Cool Photo Editing Apps - Part 2

Computers are often associated with numbers and words but the new generation of tablets typified by the Apple iPad brings a whole new dimension to creativity. For those like me who are not artistic in the traditional sense, the ability to manipulate photographs with powerful, easy to use, touch screen apps is absolutely marvelous. Last month, I discussed a number of photo apps with some editing capabilities but whose main strength was taking pictures. This post describes some of my favorite among hundreds of apps that manipulate images although most can start with an available photo or take one using a basic camera function. My usage is limited to Apple iOS devices but many of these apps should be available on other platforms.

I won't spend a lot of time explaining whether the apps work on iPhone/iPods or iPads. That is easy enough to check out at the app store if you are interested. Certainly apps that work on images are most effective when they take advantage of a tablet sized device. However, there are some fun and useful photo editing tools for the small screen as well. Some of these apps are free while others cost $1-4.

Photo Studio, Photo Booth and Finger Design

With this background here are some of my favorites:
Photo Delight allows you to eliminate all color from a picture except selected portions. I've shown examples before and the UI (User Interface) is perfect. There are several others that do the same thing but none I've seen with the elegance of Photo Delight
Dynamic Light provides a number of stunning special effects as shown in the picture of Honolulu at the top right of this blog. Some photographs are meant to record an image as realistically as possible. Now with all the digital cameras we have plenty of "ordinary" photographs so apps like this can be used to create unusual images.
Camera FX (iPhone) and Photo Booth (iPad) offer effects similar to the popular Photo Booth app on the iMac. You preview a number of fun house type images and snap a picture of one (or hundreds!) that you like. (These apps are really in the category of camera apps I reviewed last month but I did not have Photo Booth installed at that time.)

There was a time in the analog age when filters were made of glass and attached to the front of your lens. They came in various colors; polarizing versions eliminated glare and others provided special effects. For large lenses, the filters could be very expensive. Today most of these effects can be provided by software after the picture is taken - polarizing is a notable exception. Not only are software filters much less expensive, you can experiment with different filters and different settings instead of selecting one or two filters and snapping a picture on film - never to be altered again.
Photo Studio (iPad and iPhone) and Perfect Photo (iPhone) are two apps with a collection of filters and other effects.

Photo Delight

Two things you almost always need to do to improve any photo are light adjustments and cropping. There are some apps that perform just those basic functions but many more powerful apps also include those functions.

Auto Adjust is an iPad app that concentrates on these basic functions.
Filterstorm and PS Express provide a much wider range of adjustments.
Photogene on the other hand provides numerous special effects without the basic lighting and cropping features.

Framed

For just plain fun, it's hard to beat Framed, Alien Booth and Photogoo. With the latter two you can waste hours making "interesting" pictures of your friends and family. Framed allows you to put your friends on TV, in a museum or on a milk carton among other places.

Finger Design does not process images but allows you to easily make a collage from your photos - original or edited versions. You can quickly select a background and arrange and resize any number of photos for display.

Finally, remember to check out my list of favorite apps and the places you can go to find apps.

Why Were the Experts so Wrong about the iPad 2?

Right before the iPad 2 hit the stores March 11th most pundits said it was no big deal - a minor upgrade - and thought the demand would not rival the first version that came out eleven months earlier. They could not have been more wrong. Not only did the first shipments sell out within hours but there have been lines of people every morning at every Apple store waiting with baited breath for the next truck. How could the experts have been so wrong?

They tend to overestimate the interest and knowledge of the general public. They believe everyone has the time and inclination to hang on every tweet from every tech vendor and writer. Surprise, surprise most people have real jobs and a variety of interests besides computers. In spite of all the hype about the first iPad a year ago, few people really knew much about it on day one - from the basics of how would it actually work to the more important "is it really suitable for business?" Questions like these prevented the vast majority of people from purchasing the first iPad early in the cycle.

Along the way, three things happened. First, the positive reviews came in and the early adopters showed theirs off to anyone they could corner - friends and coworkers alike. This created the buzz and the associated "cool factor." Next, businesses began to experiment and found that it really was appropriate for many tasks involving their mobile workforce - storage of sales and technical documents for example. Finally, at the end of 2010 many people who decided to buy were advised to wait because the next version would have a camera - or maybe two cameras.

Consequently, when the iPad 2 became available there was a huge demand in spite of the experts suggestion that it was not a major improvement over the original. When you think about it, what would the "experts" have required for a major improvement? It is unlikely in my opinion that any new tablet from any vendor will be considered a major advance over the preceding tablet. Just like the succession of PCs over the last thirty years, each one will be a little faster or have a slightly better screen or camera. The fact that tablets are primarily touch screens with a processor and solid state storage makes improvements primarily a matter of new and upgraded apps. There's not much you can do with the basic tablet slab except speed it up and add a new I/O port or button. I certainly am not saying there will not be better tablets in the future; I'm just suggesting that few new versions will be considered major leaps forward.

Cool Camera Apps - Part 1

No subject gets more attention in my newsletter than the apps I review. (Note: in case you haven't heard - "app" is just another name for a program. The term evolved along with mobile technology but is now being used for full fledged PC/Mac software as well.)

I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I use my iPhone camera. It's certainly not a great camera but for many purposes it's "good enough" and, most important, I always have it with me. I divide camera apps into two categories
1) apps that are primarily associated with taking pictures (photography)
2) those that are mostly used for editing pictures (editing)
This distinction is not precise since many apps do a combination of the two. I base the distinction on the primary attributes of the app and what I generally use it for. Some apps modify still and/or video images as they are being taken; others operate on images from the library and some can do both. The following two apps cost 99 cents each.

