Software

Adobe Max is a creative conference where artists from around the world the chance to interact with beta designs, see great speakers and learn from professionals and of course, see what new software and hardware advancements Adobe is adding to the fold. This year, Microsoft made a surprise appearance, and at the end of the keynote they gave everyone attending MAX a Surface Pro 3. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a free 2-in-1.

Adobe MAX is Adobe's major creative conference show that takes place annually in Los Angeles. We got a bit of a peek into what they would be announcing, which we shared with you already, but they held back all their information when it came to the desktop applications. Updating live, here is what they have revealed.

Announced this morning to kick off Adobe MAX, Adobe has released a series of applications for mobile devices that are designed to increase productivity, especially when on the move. They were able to show me some of these pieces of software during a briefing last week, and I must say, these look to have incredible potential for photographers, videographers and graphic designers.

Originally, the idea of a “creative cloud” was difficult for many to grapple when it was first announced. When I spoke to him about a year ago, Photoshop mastermind Jeff Chien understood how we felt: Adobe couldn’t just put the software in the cloud and actually expect it to be an improvement. It had to mean more. Since then, Adobe has been trying to get to the point where the public would be on the same page as them in this regard. They might be getting there with today’s announcements, which are expanding the connectivity of your accounts in CC in ways that finally make the CC model begin to make sense.

In the fight against online image theft there is a new player and they are coming into the arena with a bang! Pixsy is a new copyright infingement software that looks to help photographers around the globe tackle an issue that plagues the industry and for the most part goes unresolved. Fighting copyright infringement can be a long and costly ordeal and Pixsy hopes to be your one stop solution for fair compensation.

I'm always moving around, which can make doing work on the road an absolutely nightmare. Between travel for photography, workshops and the general need for some decompression, I find myself packing for travel much more often than I expect. After years of just shutting off while on the road, I've finally developed to ways to make traveling as a photographer easier.

Phase One has officially announced the release of Capture One Pro version 8 with a host of new features and a new purchasing model option. More than just minor enhancements, version 8 brings with it truly useful features that allow you to perform more of your work within it and not have to turn to Photoshop or additional plug-ins.

Along side the announcements of the PL mounted Cinema and Production Cameras, Blackmagic has also supplied some updates and new software for videographers everywhere, including an update to their DaVinci Resolve system - a multi track color correction system for videographers. Alongside the announcement of the update to DaVinci Resolve, is an all new software suite, entitled Blackmagic Videohub.

The state of California is simply unmatched when it comes to beautiful, picturesque imagery in the United States. As the birthplace and home of timelapse photographer Hal Bergman, it was his goal to compile as much of the visual wonders California has to offer in to a tight four-minutes time. His newest video, aptly titled “California,” combines four years of filming in to a marvelous treat for the eyes that any citizen of the world can appreciate. Beyond the video, Hal also speaks to Fstoppers about the behind-the-scenes work and equipment used in the making.

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.

The Nik Collection by Google carries some of the most powerful image editing applications for photographers. One of these applications, Color Efex Pro, has the ability to dramatically enhance the stories inside your landscape images. Out of the 55 filters available in Color Efex, there are five that I come back to using time and time again. In this article, I will show you what these essential filters are and explain how they make processing my images much less draining.

Blackmagic Design today released Camera v1.9.3, a firmware update that adds histogram, audio meters and media time remaining indicators to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Pocket Cinema Camera. These features were also recently added to the Production Camera.

Though there are other programs out there that say they can quickly cutout objects from the background via masks and leave you with a clean end result, I've tried a few of those programs and they just don't seem to cut it. The process to create these masks also seem very awkward. Now you can quickly create (pretty darn good) masks on your iPad using Photoshop Mix, a mobile offering from Adobe we told you about earlier this year.

IMGembed has been around for a while now, giving creatives a way to allow their images to be shared while governing what content users pay to use those images. One of my personal favorite companies as it applies the "Fair Trade" ethic to image use online, IMGembed is looking to grow as it asks for $100,000 over the next 28 days through a Kickstarter campaign.

DSTRUX launched a new iOS app of the same name yesterday that changes the way content owners control their images' usage across the web. A universal Snapchat of sorts, DSTRUX brings private and controled viewing of images to anyone with an Internet browser.

Scott Kelby over at KelbyOne recently shared this video showing you a quick and easy way to edit video in Photoshop CC. I personally tend to lean more on the still-photography side of things and am not entirely versed in video post production. This tutorial gives me and photographers / videographer like me a simple option and alternative to the under-equipped iMovie for quick video edits.

