News in brief: Super-secret iPhone panorama function

So if you’ve an iPhone, and if you’re running iOS 5, and if it’s jailbroken, (which is quite a few ifs, admittedly) there is, apparently, a panoramic camera feature secreted away in the deep, dark depths of its files. According to Conrad Kramer – the guy who stumbled upon it – if you want to take advantage, you need to find the ‘EnableFirebreak’ setting in the iOS preferences file, and flip it to ‘Yes’. And lo! You will have the ability to construct grand and sweeping panoramas with your iPhone, which is of course every iPhone owners every desire.

(Headsup to Engadget)

What is this? - In our NewsFlash section, we share interesting tidbits of news. Think of it as our extended twitter feed: When we find something that get our little hearts racing, we'll share it with you right here! Loving it? Great, we've got lots more News Flash articles - and, of course, we're still on Twitter as well, for even shorter news tidbits.

The pictures go round with Adobe Carousel

I do love the imagery of the name Adobe’s given its latest photo editing and synching software, Carousel: your photo gets on at one point and gets off at another.

How does it work? There’s a set of apps for your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and your Mac OS (sorry Windows users, you’ll have to wait until sometime in the first half of 2012). You download them across all your devices (provided that they’re compatible, of course: iPhone 3GS and above, iPod Touch 4G, Mac OS X Lion). Then you import your photo library into Adobe Carousel and take new photos using Adobe Carousel on your iPad or iPhone.

Through the magic of the cloud, all those photos will be accessible automatically on any of your Carousel-carrying devices. From then, any edits, deletions or additions to the library that you make on one device will be automatically updated on all the devices linked with your account.

No Flash involved, no manual synching required, and version control for everyone. Oh, and you don’t have to worry about clogging up your iPad with photos, either.

As for the editing software in Carousel, it’s based on Lightroom. It uses multi-touch gestures, and allows you to adjust exposure, shadows, highlights, white balance, vibrance, clarity, and contrast. There are also over 12 ‘looks’, which are basically presets, that allow you to mess around with the look (now there’s a surprise) of your photos.

Unfortunately, none of this comes cheap. The introductory price for Carousel is £39.99 (US $59.99) for a year, or £3.99 (US $5.99) for a month’s subscription. You can renew at that price for two years. Miss the boat, which sails on 31 January 2012, and you’ll be paying £69.99 for a year or £6.99 for a month. Sure, you can install it on as many (Apple) devices as you own, but is synching across them worth that much? I’m not convinced it would be for me.

Have a poke around here and let me know what you think.

A Steadicam for your iPhone

So apparently there are people out there who take videos with iPhone seriously enough that they are willing to part with £170 (US$280 / EUR190) in order to ensure that the shaky-cam quality is removed, and replaced with a helping measure of steadicam goodness.

As far as I can tell, this is basically a heavy thing in which you can mount your iPhone, which adds enough inertia to your movements so it filters out some of the shakies.

I'm sure it works well - after all, the light weight of the iPhone is probably one of the chief reasons why you get shaky camera footage - but I can't help but ask myself WHY? 

Anyway, if you want to open yourself to ridicule from yours truly, you can get one of these gadgets on Firebox.com. But be warned: If I spot you on the street with one of these, I will make fun of you.

News in brief: Cute Slideshow - now with video!

It’s awesome when developers listen to your suggestions! A while back I had look at Cute Slideshow, a simple-to-use iPhone app that allowed me to turn my pictures into a slideshow, insert text, and even set it to music. I loved the idea, but it had one major flaw: the slideshows were stuck there in my phone (unless I had a cable to watch them on a monitor, which I probably did… somewhere… ). What it really needed was an export function.

Lo-and-behold, the latest update to Cute Slideshow includes an export function compatible with the iPhone 4 and fourth generation iPod Touches. All for £1.79 (US$2.99) from the App Store. Super stuff!

What is this? - In our NewsFlash section, we share interesting tidbits of news. Think of it as our extended twitter feed: When we find something that get our little hearts racing, we'll share it with you right here! Loving it? Great, we've got lots more News Flash articles - and, of course, we're still on Twitter as well, for even shorter news tidbits.

Adobe Photoshop Express 2.0 is go

Hot on the heels of Photoshop Express 1.5, which came out at the end of January, version 2.0 of Adobe’s on-the-move photo editing suite for iPhones, or anything running iOS 4.2, really, is available for download. That bit’s free, but there’s also a not-free Camera Pack that you buy for £2.39. Of course, it’s the not-free bit that you’ll be wanting.

So now you can have a noise reduction feature, called, rather originally Reduce Noise; you can self-time pictures at three or 10 second intervals; and there’s the Auto Review function that allows you to decide quickly if you want to keep your picture.

