Are you using Instagram Stories in your marketing? Are you wondering how photographers are using Stories? With new features like tagging and Boomerang being added this week as well as the possibility of links being added in the near future, Instagram Stories is quickly becoming a great tool for marketing that every photographer should take advantage of. Here is a list of ways you can start using Stories for your business today.

Instagram has been around for a few years now and it comes with no surprise people still want to find new and interesting ways to manipulate and push the limits of how it all works. Though the Instagram algorithm has its secret formula no one can seem to solve they still find ways to get around that, this time it's for fun. Thanks to a handful of advertising specialists and social media experts we now have Likecreeper!

The rollout begins today, so you'll see the updates soon if you haven't already. Adobe is calling this a major set of updates, and I'll highlight the ones that apply to photographers.

August is the time for photographing the annual Perseid meteor shower. It is one of the most spectacular ones, and definitely worth photographing. If you want to get the best pictures, some preparations have to be made.

Last week, Adobe released Lightroom CC Version 4.1.1 for iOS. While such "dot releases" are usually used as maintenance updates with bug fixes, performance improvements, and updated raw libraries, Lightroom CC Version 4.1.1 adds welcomed support for Apple Shortcuts.

There is obviously no shortage of camera apps out there in the world but, every once in a while something new hits the market that actually seems a bit useful. While not something I would recommend to the casual, or even semi-pro photographer the Mark II Artist's Viewfinder actually looks very helpful to directors, and photographers that need to do a lot of scouting and planning for their shoots.

Coolors is a fantastic new app that I stumbled across the other day. It is an incredibly easy and intuitive way to generate a beautiful 5 color palette for any situation. Primarily developed for designers it has instant appeal to us photographers. We deal with colors in most of our work and knowing how to match and complement effectively can make or break the images we create.

The FTC seems to be continuing its watchful eye on sponsored posts via social media as influencers and celebrities get paid to post about their favorite brands. So beware if you are one that is taking products or collaborating with a brand as an ambassador, or simply as a partner. As photographers, many of us bring on relationships with companies and camera brands without knowing the rules fully. Not disclosing these partnerships can result in fines from the FTC.

Photographers and digital artists alike have been using image editing software like Photoshop to enhance their work for years. There are several ways to add creative enhancements and filters to your work within Photoshop, but there are ways to add them without using the program or even in conjunction via other software and plugins. Auto FX Software has been around for more than 20 years with their customized creative photo software solutions which work as a stand-alone program or as a plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom. Right now you can get two of their modules for FREE along with support from Auto FX Software.

Luminar software from Skylum has had a tremendous impact with many photo editors, bringing a lot of Photoshop and Lightroom-esque features along with some one-of-a-kind capabilities like one-click sky replacement and AI-based features for landscape and portrait photographers.

Every year's Adobe MAX conference marks the an obvious time to expect updates throughout Adobe's product lineup. So what's different this time? Mobile. Adobe has the monopoly in the area of creative applications for media editing, but for the first time in a while, it feels like they're competing with some unknown entity. This year's updates bring so many new features across the widest range of Adobe products ever that there's no doubt they're serious about their making customers happy with a huge concentration on mobile.

With Facebook’s reach going down hill, we’re all looking for something that will allow us to get in touch with as many people as possible and Instagram is that link. If you need persuading, follow up this article with Dave Geffin’s post about how to fully harness the app. Once you’re convinced, here are some things you can do to make sure your followers are getting the most bang for their buck and you're showing off your best work.

You might have heard of Stu Maschwitz before, possibly from his work on these Red Giant video projects, or perhaps the Plastic Bullet app he made a few years ago. His latest creation is a custom set of presets that integrate with Lightroom, and gives the user a set of vintage photo looks to choose from.

If you’ve been working with video in the last few years and are looking to take your post-production to the next level, color grading absolutely needs to be something you consider incorporating into your workflow. DaVinci Resolve is not only a powerful software for doing this, but it's base version is actually free for anyone.

The other morning I posted an unnecessarily snarky tweet about VERO and a breach of my copyright. That afternoon, I found myself on an hour-long Zoom call with founder CEO Ayman Hariri after he got in touch to discuss what VERO can do to improve.