What's the best way to optimize photos so that I can deliver quality to my clients while reducing the file size for faster uploads into the cloud? This has been a question I’ve been thinking about for sometime. I have tinkered with settings in Lightroom to try and find the right export recipe but it wasn’t till another photographer told me about JpegMini that I finally felt I had the solution. Using image optimization technology they developed, JpegMini was able to deliver maximum quality at minimum file size. I ran it through some tests and here are my results.

Smartphones have undeniably taken over our lives in the past few years and most of us carry one everywhere we go. One of the most-used features on a modern phone is the camera, and it's being used all the time. In many cases, more than one person is taking photos or videos of what is going on and each person gets different angles and maybe a different part of the action. There has not been an easy way to edit it all together, but Disney Research announced the development of an automatic editing tool that takes the different videos from a scene and intelligently combines them.

Artists all over the world use Photoshop to retouch images and for graphic design. Because of that, Photoshop has become the #1 image editing software out there. We know Photoshop has put a lot more implementation into its 3D capabilities, but that's not what Photoshop is really for and it still has a long way to go. So it's great news that a group of Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and University of California, Berkeley have come out with software that allows for full 3D manipulation of objects in a photograph.

Last month, Apple announced that they were ceasing development of the beloved Apple Aperture. While the software is still usable and available for purchase and download, it has a timeline on how long it will work, as new camera profiles will no longer be supported. Fortunately, Adobe has made the transition a little easier, with a simple transition guide.

With the announcement of Aperture's retirement, many of Apple's software users are seeking a new home for their image libraries. One of the most obvious choices is Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom. But moving those images from Aperture to Lightroom can be a little tricky. A new app has made it out of Beta and hit the app store that may provide an easier solution.

Over the years, Capture One has evolved tremendously in its feature set, and has steadily become one of - or arguably the best - raw processor available. Despite all it's advantages and praises, many remain hesitant to adopt it, largely due to its seeming complexity and the intimidation factor associated with a truly professional tool. In this tutorial I'll be guiding you through the key aspects of Capture One version 12, and demonstrating that it's actually quite intuitive and straightforward to use.

As your photography archive grows, so does the need to handle and protect that data. What happens if your computer doesn’t boot, or an image file won’t open? What if your home or studio gets robbed, or worse, catches fire? What if your backup drive fails, or your laptop gets stolen? These are all questions I ask myself when planning my backup strategy.

Last week FreeFly Systems sent out a rather critical announcement stating the new firmware (version 3.08) had been released with a new Configuration App, and it was imperative to update your devices by August 1st, 2014 because..."If you do not upgrade by the specified date your MōVI could cease to function." What follows is how despite my best efforts, I still managed to brick it.

When it comes to raw converters and photo library managers, our choice of products has recently become more limited with the demise of Apple’s Aperture. My impression in the past was that one’s choice is largely based on features and ease of use with little difference in image quality between them. That opinion was quickly changed when I started digging into Phase One’s Capture One Pro 7.

There are few things we, as photographers, are more OCD about than tack-sharp focus. We invest so many of our hard-earned dollars into nice glass, painstakingly focus, then spend hours in post afterwards pulling our hair out when the eyes aren’t sharp. While of course sometimes OOF images are due to user error, small variations in the lens and camera can result in less-than-sharp images. These discrepancies in camera / lens combination can be dialed in to get perfectly sharp images more consistently. Enter FoCal, a [semi]automated focus calibration software.

Jeff Rojas is challenging you to see just how much retouching you can finish in 6 minutes. Dubbed the Dirty Edit Challenge, Jeff explains that sometimes you don't need to go overboard for certain clients. Maybe you're not getting paid enough, or maybe you have a ton of images that need retouching. In either situation, this is a great way to see what your strengths and weaknesses are in Photoshop.

Adobe has just announced the latest release notes for Camera Raw 8.6 which updates Photoshop CC and CS6. The release candidate adds bug fixes, lens profiles, and support for new cameras including the recently released Nikon D810, Panasonic LUMIX AG-GH4 and the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ1000. The release candidate also includes improvements for batch processing and color matching profiles for the Sony DSC-RX100 III, Sony A7S, and Sony Alpha SLT-A77 II.

Back in 2004 I was given the Nikon D100 digital camera for Christmas and I started making money with the camera within a few months. I fell into wedding photography and within 2 years I was making almost 100% of my income shooting them. In the last 10 years I never learned how to process a RAW file (effectively) or use Lightroom until last week.

We said it was coming, and now it's here: Nikon Capture NX-D is available for download completely free of charge. If you're a Nikon shooter just starting out and don't have anyting you love for RAW processing, it certainly doesn't hurt to give this a try.