Version 2.0 will work provided that you’re running iOS 4.2 on your Apple-branded mobile communication device; but you need an iPhone 3Gs or more exciting, a third or fourth generation iPod Touch, or either of the iPads for the Camera Pack to work. Oh, and Photoshop Express can’t currently support the camera on the iPad 2. Just by the way. Very useful.

Photoshop Express 2.0 can be downloaded from the iTunes store, naturally.

Sending postcards from your iPhone with ShootIt

Using your own photos as postcards? Genius! Shame ShootIt's service doesn't work...

There are a few providers who offer the ability of sending postcards directly from your Apple iPhone (or the web) when you're out and about. I decided to give ShootIt a shot (forgive the pun), because their app seemed particularly sleek, and because I'm currently travelling a lot; seemed to make a lot of sense to trust the web to get my cards sent quickly, rather than relying on the local postal system.

ShootIt (shootit.com) have a clever business model: You upload an image via the iPhone app or their website, write your message, and click 'send'. They take care of the rest, including the printing of the postcard, and, as they say on their website, "shoot it! mails postcards First-class the next business day", which means "they will be produced overnight and delivered across Western Europe in just a few days".

Tragedy strikes

Whilst I was travelling, my family suffered a minor tragedy - my grandmother, who turned 90 last year, got ill, and it didn't look as if she would be able to pull through. My father asked me if I would please send a few postcards from my travels, as grandma - who usually was very active - would be locked to her chair and/or bed for the foreseeable future (in retrospect; for the rest of her life).

Anyway, I figured that the best way to start sending a lot of cards would be to leverage ShootIt: By taking photos and sending postcards frequently, they would arrive much, much faster than sending them by snail mail, right? So there I went, sending a total of 5 post-cards between February 1st and 18th.

Then, an inevitable, yet sad sad thing happened; on the 21th of February, my grandmother passed away. I called my parents, and asked them if they could please place my postcards on her coffin during the funeral. "Postcards?", my dad asked me. "What postcards?". It turned out that by the 21st of February, not a single one of the postcards I sent via ShootIt had arrived. Luckily a postcard I sent in the regular (notoriously unreliable) vietnamese postal system around the 4th of February, arrived just in time for the funeral, and I was able to 'be present' via a postcard after all.

"The postcards were all addressed perfectly", I thought, "Why the hell weren't they delivered?". Then, Daniela (who edits the Small Aperture site) e-mailed me to thank me for her ShootIt postcard... on the 11th of March. It was sent on the 4th of February - so the postcard took a mind-numbingly month-and-a-week to arrive to the UK.

As for what happened to the postcards sent to my grandmother in the Netherlands? Who knows - as far as I know, they're still scurrying their way across the atlantic.

ShootIt? More like 'shove it'.

It's such a cursed shame; post-cards sent from your iPhone (or computer) is cost-effective, and ought to be bloody fast. But when it ain't (and especially since none of the messages I wrote to my grandmother arrived before she passed away), it's useless.

If anyone knows of a service who does what they promise, it may be worth a shot - but I'd give ShootIt a miss, if I were you.

Update #1

I just received an e-mail from my mother, who tells me that 5 postcards arrived all at the same time on the 17th of March. She tells me the quality is great, but notes that " This is sort of like it used to be many years ago: You buy the postcards in the country where you are on holiday, forget to post them, and then send them when you get back home, with your normal stamps. Although that would probably have been faster than using the online service".

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Instagram hits 2 million users

Late last summer, we wrote about what we considered to be the 10 best iPhone apps for photography. Instagram didn’t feature on that list, for one very good reason. It hadn’t yet seen the light of day. Doubtless it was a bit more than a twinkle in its developers’ eyes, but the general public had yet to welcome its picture-sharing prowess onto their operating systems with open arms. Now they’ve had the chance, there’s no stopping them: it took three months to reach 1 million users; and six weeks (yes six weeks) after that, it has a decent-sized city of users at 2 million.

When you consider that Instagram is available only on iOS – not Android, not Blackberry, not anything else – that’s, well, astonishing. So now the question is, will they be releasing an Android-or-anything-else version?

PicPlz has been making in-roads into the Android instant-photo-sharing market. Are we set for a explosive battle for dominance, or a growling detente with a division of the spoils?

