Panoramas
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Adobe speeds up Lightroom Classic editing with GPU acceleration
Adobe has done a good job of using your computer's GPU to speed products like Premiere Pro and Photoshop. However, it hasn't given Lightroom the same love, and with the enormous 60-megapixel-plus files coming out of cameras (and smartphones) these days, you need all the speed you can get. Luckily, Adobe has announced that the latest version of Lightroom Classic will now take better advantage of your GPU where it's most needed -- editing photos.
Google's Photo Sphere app now on iOS and not just Android
Photo Sphere is no longer an Android exclusive. Google released the app for iOS users today, calling it Photo Sphere Camera. It's free, and a nice way to create immersive 360 degree photos. The app is pretty simple to use. Press the start button and the app will prompt you to move by centering a yellow dot that appears on screen. You'll chase the dot in a complete circle. If you like, you can also point up and down to get a full spherical image of your surroundings. Of course, Google would love for you to upload your images to Google Maps where they can be shared with the public. The image will also be saved to your camera roll, but you can't view it that way as a 360 degree sphere. Instead it appears a really wide panorama. You can view your 360 degree images properly in the Google Photo Sphere app. The Photo Sphere views can also be uploaded to the Google Views site, or embedded in a web page. The app works really well. During the stitching mode you'll see a little animated man getting all the seams adjusted to make the image smooth. Of course, there are many iOS apps that will create 360 degree scenes, so Google is a little late to the party. Photosynth from Microsoft has a similar set of features. 360 Panorama (US$0.99) from Occipital also performs well and is popular with the iOS photo community. 360 Panorama allows an easy share via email of your photos that preserves the 360 degree view by giving the recipient a link for Safari. Other popular free spherical photography apps that have been around a while for iOS include Sphere and Bubbli. It's good to have Photo Sphere on iOS. It's free and the image quality is very high. The stitching seemed accurate in my tests, and exposures were adjusted so everything looked quite smooth. The app requires an iPhone 4s or greater and runs on iOS 7 or later.
Vacation Coming? Here are my favorite iOS photo apps
It's that time of year. Vacations are likely in your future, and there has never been a bigger choice in apps and utilities to make and share great still photos from your iPhone. Among the multitude of apps I've tested over the years, I have some favorites, so I'm sharing those treasures with you. I'll miss some great apps, but these are the apps that have never let me down under a variety of conditions. Let me state that the majority of my photography is done with a Canon DSLR. It has great quality and unparalleled reliability, but there is nothing like the iPhone for a quick good quality photo or panorama, and there are plenty of great tools to edit that photo before you share it. I find I'm always using both cameras; the DSLR for the keepers I may print and frame, the iPhone for all the rest. Let's get started. I'm going to deal primarily with landscape or location photography. The built-in Apple camera app is fine for taking shots of people, and if you use the built-in HDR mode you can rescue photos from blow-out due to bright sky backgrounds. For landscapes, HDR is just the ticket. HDR gives you a wider dynamic range, so detail shows up in the shadows and bright skies won't overpower your image. The above-mentioned HDR feature from Apple is OK for landscapes, but won't give you the best quality your iPhone camera can provide. I've had the best results from three apps. Pro HDR (U.S. $1.99), Tru HDR($1.99), and Fotor ($2.99). Fotor is also a capable photo editor and camera app. %Gallery-192680% Non-HDR apps, for taking family pictures or photos where there is motion present, are also abundant. Among those I like are the already mentioned built-in camera controls from Apple. I'm also a fan of the popular free Instagram app that provides camera control and a variety of editing options and filters, and Camera + which is both very popular and a well performing $1.99 app. It contains granular camera control, and a host of features for both taking and editing photos. Let's not forget panoramas. Apple added a very good panorama feature in iOS 6, and it works great. (You need an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5.) Put the camera in Panorama mode, and slowly move it from side to side while the camera captures and instantly assembles a high-resolution horizontal image. Editing There are hundreds of apps that let you edit photos. Fotor and Camera + do a nice job, and both have a variety of filters if you want to apply them to your photos. I think the standout app is the free Snapseed app. It has an easy to use GUI, and best of all gives you a tremendous amount of control over several parameters that can make your images compelling. Even if Snapseed had a price tag associated with, it would still be my recommendation -- being free, it is a terrific choice. Apple's camera app does have some on-board tools like cropping and simple enhancing, but Snapseed is far superior. I also like to create collages and send them to friends while I am still traveling. My favorites in this area are Diptic ($0.99) and ProCollage ($1.99). Sharing You're on your trip, and want to share those photos before you get home. Again, there are plenty of options, including services like Flickr, Amazon Cloud Drive and Instagram, but I really like the free app Photoset. This universal app lets you select photos, upload them to a website, and send the url to friends. You don't need to sign up to anything, the photos look great, and unlike Apple's PhotoStream option, the pictures will never go away. My only wish for Photoset is that you could select multiple photos instead of selecting them one at a time before uploading. Where and When to take pictures Just like in real estate, location is everything. Sometimes you are taking pictures wherever you happen to be, while others look for the best places to visit specifically for photography. If you are in the US National Parks, the Chimani guides are indispensable. This series of free apps provides information like hours of operation, best photo spots, and travel tips for the major National Parks. The time of day that you take that picture is really important too, with the best lighting occurring during the so-called "golden time" just before sunrise and just before sunset. Magic Hour is just the ticket for figuring out the best time to take those wonderful pix. The app is free, uses GPS to figure out where you are, and then tells you the best time to grab those beautiful landscape photos. How about figuring out the best nearby photo locations? If you have an iPad, grab the free Stuck on Earth app. It shows your current location on a map, and scours the web for photos taken at that location. It gives you a great idea about what to expect and is also handy for trip planning before you ever leave on your vacation. Sadly, this app is not available for the iPhone, and there isn't an iPhone app that is comparable. Summing Up The apps mentioned here will go a long way toward making your vacation photos memorable and worth sharing. I still am amazed that such great technology can be stuffed in a smartphone, but there it is. Have a safe trip, and may you get lots of great photos.