For the photography apps, you can't beat QuickCam - often described as the camera app that should have come with the iPhone. For general purpose iPhone pictures, I've switched completely to Quickcam. It's easy to use and will start up and take pictures much faster than the standard Apple app. It has a rapid fire mode where you can touch and hold the camera button and take two pictures per second. While you are taking video, you can touch the camera button and take a still picture.

ToonCamera is another favorite. It works on both live and stored still and video images to create a cartoon effect by limiting the number of colors used. This picture of a fox taken in our back yard

Cartoon Fox - original shown in inset

shows the results. If you are familiar with the GIF image format, you get the same effect. GIF works great on art and drawings with a limited number of colors but produces the cartoon effect when used with photographs - like coloring with eight crayons!

Here's a quick list of other favorites in this category (many have free and paid versions)

Timelapse - Set your camera in a window and it can take pictures at regular intervals for a specified time. Then save the results and play them back as a movie - watch a flower grow!

ExternalCamera - Monitor the iPhone camera on your iPad - watch and listen to a sleeping baby or keep an eye on your front door.

CameraFun - Variety of special effects.

SneakyPix - Set the camera to take a series of pictures while you appear to be reading email or talking on the phone - that's sneaky.
CanScan - Use this camera app to snap a picture of a document and automatically rotate, crop and adjust the lighting for a perfect "scanned" document.

Photography breakthrough: HDR for the masses

Thankfully we are now past the stage of "megapixel bragging"; every camera today has more than enough megapixels to do the job. Image stabilization (IS) is the most significant improvement in photography in recent years. If you've never experienced it, hold a camera zoomed to 300+ mm and see how different the image is with and without IS turned on. But one thing that still plagues amateur and professional alike is the uneven distribution of light in many images.
The Problem
On a sunny day, for example, the bright sky causes the camera to close down the aperture and underexpose the subject. Most people learn they can set the camera to allow in more light - back light compensation - but then the nice bright blue sky turns almost white. The highlights are said to be blown out. It turns out our eyes can see a wider range of light intensity than a camera.
Professional digital photographers have a solution. They spend money on expensive cameras, spend more money on Photoshop and then spend time combining three separate images - one standard exposure, one over exposed and one underexposed. High end cameras can easily produce this set of images. This is not an approach most people would want to try but the results are amazing; details are present in the bright, dark and intermediate areas of the picture.
The Breakthrough
On September 1, 2010 Apple announced an upgrade to their iOS software - used in iPhones, iPods and iPads. This change allows the camera to take the necessary three images and automatically combine them into an HDR photo. The results looked impressive in the demonstration but I'll have to see real results before I believe it. This approach does not require anything special in camera electronics or optics since the process is just rapid image capture followed by sophisticated image processing. Since all smartphones and the upcoming hoard of tablets generally include cameras, it is likely other vendors will implement similar capabilities that will produce better images and require little if any change in user behavior.

Thinking of a camera for Christmas?

If you think it's time to upgrade your old 15 megapixel camera, this may be just what you need. A camera company you've never heard of - Leaf Technologies - just announced their 80 megapixel monster. That's no typo. You need plenty of memory cards though because each image takes nearly one-half gigabyte of storage. Oh, and you also need plenty of money; the basic model is $31,387 - also not a typo. And of course if you want to take any pictures, you need to buy lenses; they aren't included with the camera. If you keep your eyes open, you can probably pick one up for 10% off on e-bay. Actually, when you think about it, it's not such a bad deal. The previous model cost the same amount and had only a lousy 56 megapixels.

The Dark Side of the digital age

Many of us take more photos on a long weekend than we did the entire time we used film cameras. Arguably the quality is improved based on immediate feedback and numerous retakes. We also avoid finding out when our film is developed - and our vacation is over - that an entire roll was poorly exposed due to unusual lighting conditions or an improper camera setting. All in all we feel like we've solved one of the world's greatest problems - documenting our lives for future generations. After all we repeatedly view, sort and arrange those precious pictures taken a century ago. We hang them on the wall and proudly point to great-uncle Eggbert as we relate our family's illustrious or not-so illustrious history. But there is a looming downside to the digital age and it affects much more than our photo libraries.

I'm often ask about the best way to store/archive photos and other files for the long term and I give the same simplistic answers as every other "expert" - make copies on CDs, store them off-site, etc., etc. But the very serious problem of long term storage of files of all types was discussed recently in Computerworld and here is a hint of the problem.

The Domesday book - a detailed property ownership survey in England commissioned by William the Conqueror - was published in 1086. It was recorded on sheepskin and written in Latin. In 1986 an updated version was prepared using the latest technology - laser discs. Guess which one was readable fifteen years later - assuming you or a friend could read Latin. That's right, the 935 year old book could be read but the "modern version" could not because the laser disc players and software were obsolete. Reading the 1986 version required significant custom hardware and software engineering.

Reading at least part of the the article by Lamont Wood is informative. Organizations with substantial concerns include the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the U.S. Geological Survey and you can forget about gigabytes; they talk in terabytes and petabytes (one thousand and one million gigabytes respectively.) The problem is reminiscent of the Year 2000 Problem but this one will not be over in five years. Digital data has the potential to last literally forever - it's all just collections of zeros and ones - providing archiving strategies are developed to store those quadrillions (petabytes) of bits.