Kirk Mastin and Mastin Labs are the creators of some of the better known (and more highly regarded) sets of develop presets for digital images to emulate the look of film. Kirk has been working on a mobile app to achieve similar results on the go for a while now, and that app has finally been released. Meet Filmborn.

Photographers of Instagram, rejoice! We can now upload content directly from our computers. Check out how to add photos right from your desktop with this step-by-step guide.

Frame.io, a leader in building software for collaboration, client review and sign-off, and cloud-based workflows in moving image productions, is being acquired by Adobe for $1.275 billion. Why is this such a big deal?

Photographers today are the first generation of image makers who are entering an industry completely dominated by social media. Over the course of the last decade, social media has utterly surpassed virtually all other forms of marketing and has quickly become a dominating factor in lives of a huge part of the population, especially photographers. Social media use, however, suffers from some pretty severe implications that can have a limiting factor on the quality of work a photographer creates.

While some photographers stay close to home, others travel quite regularly. I’ve been traveling my entire life for one reason or another. And whether it was for a newspaper job I was essentially commuting to (living four days in Southern California and three days in Northern California every week) or a short trip on a personal photographic exploration, I quickly learned that it’s great to have some creature comforts to keep you company along the ride once whatever glamour of traveling that’s left these days fades away.

It's nice to see Skylum offer the powerful Luminar tools for iOS and a version that runs natively on Apple's new Vision Pro headset.

Happy New iPhone Day! Today, that small startup in Cupertino known as "Apple" released their latest and greatest iPhones, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But with all the hype and cool new features, we were mostly concerned with the camera and boy, did they deliver.

Instragram is a great social media platform for photographers. Being primarily focused on images, the popular platform allows for talented photographers to develop a feed that provides their followers a sense of who they are and what they do. So what happens when who you are stays the same, but what you do changes?

It all started when I lost my camera. I needed a smartphone with a decent camera for just such occasions. So why on earth aren't there any good camera apps on Android?

You heard right, an entire year of Adobe CC Photography Plan for free with the purchase of an Intuos tablet. This deal is only good until September 17, so you might want to act fast before the weekend hits. Though it might not seem like a deep discount, for those photographers out there that find retouching and fine tuning imagery with a physical pen the way to go, this might be perfect for them so don't wait and miss out on a solid deal.

Having only been shooting for a few years, it's taken me a bit longer to understand things like pricing, licensing, and even a simple model release form. Learning about these things early on could have started me on the right track to better habits in the future. Recently the mobile stock image site Snapwire came out with a simple way to solve one of those issues — the model release form — with their own app called Releases. The best part: it's free.

DxO PhotoLab is well regarded as one of the finest raw editors available for pro and semi-pro photographers. Although certainly not as well known as the Adobe products like Photoshop and Lightroom, it offers very powerful tools that have gotten a lot of attention.

It's no secret that most businesses despise Facebook's current model, which has destroyed organic reach in favor of the "boosted" post. Instagram, on the other hand, has never employed such a process. That may be about to change, though.

I don't much like being wrong, but it happens and by degrees. Some years ago, I would scoff and tut at adverts and posts purporting to have found a brilliant new plugin for Photoshop, writing them off instantly as a waste of money. But are they?

500px just introduced their RAW app. It uses the new iPhone raw image capabilities to make editing on the go easier and as intuitive as possible. The app gives you the capability to export to your social networks as well as your 500px profile, where you can sell the images and make 60% of the profit. It also has an Assignment section, which I believe will be used to give photographers paid projects depending on their location. Is editing raw images on mobile devices the future of post-production? By the looks of what Lightroom has done with their mobile apps in which you can edit your raw images by using a smaller proxy file, it might be the way the industry is moving.

I came across a web app for scheduling appointments that was a complete game changer for my business! It's by far my favorite productivity tool. Every wedding photographer needs to check this out. It could be the missing link you need in your business to book more wedding photography clients. In my first week I was able to arrange seven meetings and book two clients. Wow! This changes everything.

Obsura 2 has been out for a while, but somehow I missed it. Now that I've connected to this photo app I'm happy to sing its praises.

