Photub

With the release of the iTunes App Store last year, naturally there have been lots of applications submitted and available for purchase that deal with Photos. It only make sense, after all, but there are two that I'm aware of that do something that makes them stand out from the crowd. (NOTE: I have not used either as I do not have an iPhone and refuse to pay to upgrade my iPod Touch to the 2.0 firmware).

iFOTOMO is a viewer for Flickr photos that presents them in a mosaic. However, the user can pan and zoom, and upon zooming make the zoomed image the new mosaic target. It is a very interesting concept, and adds something new to the many Flickr viewers out there, at least that I've seen.

The other app that I've seen that I would definitely purchase, is Nick Campbell's ShakeItPhoto. What is interesting about this, is that it emulates an "old school" Polaroid camera in that upon snapping a photo, with the iPhone's camera, the processing is designed to take a little while to finish, but, it speeds up when you shake your phone—just like a Polaroid. You can see it in action here, and see a ton of examples on Nick's ShakeItPhoto photo blog.

The GIMP team has released version 2.6 of The GIMP. If ever there was a time to have a look at the best free software alternative to Photoshop, this would be it.

GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view. It features changes to the user interface addressing some often received complaints, and a tentative integration of GEGL, the graph based image processing library that will eventually bring high bit-depth and non-destructive editing to GIMP.

The new UI looks great, and I can't wait to play around with it.

Also, have a look at this WebMonkey article for more details, and a review.

Photoshop Express has added Flickr integration. It's adding features like this that will kill off those other up and coming online editors.

Exposure blend is a GIMP plugin which facilitates the process of creating contrast blended exposures. Contrast blending is a popular technique for getting more dynamic range from a set of bracketed images.

(Photoshop users might wanna check here for a few actions and a tutorial.)

I've decided that Photub should actually be renamed to Flickr News Network. Flickr Code is a site to talk about and discuss writing things for Flickr. The Flickr team has made the source available for Uploadr, a cross platform tool for uploading content to the site. There is also a blog.

GIMP's development team, has announced the 2.5 development branch. It's no where near stable yet, but what it means is that we will soon have a Gimp that can support higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing—things many have criticized the GIMP for over the years.

Like I said, this is just a development branch, so it's really for nothing more than taking a peek into the future. Those who'd like to try GIMP, or find out more should take a look at their latest stable release GIMP 2.4

Lightroom 2.0 is now available in beta from Adobe Labs.

Adobe lovers rejoice! You no longer have to use more powerful software on your personal computer where you store your photos! Now, you can upload your photos to Adobe and edit your files from anywhere using a less powerful Photoshop Express!

It was bound to happen. The online photo editing scene has been taking off and lots of sites now allow you to upload a picture and make some adjustments to it and save it back down again. Adobe has been mysteriously absent until a few days ago when they released PS Express. The great thing about it, is that it works really well and provides you some simple tweaking. It's probably one of the nicest Flash/Flex applications I've ever seen. The photo management portion of it reminds me of Light Room's browser and the editor is probably more like Elements than Photoshop, but that's only because you're not getting tools like the lasso, the pen tool or curves. My guess is that we'll be seeing some more improvements and maybe even some other software packages come to life online from Adobe.

So, you've got a few pictures you wanna add to your blog, or some other gallery, and you're going to use LightBox to display them in a nice way when a visitor clicks on them. Well, don't. Try Highslide. Let your visitors open up a few side by side and compare. Best of all, it's free for personal use (like all good software should be). (Note: I have nothing against LightBox, I just think this is cooler)

Gimp users who are also Flickr users will like GimpPublishr because it cuts down on an important step in your workflow. GimpPublishr supports exporting photos to Flickr and to Picassaweb.