Autostitch for iOS adds augmented reality to improve panoramas
Autostitch has been a long time favorite for combining multiple images into a smooth panorama. With a just-released update, the app adds augmented reality which superimposes visual data onto real world images. As the camera moves, the location of images already taken are layered over the real-time view to help you visualize the scene that will result. The new feature is called StitchGuide, and it uses the iPhone gyroscope to register images and provide active tracking. Photos can be rearranged or deleted and replaced with new images. So how does it work? Quite well. I liked seeing the framing of each photo as it is taken, which helped me make decisions about the next photo to be taken. When photos are combined, the final photo in all my tests appeared to be seamless and well registered. The app also provides a crop tool to remove the uneven edges that usually result from combining images, but the StitchGuide seems to minimize those issues so there is less cropping that needs to be done. Autostitch was the app I always selected when I needed a wide view of a landscape, and the enhancements make it even more desirable. The app is a free update to current owners, and a US$1.99 purchase if you are buying for the first time. The app is not universal, so it is native only for the iPhone and iPod touch. It requires iOS 4.0 or greater. %Gallery-163374%
Panoramic ball camera gives a full 360-view of you nervously throwing it in the air (video)
Yes, it isn't the first ball camera we've seen, nor is it the first camera to hawk 360-degree panoramas. But, the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera marries these two concepts together, and packs them into a sturdy-looking sphere made mostly of foam. This shields the 36 fixed-focus phone camera modules, each capable of taking two megapixel snapshots. These are then stitched together to create full panoramic works like the shot above. Somewhere within that squishy core is an accelerometer to measure the apex of its flight, and where the camera array will capture its image. The big question is, can it survive a few rounds of keepie-uppie? You can take a closer look at the ball camera's 36 x two megapixel images in the video below. Now, do you think there's any chance of getting one for the next Engadget meet-up?
Photosynth now 'cool enough' for iOS
It's funny how times change. In 2008 Microsoft released Photosynth for Windows, an impressive technology that allowed the stitching of several photos into one large panorama. Microsoft said at the time that they weren't "cool enough" to run on Mac OS. Well, I guess times have changed, and Apple has eaten Microsoft's lunch in smartphones and tablets, so now Photosynth is available for at least the iPhone. The app was released today, and it's free, so I gave it a quick checkout in my neighborhood. You take an image, and then move the camera in any direction. The app continues capturing pictures, and when you are ready, it stitches them all together and saves the resulting panorama to your camera roll. It works pretty well, although it got a bit lost doing a 360 degree sweep. Also, Photosynth sometimes wanted to take a picture while I was still moving, and I saw some blurry results. Still, the app looks promising, and it's nice to see Microsoft bring it to iOS. I think 360 Panorama from Occipital ($1.99) has a bit higher quality, but Photosynth is worth a look and provides pretty good results. Images can be saved to your iPhone, Facebook or Bing Maps. Hopefully Microsoft will stay with it and improve the software. Check the gallery for a couple of quick images I did. They are cropped to remove uneven edges and reduced in resolution and size for quick downloads. %Gallery-121543%
360 Panorama brings sharing, simplicity to iPhone pano photos
We first looked at 360 Panorama back in July when it debuted against other panoramic photo apps, including Boinx's You Gotta See This and Debacle Software's Pano. On sale now for just US$0.99 (regular price $2.99), Occipital's panorama application has been updated to add what developer Jeff Powers calls "streetview sharing." This new sharing feature (a "hosted immersive viewing experience") allows you to upload your panoramas and access them from any web browser, whether that browser supports Flash or not. When viewed, you can flick and drag to see the panorama from any angle. Follow through the "read more" link to view a sample embedded panorama that I created at a local cemetery, which showcases the hosted interaction. You can easily share your panoramic creations with family, friends, colleagues and clients. All they need is a browser.