Supermodel Coco Rocha and photographer Steven Sebring have teamed up to release an interactive book, The Study Of Pose, chronicling over 1000 poses captured from 100 different angles in an experimental 360 degree rig. It is an ambitious project that has resulted in a massive, and certainly quite heavy, book with over 2000 pages.

Branching off from their web-based portfolio service, Format has launched a free iPad app named Kredo. The app allows users to add and organize their images into portfolios, exhibit portfolios to clients in a sleek-looking presentation, publish their work to the Kredo Discover network, or share their portfolios with anyone else on any device with optional password protection. While up against the trusty tactile printed portfolio and other digital portfolio services, the unique features and dark, minimalist layout may be something worth testing out.

We've got a new and improved version of DxO PhotoLab available today, and version 5 will be of interest to advanced photographers and serious amateurs.

Earlier this week, the European Parliament voted to make huge changes to copyright legislation. The new directive could mean that Instagram will finally have to address the vast amount of freebooted content that proliferates on its platform.

Smartphones are incredibly powerful tools, and they offer a ton of apps and features that make them one of the most useful things a photographer can carry with them. With the huge number of apps out there, it can be tricky to know which is right for you and your work. This fantastic video tutorial features an experienced photographer walking you through some of the best options.

The video showcases and discusses the latest desktop computers and what features you can get with regards to screens and processor capabilities in the category. I've used a laptop for most of my photography and videography career. The idea of not being able to take the machine with me when I need to go has been my reason for not getting a desktop machine, and the work I do requires me to get up and go when a job arises.

Have you ever had trouble finding a model, make up artist, or stylist to work with? Maybe the traditional methods of networking aren't working for you, or you are new to the area. Pro Photo Shoot is a new IOS app designed to help photographers find other industry professionals to collaborate with.

Skylum has kept reviewers well stocked with pre-release versions of Luminar Neo, and I've reported on the results. Nowm we've got the release version, although it is still not complete, which I'll detail below. Here's our review.

I recently upgraded my Canon 5D Mark III to a 5D Mark IV, and a new feature that was added to the camera line, that I thought I would have no use for whatsoever, was WiFi. I knew it was going to be in the camera beforehand, but I really did believe I would have no use for it at all, Now after using it for two months, I am hooked. Being able to quickly and easily transfer photos to my cell phone via the built-in WiFi has been really incredible for me, and now not a day goes by that I do not use it. So I would just like to just walk you through briefly how simple it is to set up and use.

Photographers have gear, and gear needs to be packed without being forgotten. If you’re like us, you obsess about systems that will make sure you have everything you need to create the work you want. Packaroo is an app we have been using to streamline this process.

A few weeks ago, I beat Lee Morris in our Puerto Rico Landscape Challenge. With that victory, many of our readers said my edit in Photoshop was simply too over the top. Today, I try to re-edit my photo to see if I can create something a bit more realistic.

If you've ever wasted a good sleep because your alarm was set before dawn, but it turned out the weather wasn't going to produce anything worth photographing, this new app may be for you. Here's my review of WeatherScout for iOS.

Sharing your work on social media, you may come across a few people who ask "what are your camera settings for this shot" or something similar. There are even a few groups on Facebook that have this as a requirement to post your work. There are a few different ways you can do this, but here's an app that makes it easy.

First announced back in September, Pixelmator Pro is an upcoming photo editing app for Mac that introduces an improved workflow and utilizes macOS High Sierra’s Core ML (machine learning) framework and Metal 2. Today in a new blog post, the release date and pricing has been revealed.

For my inaugural post on Fstoppers, I want to run down of a few of the apps that my studio manager and I use almost daily to help manage the studio and keep things running smoothly. Many of these you’ve probably heard of, others may be new to you. The list is actually endless, but I’ve narrowed it down to these nine to get us started:

Having just started in photography two years ago I have a strong passion for creatives willing to share their passion and tips with the community. Fstoppers included, its one of the reasons I found all the information I needed with little to no cost starting out. Skillshare is launching an exciting series of classes highlighting how some of the best photographers in the world do what they do best, take incredible photos and share them with the world.