(Headsup to TechCrunch.)

iPhone: now for movies

We’ve seen the fashion shoot on the iPhone and the short film shot on a Nokia N8 mobile phone. It wasn’t going to be long until there was a film made on an iPhone, was it? It’s being released today. It’s called Paranmanjang, which translates literally as Ups and Downs but seems to be going under the English-language title of Night Fishing, and was made by Park Chan-wook. This dude has won prizes at Cannes, so it’s hardly a tin-pot production, either.

iPhone’s South Korean distributor shelled out $130,000 to fund the project, a 30 minute film that tells the story of a fisherman who trawls up the body of a woman. Park used eight iPhone 4s to film it, and it’s mostly in black and white. I get the feeling its moody and menacing, then.

I’d love to give you a full review, but it has been released in Seoul, and the Small Aperture travel budget doesn’t extend quite that far this year. But it just goes to show what you can do with an iPhone. As Park told the Los Angeles Times, ‘Find a location. You don’t even need sophisticated lighting. Just go out and make movies.’

Nokia's film shot on a phone

It was only a matter of time. After a professional fashion shoot done using an iPhone and Sony announcing that it has a 16 megapixel sensor ready to go in its camera phones, a film shot on a mobile phone had to be next. Nokia has taken that honour.

It’s called The Commuter and it has been filmed in its entirety using Nokia’s brand spanking new N8. And to prove just how serious they were about their camera technology (it’s a 12 megapixel number with a Carl Zeiss lens and a Xenon flash), they recruited Dev Patel, Pamela Anderson, Ed Westwick, and Charles Dance to the cause. Oh, and it has been directed by an up-and-coming groovy duo, the McHenry brothers.

There’s a behind-the-scenes video of the video so you can see how they got on, too:

I’m just wondering how good the phone bit of this phone is…

The Nokia N8 is available from Nokia from 15 October. The film premieres towards the end of the month.

Apple ventures into the bright new world of HDR

Well whaddya know, the first topic that Steve Jobs discussed at Apple’s Special Event yesterday, when it came to the iPhone, was HDR photos. With the release of Apple’s iOS update (iOS 4.1) next week comes a new feature for the iPhone camera: HDR.

When you activate the phone’s camera, you’ll see a button on the top of the screen that says ‘HDR’. If you select this feature, the camera will take a normal ‘raw’ photo as well as an HDR image. Both will be saved to the iPhone’s camera roll.

According to Jobs, the camera will take three exposures in rapid succession: one underexposed, one exposed properly, and one overexposed. Some ‘complex algorithms’ (got to love that phrase) will then merge the three images together, creating one HDR photo. However, it’s more likely that the iPhone software automatically processes two extra images from the original rather than actually taking three separate photographs.

The slow speed of the phone’s shutter release would cause all sorts of camera shake problems, therefore making ‘real’ HDR photos difficult to achieve. While this may disappoint true HDR enthusiasts, the new native feature is a big step forward for smartphone photography and should help propel HDR photography into the global mainstream.

HDR: it’s where all the cool kids seem to be playing.

Friday 2 September 2010, Update: Seems as if it’ll only be available for iPhone 4. Oh Apple, why do you taunt 3G and 3GS users so?

10 of the best: iPhone apps

Did you know that since Apple launched the iPhone, over 200,000 apps of all kinds have been released? Just a few, then. From navigation to games, sports scores to language lessons, there aren’t many applications you can’t find in the AppStore.

However, photography apps have taken the market by storm and there are currently over 2,700 available for iPhoneographers across the globe. David here has installed fifteen of them. With so many to choose from, finding the right apps can get a little tricky. Let us save you some time and with David Smith’s help, show you a few of the best ones we’ve come across.

Photo-editing and camera apps

Hipstamatic

£1.19/$1.99

Hipstamatic is one of the better toy camera apps available in the AppStore. The developers really tried to make this app feel like you are holding a camera in your hands instead of a phone. The design is sleek with a simple but unique UI, complete with virtual shutter and flash buttons. Users are also given the option to swap virtual lenses, films, and flashes to provide numerous possible combinations, giving Hipstamatic exposures a very distinct look.

There are, though, some downsides. First of all, you can’t edit photos that are already in your camera roll. Second, the small virtual viewfinder makes it difficult to know exactly what’s fitting into the frame of your shot.

Lo-Mob

£1.19/$1.99

A solid film simulation and experimentation app, Lo-Mob has 39 preset ‘filters’ to choose from. While not necessarily the most options to play with, the filters that are provided are very clean and high quality. Lo-Mob is a good app to have when you don’t want to waste too much time fumbling through countless filters and films to edit your shot.

Take a photo (or import one from your camera roll), select one of the preset filters, save the new photo back to your camera roll, and you’re off and running.

Film Lab

£0.59/$0.99

Just as the name might suggest, this app’s emphasis is on film simulation. Film Lab provides users with 13 popular film brands, such as Kodak and Ilford, along with several types of film under each make. A simple toolbox allows you to adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, hue, and saturation through the use of sliders.