AutoStitch raises the bar on iPhone panoramas
There are quite a few programs that allow you to create panoramas on the iPhone. I've reviewed some of them, and they all get pretty good reviews. The differences are often in how much work you have to do versus letting the software do the alignments of the various images. Since iPhone photos are almost always hand held, there are going to be issues of the camera not always being level.AutoStitch [App Store] is a US$1.99 app that gets most of the process just right. When you run it, it asks you to import images from your camera roll, as many as you like. They can be horizontal for a wide panorama, or stacked vertically. As an experiment I shot both vertically and horizontally, and rocked the camera significantly out of level by tilting it up to about 45 degrees. I took 10 images, and the software assembled the images in the proper order. There were a couple of gaps, where there was no image, but that was my fault, not the application's. The result was pretty impressive: not as a great image, but that AutoStitch could make sense out of the jumble of shots. You can see this image in the gallery I've created.No panorama software I've seen is perfect. When I look closely at the full resolution images I see a bit of ghosting in the distant mountains, but overall AutoStitch is an excellent program that lets you take the pictures while it does the work. All panoramas need some cropping cleanup, and iPhoto can do this when you import from the camera. If you want to do all the post-processing on the iPhone itself, I suggest Photogene, [App Store] which will straighten and crop your photos, plus lots of other functions if you want them. It's a great US$2.99 investment. I'll be reviewing this app in a future post.Here are some sample panos taken assembled with AutoStitcher. I've reduced the size of these images so they will load faster. You can find more on the developer's web site.Image Examples:%Gallery-65856%
Son of: In search of the perfect panorama
Yesterday I put three panorama programs to the test. Today, I added a 4th program, appropriately enough called Panorama [app store link]. It's US$9.99 and the most expensive of the apps on offer. After using the new app today, and going back and taking another fresh crack at the other three, I'll share the results, and some sample images from each one. I didn't always shoot at the same location, because that would have been boring, but shot them all under the same sky conditions and lighting. In each case, I took two images and then merged them in the software. All the software allows the merging of more than 2 images, but I wanted to keep the file size down.Using Pano [app store link] I got better matched skies today, and sharper alignment. The blend between the two images was good, and once you do a rough align, Pano takes care of the rest. At US$2.99 it is the bargain of the offerings.TripStitch [app store link] gave me an acceptable image, but it was a lot of trouble because you can't take the image from within TripStitch. You have to go out to the iPhone camera app, then import the images into TripStitch, which I feel is an unnecessary step. I also didn't see any auto-alignment feature, so it's all up to the photographer. TripStitch is US$4.99.Panolabs Pro [app store link] gave me a lot of control, but an image that I felt was below the quality of the others. I tried on several scenes, but manipulating the images for a smooth merge is difficult, and the controls are not fine grained enough to make delicate adjustments. I've shared my best effort with you in the gallery. The app is US$4.99.Panorama did a nice job as well. It was pretty easy to merge and align the images, and the final result looks pretty good. It was the most expensive app of the group, but it was not head and shoulders above Pano or TripStitch. It allows a lot of control and lets you select the final resolution for saving. It does a nice job of guiding you through the process of taking and aligning the images.So there you have it. A look at the options for making panoramic shots from the iPhone. Of course, you can get better results using a higher resolution digital camera, and something like Adobe Photoshop or Elements or 3rd party apps like DoubleTake or The Panorama Factory to stitch them all together. It is remarkable, though, that you can get decent pano photos from what is arguably a less than top-quality cellphone camera.Click on the gallery below to see the images produced by the apps.%Gallery-42210%
In search of the perfect panorama
No one thinks the iPhone has a terrific, pro-level camera, but it is fine for quick snaps. One way to get an even better picture is to make a panorama, stitching multiple images together to give you a wider view, or a taller view, and more pixels.I've tried three of the apps designed to do panoramas and they all come up pretty short.The first I tried was Pano [app store link]. It's US$2.99. This app does the best job of guiding you through the process, telling you to take the leftmost view, then another, and then if you want another image it cues you for that. You get a choice of accepting the photo, or taking a fresh one. When you are done, Pano merges the photo and you have a panorama ready to save to your phone or export to iPhoto. Some of the pictures look OK, but I noticed when I was shooting outdoors the three panels did not match very well in tone or color. There were big differences, especially in the sky. It looked a bit like the old Cinerama movies where the three cameras didn't quite match up. When shooting inside, I found the images more consistent. Steve Sande reviewed this app for TUAW back in October.
Macworld Expo 2007 QuickTime VRs
While we whipped out our own photo galleries feature last week for Macworld 07, Panoramas.dk specializes in putting together QuickTime VRs of major events and places. TUAW reader Christian Chladek just tipped us off to Panoramas.dk's new Macworld 07 gallery, containing over 15 full-screen VRs of various booths from the likes of Canon, Microsoft, Crumpler (their booth really was pretty unique) and - of course - the iPhone in its awe-inspiring rotating glass case. The VRs look pretty nice and are one more way to 'be there' without being there. We just wouldn't recommend trying to lick the iPhone display.
