Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
This is interesting for your iOS folks. There’s a new Kickstarter in town for something called the HyperCube. It’s an interesting little device that sits in between your phone’s charger cable and the USB socket and provides a microSD slot as well as a USB slot for plugging in a hard drive, SSD or flash drive.
When it hits retail (which won’t be for a while), it’s going to be $49, although it’s as low as $29 right now through the Kickstarter campaign.
While many Canon shooters process their images on the desktop with something like Lightroom or Capture One, Canon’s Digital Photo Pro software doesn’t suck. A lot of Canon photographers still use it and recommend it to newer photographers who want to shoot raw without getting locked into a subscription or buying expensive software.
But as more photographers start to include tablets into their workflow, software needs to adapt. While Canon may sometimes take time to adapt, they’ve now released DPP Express; A version of Digital Photo Pro for the iPad and iPad Pro.
Popular iPad Pro photo editing app Affinity Photo has just seen a pretty significant update. The updates and new features are the result of direct feedback from users. Serif, the company behind the app, says that there are now over a quarter of a million Affinity Photo for iPad users worldwide. They also say that this has kept them “inspired” to keep pushing the capabilities of the software and what’s possible on a mobile device.
Yes, that’s right, it’s finally coming. Photoshop is to become an iPad app. Apple’s dream of turning the iPad Pro into a desktop replacement is potentially about to become a little more true thanks to a report from Bloomberg today. All I can say is, it’s about time!
Camera+ is one of my favourite iOS apps. It’s almost certainly the one I’ve used the most during the time that I owned iPhones. Whenever I got a new one, it was the first thing I’d install to replace the stock camera app that comes with iOS. It offers a level of control that the native app just can’t (or at least, doesn’t) offer while still offering “easy mode” options for when you want a quick snap.
Launched almost 8 years ago, it’s become one of the most popular 3rd party camera apps out there for iOS. Now they’ve launched a completely new and overhauled Camera+ 2. It’s been “reimagined and rewritten from the ground up” to help optimise efficiency and add new features. It offers improved dual camera support, built-in raw & depth editing, new sharing options and a “Smile Mode”.
Affinity Photo for iPad has rapidly become the hot favourite for editing images on the go. It’s a fantastic piece of software that’s extremely powerful. It contains the same processing engine as the popular Mac and Windows versions, but it’s optimised for the iPad hardware. Now, Affinity Photo for iPad has been updated for the new iOS11 release.
One of the new capabilities Apple added to iOS 11 is the new Files app. The new Affinity Photo update allows you to drag and drop files from the Files app into the app itself. It means that multiple files can be dragged at once for focus stacking, HDR or making panoramas. And you can drag files straight in from emails, including PSDs, with all layers intact.
It’s been a long time coming, but Affinity Photo has finally been released for the iPad. Mac users have had Affinity Photo for a good while now, and Windows users finally got their hands on it last year. And Affinity Photo for iPad uses the exact same backend as the desktop versions. But fully optimised to take advantage of the iPad’s hardware and touch capabilities.
If the trailer’s anything to go by, Affinity Photo’s debut onto the iPad looks like it’s one heck of an app.
It’s not exactly a new idea, but we all know it’s not cool until Apple does it. There have been attempts at a device like this a couple of times before. But it’s just never really taken off. We’re talking about a laptop-like dock for your smartphone. The only one that’s seen any kind of popularity at all is the Motorola Atrix Lapdock. And even that is more amongst the Raspberry Pi crowd than its originally intended target.
Published recently by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple’s patent provides their take on the idea. And the idea is very cool. It would be very handy to be able to just plug my phone into a larger screen and keyboard while away from home. But can Apple pull it off? Or is it another “me too!” device that’s doomed to fail?
Many of us take photography for granted. Whether it’s a big fancy DSLR or the phone in our pocket, Photography is part of our daily lives. For some, that simple pleasure of just hitting the shutter isn’t so easy. One such person is James Dunn. James, now 23, from Whiston, England, has a potentially-terminal skin condition which prevents him from being able to use a camera.
James has Epidermolysis bullosa, a genetic disorder which causes his skin to be extremely fragile. Prone to blistering and in constant pain, James’ fingers started to fuse together when he was only 10 years old. Now, thanks to the BBC series The Big Life Fix and inventor Jude Pullen, James once again has the ability to pursue his passion.
Another one to not hang about, 500px are also jumping onto iOS10’s new raw shooting capabilities. Not only do they want you to shoot and edit with raw on your iPhone, but they want you to sell from it, too.
It’s an interesting app, and one I’m curious to see how well it will take off. The new raw capabilities of iOS10 are great. Are enough people going to be shooting to sell with their iPhones, though? Even with the iPhone 7 Plus’s eventual new feature to simulate shallow depth of field, will people buy the images?
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