ProCamera
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Daily iPhone App: ProCamera is a best of breed photo app for iPhone
It takes some work for a photo app to stand out from the crowd, but I think ProCamera does just that. The US$4.99 app has assembled a very strong feature set that will give you the best chance of getting excellent photos out of your iPhone. The app includes some anti-shake software, a self-timer, rapid fire shooting, both still and video modes with auto and manual exposure, focus lock, alignment guides, full HD recording in movie mode (1080p at 30fps), geotagging with an extension for the direction your were facing when you took the picture and much more. Not all features will work on every iPhone due to hardware limitations. Obviously full-resolution video recording needs an iPhone 4s or 5. There are some other hardware-based limitations, and the company provides a helpful chart showing which features work on which iPhone. With all the camera features, I was surprised and happy to see full editing features as well. The editing tools are divided into several groups: ProFX with a variety of filters that can be applied; ProLab for brightness, saturation and contrast settings; and auto-adjustment options that are quick and easy. Finally, ProCut lets you crop, change aspect ratio and straighten photos. The app also features a unique Exhibition Mode. It lets you submit your prized photos in the IPA Quarterly Gallery Exhibition. Using the app was a pleasure. Screen controls are easy to figure out without a manual, although instructions are included with the app. The control labels rotate in for portrait and landscape mode, a nice feature many camera apps forget. You can display a live histogram of your image, which pro shooters will like, and there is a night ISO setting for dark environments. The only thing missing is an HDR function, and I'll bet the software wizards who created ProCamera could do that well. When your image is done, it can be easily shared to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Flickr (Flickr coming in iOS 7 update), and of course to the camera roll. Images can be shared one at a time, or in groups. ProCamera is optimized for the iPhone 5 and will run on any iPhone that can run iOS 6. This is an impressive camera app for those who want to go beyond the usual point-and-shoot routine.
Nokia intros Photo Transfer for Mac to back up shots from special image modes
It's easy for Mac users to back up regular photos from Lumia phones, but not the shots taken using Nokia's special modes -- iPhoto can't handle the raw data from Cinemagraph, for example. Nokia's new Photo Transfer for Mac should provide that missing peace of mind. The utility saves all the files needed to work with photos and videos in Nokia's mobile imaging apps, including Cinemagraph, Pro Camera, Smart Camera and SmartShoot. While there's no on-computer editing, the tool simplifies exporting any media to a Lumia device for additional tweaks. If you're running at least OS X Lion, you can grab Photo Transfer for Mac at the source link.
Nokia Lumia 1020's Pro Camera app to hit 920, 925 and 928 (hands-on video)
One of Lumia 1020's main attractions is its Nokia Pro Camera app, which completes the phone's 41-megapixel camera with a bunch of handy features. In our video after the break, you can see Niina (not a typo) from Nokia demonstrating the manual focusing and lossless digital zooming. The latter actually works both ways: even if you've zoomed in before capture (and still get native 5-megapixel resolution), you can also zoom back out while browsing these photos, as the app captures both the zoomed-in 5-megapixel image as well as the full 38-megapixel image simultaneously. This way you can reframe the image and even focus on a different subject, as CEO Stephen Elop showed us in our earlier interview. But if you don't need this feature, you can simply set the app to capture just 5-megapixel images by default.
