses machine learning to reverse-engineer your edits, and then does its best to redo those edits in Lightroom. It seems amazing. And because it doesn’t need the Aperture app installed on your Mac at all, you can use it even if you’ve already upgraded to Catalina.

Adobe Lightroom hits the Mac App Store and you can try it out for free

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Adobe-Lightroom-Mac
Try it for 7 days before signing up.
Photo: Adobe

Adobe has brought its professional photo editing software to the Mac App Store.

Lightroom for macOS is available now as a free download, and you can try it for seven days before deciding whether or not you want to cough up for it. This is the full version of Lightroom — just like you would get from Adobe.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud bundle gets a big price increase

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New pricing 1
No more $10 option!
Screenshot: Peta Pixel/Adobe

Adobe is apparently cranking up the prices for its Photography bundle of applications. But don’t worry: it’s only increasing by 100%.

Adobe’s website is now listing $19.99, rather than its previous $9.99, for the monthly subscription cost for Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom Classic. The company claims that it is testing out new pricing options.

Adobe Lightroom now supports Shortcuts

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I sent this image to Lightroom with a Shortcut.
I sent this image to Lightroom with a Shortcut.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Adobe’s Lightroom, perhaps the best photo-editing app on iOS, now supports shortcuts. That is, it supports one shortcut, letting you load photo into it from the camera roll, or any other place your find images in iOS.

Wouldn’t a simple Open In… option suffice? Perhaps, but by adding just one simple shortcut, Adobe has also added quite a few powerful possibilities.

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.

Castro, Hookpad 2, Ribn, and other awesome apps of the week

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Awesome Apps
'Appy weekend.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Did you know that Adobe’s Lightroom CC for iPhone has a fantastic camera built in? Or that you can now listen to any audio file in the Castro podcast app, just by dropping it into an iCloud folder? Or that you can make a catchy song in your iPad’s web browser using Hookpad 2? Well, now you do.

These are the awesome apps making waves this week.

Video glitches plague new MacBook Pro

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Apple's new MacBook Pros with Touch Bar should be hitting store shelves by the end of the week.
You might want to hold off on buying the new MacBook Pro.
Photo: Apple

The new MacBook Pro may not have been worth the long wait for many customers that preordered.

Early owners of Apple’s new machine are reportedly encountering problems with the GPU that cause the display to glitch so bad the MacBook Pro becomes unusable at times.

Adobe’s new Lightroom 6 is the best Aperture alternative

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Photo: Adobe

Today Adobe released Lightroom 6, cementing the photo editor as the best alternative to Apple’s now-extinct Aperture.

For Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, the new app is called Lightroom CC. While perhaps the biggest enhancement is related to speed and performance, there are also a few new features users should find helpful.

How to create and use custom presets in Lightroom Mobile

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How about using your own Lightroom develop presets on iOS? Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Wouldn't it be great to use your Lightroom develop presets on iOS? Here's how to make it happen. Photos: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

I can’t tell you how much I love Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile. But like an insatiable lover, I want more. Specifically, I want to add my own presets. LR Mobile ships with a selection of the desktop app’s image presets built in, but unlike the desktop version, you can’t save your own settings as a preset, nor can you add any made by third parties. Or can you?

In this tutorial, we’ll see how to add any preset to Lightroom Mobile, using any and all of the image-editing tools available in the Mac version and making them available on iOS.

Get a taste of Apple’s photo future with Lightroom Mobile

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The same photo, on all your machines.
The same photo, on all your machines: This is the future. Images: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

OS X will get a new Photos app next year that will keep all your pictures in sync across all your devices. It will work with the iOS 8 Photos apps on iPhone and iPad to match up your full-res photographs, your albums and even the edits you make to your pictures.

The changes are a ways off, but fret not -– if you use Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile, you can enjoy this fabulous cross-platform photo synchronization right now.

App Watch: Stargazing, light-leaking and book-recommending

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This Labor Day holiday we take things easy. Whether stargazing with Starwalk 2, taking a walk and remembering the hot spots along the way with Rego, getting a recommendation for a good read with Bookvibe, or adding so retro-style light leaks to our photos with a new set of Prolost Lightroom presets.

This Labor Day holiday we take things easy. Whether stargazing with Starwalk 2, taking a walk and remembering the hot spots along the way with Rego, getting a recommendation for a good read with Bookvibe, or adding so retro-style light leaks to our photos with a new set of Prolost Lightroom presets.


Adobe outlines how to switch to Lightroom once Apple kills Aperture

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Screen Shot 2014-08-04 at 4.48.53 PM

Now that Apple has ceased development of Aperture, it’s time to start looking for alternative photo management and editing solutions. The obvious choice is Lightroom, which Adobe has committed to continue work on heavily in the future.

Adobe is working on a migration tool to take all of your Aperture data and bring it to Lightroom, but until then, the company has outlined how to make the switch on your own.

Don’t wait for Handoff — these 5 apps sync seamlessly today

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iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.

But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.

Picturelife 3 should be your new super-awesome online photo library

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The iPhone version is one of the best photo apps I've used. Screenshots Picturelife.
The iPhone version of Picturelife is one of the best photo apps I've used. Screenshot: Picturelife

Remember Picturelife? It was one of our top picks for online photo storage when Everpix bit it, and now it has been upgraded to version 3.0. The highlights are a new $15 per month unlimited plan, which is really truly unlimited and can be shared with up to three other family members, plus an all-new, redesigned iOS app.

Things in the online photo world are definitely heating up again. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will bring exciting new features for photographers and a recent update to Adobe Creative Cloud gives shutterbugs even more options for editing and storage.

But Picturelife has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve to make it a worthy competitor to the big guns. Here’s why it deserves a shot at becoming your new super-awesome online photo library.

Picture-perfect strategy: Why killing Aperture means Apple will rule the cloud

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An aperture. Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Apple and Adobe make major moves to change the way we manage our photographs. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Ubiquitous cloud storage and editing solutions for your photos are like buses: You wait ages for one, and then two come along at once.

Both Apple and Adobe are going all-in on allowing you to view and edit your photos on any device. Adobe has done this by bringing its Lightroom desktop app to mobile. Apple is doing it by ditching iPhoto and Aperture and starting again with the upcoming Photos app for iOS.

While the approaches are different, they both look rad. And they’ll drive a fundamental shift in the way we manage our photos.

Adobe Creative Cloud just got truly awesome (with 1 tiny problem)

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I was all set to pull the trigger on Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives subscribers access to Lightroom and Photoshop as well as Lightroom Mobile for the iPad and iPhone.

After all, it’s just $10 per month, right? (or €12.29/$16.71 in the EU). That’s about what I spend on Rdio, or Dropbox, and I get Lightroom on my frickin’ camera.

But I decided to hold off and see if one huge doozy of a design problem is fixed before my 30-day trial of the service finishes up. This will also give me time to check out the amazing new Adobe Photoshop Mix, which is what Photoshop for iPad should have been all along.

And the little problem that could be a deal-breaker? You’re gonna love it…

Lightroom For The iPad Is Straight Up Amazing

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Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).

And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.

So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.

This Magic Script Recovers Your Lost Lightroom Photos

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Here’s a slightly obscure tip that’s worth sharing becasue it could literally save you from a lost photo library. If you use Lightroom, Adobe has a “secret” script you can download that extracts the JPG images from your previews. Why would you want to do this? Say you lose the hard drive with all your original RAW photos on it, or you just get drunk one night and wake up in the morning to find you deleted your Lightroom folder.

This script will rescue you.