Best Camera

£1.79/$2.99

Best Camera may not have the greatest variety of effects and filters to apply to your photos, but where the app shines is through its online sharing community. Like most photo apps, users are able to share their work via Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, but Best Camera brings their app to a new level by displaying a live-stream of images on their website, TheBestCamera.com.

Users can not only create an online portfolio, but can also browse and rate other photos taken with the app, as well as see what effects were used to create those photos. The talent seen in Best Camera’s live-stream is brilliant, and if you don’t want to pay the sticky price for the app, at least check out the most popular uploaded images here.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Free!

The world’s most popular photo-editing software has arrived in mobile form. While the original Photoshop app was released some time ago, a completely upgraded version hit the AppStore earlier this month. PS Express gives users a strong selection of editing features to choose from, including crops, color control, contrast, sharpening, borders, and several preset effects. Each adjustment can be made with the use of sliders, a familiar feature to all Photoshop users. An all-around solid app on its own, and the price tag makes it a must-have for all iPhoneographers.

Speciality photography apps

Flickr

Free!

For photographers, one of the greatest things about smartphones is the ability to whip out your portfolio in seconds, right there in the palm of your hand. The Flickr app for iPhone makes this simple to do. Users can browse their own photostreams and view recent activity on their accounts, as well as search for photos within the entire Flickr community. It’s a free app and if you have a Flickr account, there’s no reason to not have it on your iPhone.

Project 365

Free or £0.59/$0.99 for Pro version

The idea of this app is simple: “Take a picture every day of the year, become a better photographer and never forget a day in your life.” Project 365 allows users to attach one image to each day of the year, giving them a colorful calendar of photos to look at. Not only is it good practice for photographers, but it’s also fun to go back and look at the pictures you took six months ago that you’ve already forgotten about.

iTimeLapse Pro

£1.79/$2.99

I’ve always been fascinated with time lapse photography, so when I saw this one in the AppStore, I had to get it. I have to admit that I was a bit sceptical about how well it would work. But it surprisingly worked very smoothly and did exactly what it said it would.

Granted, you’ll need some sort of support method to keep your iPhone perfectly still, as well as a good hour or longer to kill. You’ll also want to make sure you disable the auto-lock feature as it seemed to kill the app when my phone went into sleep mode. Phone calls, text messages, and battery warnings will also stop the time lapse process, so putting your phone in ‘airport mode’ is a must. Minus the few inconveniences, this app makes for a fun project on a boring Sunday afternoon.

Just for fun

FatBooth

£0.59/$0.99

My sister showed me this app a while back by sending me a picture of what looked like me after eating a dozen of these.

While this may not be the most useful photo-editing app out there, it’s still fun to see pictures of your friends weighing 300 pounds and then embarrass them by posting the pics on their Facebook walls. And if you don’t have any friends, you can always spend a few enjoyable minutes fattening up George Clooney a little.

App of the Dead

£1.19/$1.99

If you’re anything like me, you enjoy a nice cappuccino at your neighborhood cafe, taking your two-year old nephew to the zoo, summer trips to the beach, and watching mindless flesh-eating zombies tear the limbs off unaware bystanders during an end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse.

App of the Dead was created in part to help promote famous zombie-flick director George A. Romero’s latest film, Survival of the Dead. Like FatBooth, this app essentially alters a portrait of you and your friends, but instead of adding a hundred pounds to your face, this one adds soulless eyes and rotting flesh, turning you into one of the walking dead. The effects are pretty decent and although a bit pricey for such a one-dimensional app, it’s quite fun for any of you flesh-eater fans out there.

And finally

There is almost an app out there for anything you want. If you’ve come across one that has revolutionised your life, or perhaps gives you a good giggle, please let us know!

DIY Toy camera presets for Lightroom

Given the popularity of the Holga, Lomo, and the other toy cameras out there, I suppose it was only a question of time before some enterprising soul would release Hipstamatic, the app which lets you take cool, toy-camera like photos on your iPhone.

There’s something about that app which jars quite viciously with me, however: Unlike the ‘real’ toy cameras, this app doesn’t actually alter the iPhone camera at all. And despite getting pretty awesome results (if you like that style of photography, of course), it’s all post-processing.

That got me thinking… It has to be possible to make my own post-processing presets for Lightroom, to turn my carefully lit, exquisitely sharp and ridiculously high-resolution camera RAW images into blurry, colourful, vastly attractive garbage. So I created a couple of presets for Lightroom 3 – and I’ll walk you through the thinking behind one of them and I’ll show you how to make your own. How’s that for a double whammy of awesome?  

