Photography and image editing

Last week, Apple announced that its App Store is approaching 50 billion app downloads. In celebration of the milestone, Apple is giving away a $10,000 App Store gift card to the lucky person who initiates the 50 billionth download.

As part of the celebration, Apple listed the top 25 apps -- both free and paid -- for iPhone and iPad. None of the apps listed is particularly surprising (especially to someone who studies the most popular list every day), but one thing that did strike me is that a lot of the all-time best sellers still sit near the … Read more

In a move that's bound to tick off a lot of (probably formerly) devoted users, Adobe's finally made the jump we've been expecting to an all-subscription model for the applications that used to be part of Creative Suite. Adobe's not just rebranding all of its professional applications with the Creative Cloud moniker (except Lightroom -- so far). Now it's created a supercell composed of Photoshop CC, Dreamweaver CC, InDesign CC, so on and so on, ad infinitum. You'll only be able to get individual copies of those packages by subscription, though that individual-product subscription … Read more

In a major shift for its business and its customers, Adobe Systems on Monday announced it no longer will sell its Creative Suite software as it moves instead to the $50-per-month Creative Cloud and other subscription plans.

"We have no current plans to release another perpetual release of the CS tools and suites. Creative Cloud is going to be our sole focus moving forward," said Scott Morris, senior director of product marketing for Creative Cloud.

When Adobe launched its Creative Cloud subscription last year, executives weren't sure how long it would offer it alongside the traditional perpetual-license … Read more

Whether you're a professional photographer or an amateur food journalist, chances are that you have more than a handful of photos spread across social network sites like Facebook and Google+ as well as smart devices like phones and tablets. With so many pictures in so many places, finding a specific photo can be a chore. NeroKwik offers a welcome solution to this problem. By consolidating all of your images to be accessible from any platform in one app, NeroKwik makes finding, rating, and sharing your photos much easier.

Here's how it works:

The latest iteration of Adobe's raw-editing and management software, Adobe Lightroom 5, enters a public beta today with a modest set of enhancements that will make some photographers very happy but will probably make a large number of others shrug and choose to skip it. The biggest news: support for proxy editing of disconnected images, a feature dubbed Smart Preview. Other highlights include an overdue distortion and perspective correction tool, Upright; reusable custom page layouts and page-numbering tweaks in the Book module; a radial filter; the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a full-blown healing brush; and … Read more

Face Stealer has to be one of the creepiest apps we've seen, and we may or may not be including Girls Around Me in that statement.

"Do you ever want to look like celebrities?" the free iOS app's description asks. "Face Stealer will turn your face into someone else in real time."

Well, it sort of does do that. There's a selection of faces preinstalled that you can try on for size, including the Mona Lisa, Barack Obama, Nefertiti, and Albert Einstein.

Read more of "Creepiest app ever lets you wear someone else's face&… Read more

The shift by Adobe Systems toward its Creative Cloud subscription plan looks to be popular with customers, a Jefferies survey of some of them shows.

Adobe is making its entire Creative Suite of software available for an introductory price of $30 per month for annual commitments, with a regular $50 monthly price to kick in later. The subscription also includes services, software that's not part of the CS products, and early updates that traditional perpetual-license customers won't get until CS7.

Jefferies asked customers about their sentiments in a follow-up to a 2012 survey with CNET.

"The majority … Read more

Are you a Mac user who wants to pull a photo off your iPhone, iPad, or Android device quickly, without having to go through iPhoto? There's an easy way to do that, built into your Mac: the Preview app.

For ages, I was frustrated that the Mac wouldn't let me browse my iPhone or Android phone to drag-and-drop pictures I wanted, in the way that I could when plugging them into my Windows PC.

If only I could browse like on the PC

On the PC, my phones appear like a drive within Windows Explorer, which is wonderful:… Read more

CORRECTION, 2:40 p.m. PT: There has been clarification since this story broke. Adobe has not officially released the CS2 software for free. Instead, it has canceled its CS2 license management servers because of a technical glitch, so for those with existing licenses it is now offering downloads that do not require contact with the licensing servers. While Adobe admits this may be seen as it giving its software away for free, this service is intended for those with existing Adobe CS2 licenses.

Adobe's popular Creative Suite has been developed way beyond the capabilities of the initial versions … Read more