Photography and image editing

PARIS -- After a year doing its Apple-centric groundwork, start-up Everpix is ready to find a wider audience for its photo sync and organization service.

Today, the company announced version 1.0 of its Windows software, an out-of-the-way utility that slurps photos from people's hard drives and uploads them to company's servers. There, Everpix analyzes each photo mathematically for a variety of characteristics then synchronize the files with iPhones, iPads, and the Everpix Web site.

Everpix, though, isn't really about syncing files like Dropbox or Google Drive. It's also not about online photo communities such as … Read more

Regardless of your feelings for iPhoto on OS X, having to launch and wait for it to load your photo library only to access a screenshot or a single photo in your Photo Stream can be annoying. The good news is, after following the steps laid out below, you'll be able to access your Photo Stream at any time, without even having iPhoto running. The process comes courtesy of a post by Ben Ward (which originated from a Mac OSX Hints thread) earlier this year. It looks more complicated than it really is, but as always, proceed at your … Read more

If you're going to be buying (or receiving) a new iOS device over the holidays, you're going to want to grab the hottest apps to see what the App Store has to offer. But with close to 750,000 apps available, it can be a bit daunting to figure out which ones to choose.

To get you started, I put together a list of apps that include both all-time hits and up-and-coming new software. Each of these is available for iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and give you a sampling of what your new iOS device can do.… Read more

Generally the addition of "Express" to the name of any program means that it is a light or less feature-packed version of the original. However, in the case of Pixlr Express, the amount of options packed into the app doesn't make it feel like a light version at all.

The company behind this app is Autodesk, which also makes Pixlr-o-Matic and AutoCAD. Think of Pixlr Express as a beefed-up version of Pixlr-o-Matic; not only do you get all of the vintage filters, but another 600+ effects can be applied in the new app.

Get started by grabbing&… Read more

If you use Apple's Aperture professional photo management program for OS X, then a new update is available that addresses a number of bugs with the previous release.

The update focuses around managing content from shared photo streams, including detecting faces, managing where streams are shared, and incorporating more cross-stream content management.

In addition to stream focus, the update fixes a number of problems with metadata management, resolution and use of secondary displays, and color profile management. The full list of addressed features is the following:

The Mosaic Team sent me an early copy of the app and I was able to go through the process of creating a photo book, and have the finished product sent to me late last week. Today, the company unveiled the heymosaic Web site, where you can get more information and sign up to receive word when the app launches.

How does the Mosaic app work? It lets you gather up pictures from a vacation, party, barbecue, or other life event, and easily make a coffee table book of photos at a reasonable price. Once ordered, the finished product arrives … Read more

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