Toy cameras tend to get their special look by being terrible cameras. Their light meters will be off by a quarter country mile (so we need to either over- or under-expose the images for a start). They are likely to have light leaks (so we ought to add streaks to the picture), and the hip and cool crowd is fond of cross-processing the film, so we need to make a couple of changes to the way the colours are being displayed.

Exposure and sharpness

So, I’m going to start messing about with the exposure in this photo. I’m being conservative by only over-exposing it by 0.75, but you can always change this later, if a photo suits a bigger mis-exposure. Next, I’m ramping up the blacks a little bit to get a feel of a smidge of extra contrast, and I’m whacking the contrast and brightness right up. Yes, this makes your photo look wrong. And no, there’s nothing wrong with that!

Finally on this screen, the clarity goes down a lot. This adds quite an appealing blur to the image, which is typical for the kind of Polaroid effect I’m going for here.

Colours

It’s surprisingly difficult to get a realistic cross-processing look, but since I’m messing about with a polaroid-alike photo here, I’m on safer ground: adding some highlight and shadow toning gives that deliciously ‘not quite right’ polaroid look. To find the settings that work, keep experimenting – it’s not always easy to come up with the look you want.

Crop

Set the crop tool to 1:1 (that’s square), and crop your image. Then, it’s time for a spot of Vignetting – these are meant to be toy cameras after all…

Light leaks

The light leak effects are typical for toy cameras - and my little preset wouldn't be complete without 'em!

To get the proper feel of a toy camera, you’re going to have to try to add some light leaks. This is pretty easy, actually: Simply add a Graduated Filter across your image, with some interesting characteristics.

Personally, I decided to just brighten and then re-darken the image. I created one thin graduated filter with the settings shown below … And then another one just underneath it which had the opposite settings (approximately – it’s not as if toy cameras are an exact science). This creates quite a realistic bar of light leakage across your image.

Of course, light leaks are meant to be unpredictable and a bit random, but the great advantage of doing them in Lightroom is that you can take some of the guesswork out of them. Use the opportunity to move the light leaks around, and highlight the bits of the photo you would like – or hide the bits of the photo you’re not too fond of. There are no rules – make your own!

Finally, I saved all the above settings to a preset called “broken Polaroid”, and now I can go ahead and drastically reduce the quality (and improve the interestingness) of my photos!

Okay, then, let’s see some examples

A couple of guys on a motorcycle in India were a prime candidate for toy camera tasticness

This was the image I used when I first created the Lightroom preset, and I think it works quite well

A street photo from Oslo, Norway, took on a completely different flavour with my new toy camera filters

Enough with the megapixels already

I’m all for camera phones – for a photography nut such as myself, there’s nothing quite as awesome as always having a camera in my pocket – but things are getting a little bit silly now. Earlier this month, Sony Ericsson showed off a prototype of a 12 megapixel camera phone, and apparently the Swedes are planning to have 20 mpx crammed into phones in time for the 2012 olympic games.

So why am I being whiney? Well, just like horsepower isn’t everything on a car (a Mazda MX-5 would trash a 1000 horsepower drag racing car on a twisty race track) and clock frequency isn’t everything on computer processors (a 2 Ghz current-generation processor wipes the floor with a 4Ghz Pentium 4), Megapixels by themselves mean absolutely nothing.  

The first prosumer-grade dSLR – the Canon EOS D30 – only has 3.1 megapixels, but the photos it was capable of taking is a world of difference from even the best current camera phones.

“Three megapixels”, I hear you cry, “That is laughable in a world where you are buried in a deluge of 5- and 6 megapixel chattersticks the second you step into a Carphone For You!”. And you’d be right. Nonetheless, the fact that the D30 takes high-quality glass means that the photos it delivers is sharper than any camera phone (and most compact cameras, for that matter).

What happened to the Old One? by Photocritic.org on Flickr

The point is that even though it’s possible to take some fantastic photos with a simple camera phone (I recently wrote about the amazing stuff people are doing with the comparatively inferior iPhone camera, for example), the phone manufacturers need to get their priorities straight: Megapixels only affect the size you can show (or print) a photograph. Most of us post our photos on Facebook, Flickr or send them to our mates, so size clearly doesn’t matter – but quality does.

Most photographers would much rather have a 2-megapixel camera with a good lens than a 20 megapixel camera with poor glass at the front.

So Sony Ericsson, LG, Apple, Nokia and the rest of the gang; if you are reading this: give us proper auto-focus, faster and higher-quality lenses, flashes, proper shutters, and the possibility to manually override the automatic exposure.

This article was originally published on FiveFWD.

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.