Photography and image editing

I've written about a lot of photo apps here in my weekly iOS app collections because it's always fun to add a little pizazz to your images. But rather than dragging out the Instagram (iOS | Android) clones and retro photo makers, I wanted to try something a little more "out there."

If you know where to look, there are several image effects apps in the App Store that give your photos some really drastic changes using overlays and unique neon lighting effects. Not every photo will benefit from these apps, but with a little creativity, I think you'll find that these apps can produce great results.

This week's collection of apps is all about adding drastic effects to your photos. The first uses several types of bright overlays to add strange effects to your photos in a couple easy steps. The second adds more features letting you add multiple effects on the same image. The third lets you add multiple overlays as well, but you can also adjust opacity and use masking tools and filters to really trick out your photos.… Read more

The newly released Photo Punch app for Android lets you cut figures out of one photo and add them to another. Here, we show you how to use the app to create funny and whimsical photos for sharing with your friends across the Interwebs.

Step 1: Download and install Photo Punch for Android It's free, and available now on Google Play.

Step 2: Create a Punch Shot A Punch Shot is essentially a cut-out foreground element from a photo, which you paste onto a different photo. In our example, your Punch Shot will be of a woman, while your … Read more

With the Photokina show in Germany producing so many new high-end cameras, it's evidently been a busy season for Adobe Systems' Lightroom team.

That team just released Lightroom 4.2, which supports 22 new cameras, 43 new lenses, and lets people shoot with 11 new cameras tethered to a computer. It takes work to figure out how to decode each camera's proprietary raw format.

Here's the full list of new cameras supported, but note that the Nikon D600 support is "preliminary and there is a minor risk that the appearance of your images may change when … Read more

Following today's OS X 10.8.2 update for Mountain Lion, Apple has issued updates to iPhoto and Aperture, which bring the latest versions of the popular photo management suites to 9.4 and 3.4, respectively. The updates include a number of small bugs and fixes, along with new features and addresses several notable issues.

The first of these is both programs now support Shared Photo Streams in OS X Mountain Lion, which allows others to view Photo Streams you have set up in iCloud. In addition, the programs now support directly opening and editing a file from … Read more

Long known for its DVD/media playback (PowerDVD) and disc authoring (Power2Go) tools, CyberLink also publishes a full suite of consumer-level photo- and video-editing software that includes powerful technology. In an exclusive release for Download.com, CyberLink's two flagship editing programs -- PhotoDirector for photography editing and management; PowerDirector for video editing and effects -- update to versions 4 and 11, respectively, including a new version of PhotoDirector for Mac. The company is also introducing two new video-production tools for audio -- CyberLink AudioDirector -- and color -- CyberLink ColorDirector, as well as a Director Suite that packages them … Read more

Fourandsix Technologies, a startup founded by a former Photoshop bigwig and a image-analysis guru, has released its first product, the FourMatch software to detect changes to an image.

The most obvious use for the $890 Photoshop plug-in: ensuring that digital photos used as legal evidence are authentic.

The company lists other possibilities, too, though, such as checking that nobody's fiddled with digital images of insurance claims or contest entries, or ensuring the legitimacy of photos that might be published as the truth.

Company executives have good street cred in the area: the software came from Chief Technology Officer Hany … Read more

Apparently 11 years was long enough.

Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, and Adobe said today that the current CS6 version of Photoshop will be the last one to support the operating system.

"The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP," Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post.

The reason, he said, is that modern performance-sensitive software requires modern hardware graphics interfaces that Windows XP lacks, in particular a way to tap into the power of graphics … Read more

Photo taking apps are a dime a dozen in the App Store, but if you look a little deeper, you can make some really cool projects as long as you use some creativity.

Instead of simply giving your photos a retro look like many of the popular camera apps, there are a number of options that turn your images into a creative project in which you can use your imagination to come up with something unique.

This week's collection of apps are all about doing something different with your images on your iPhone. The first quickly turns your photos … Read more

HipGeo Travel Blog and Trip Journal (free) lets you tell the story of your vacation with images, videos, text, tags, and more all tied to your geolocation. You start by signing up through Facebook or Twitter, then you can choose people to share your travels with. If you just want to see the app in action before you take your trip (and see best practices from other users) you can use an explore button to check out blogs of popular or featured users, or look at posts from near your location.… Read more