Photo Editing Software and Applications

In this tutorial, we will explain how to quickly shoot and isolate images onto a white background using a combination of Photoshop and Lightroom.

Over the years, I have spent quite a bit of time experimenting with product photography; sometimes more successfully than others. While I spend my days working as the editor of Psdtuts+, I often spend time in the evenings helping my wife by shooting photos of her jewelry. In this tutorial, I wanted to share the workflow that I have developed for quickly shooting, and retouching images using a combination of Photoshop and Lightroom. Let’s get started!

Facetune, the highly rated portrait photo editor for iPhone and iPod touch, has just received its big 2.0 update.

Facetune 2.0 introduces localized filters and new frames, among other enhancements. With localized filters, you can now control the exact placement and intensity of each filter. And with the app’s new frames, you can add creative photo frames with support for a before-and-after comparison of the edited and unedited photos.

• Textures: Now users can apply amazing textures to the photo, to add another unique picture effect. Each texture can also be controlled for intensity and localization.
• Tones: We have added a full color spectrum to choose from.
• Menu redesign: Fuller and clearer import and share menus.
• Share Screens: We improved the general look and functionality of the share screens.
• Help Screens: Redesigned help screens, with extensive explanations of each feature, with beautiful and easy to understand graphics and videos.
• Demo Photos: We have added new Demo photos for users to practice on.
• Existing Feature Improvement: All the features you know and love are now more accurate and effective.
• Bug fixes.

Here's an app that makes sure batch image editing is made super simple and easy for all users. BatchPhoto is a Mac app that helps you edit images in large batches. And it's an easy to use software too. 

Editing photos as a batch is one of the best ways to handle a lot of stuff. You might want to re-size the photos, add some standard filter and work on renaming them to something specific. There’s a ton of things that you might want to apply to every photo in the album (or to most). In these situations, a batch photo editing app is a must-have.

Where there’d be numerous options and sub-options and preferences to tweak in other softwares, BatchPhoto kicks all complexity out and produces a stream-lined approach to batch-editing. It’s so simple and neat that the software can be as easily used by a layman as by an expert who dabbles with Photoshop and stuff.

CORE has released the updated version of “Focus Photoeditor”. It is an excellent painting and editing program. You can paint, draw lines, polygons, ellipses and apply color, textures, gradients and objects.

Focus Photoeditor emphasizes digital photography but does just about everything other graphics packages can do, with a few twists of its own. It has automatic features for quick photo fixes, but it’s also easy to use it to draw, paint, and create custom graphics. It includes an advanced image browser and a Web album wizard, too.

ProCamera 7 ($0.99) by Cocologics is the brand new iOS 7-only version of the award-winning pro camera app that was introduced years ago. If you’re a serious iPhone photography fan with iOS 7, then this is one of those apps you’ll want to check out for yourself.

ProCamera has been around for quite some time, and it earned many fans because of it’s powerful features, while still remaining pretty user-friendly for even the average photographer. Even though I’ve mostly switched to the native Camera app for now in iOS 7, I still enjoy third-party camera apps for their feature sets, like Camera+ 4, and now ProCamera 7. Photography has always been something I’m interested in for fun, and while I don’t think I’m a pro, it’s still incredibly satisfying, especially with my iPhone, which keeps getting better and better for photography with every iteration.

While the old version of ProCamera had tons of features, I can’t say that I was a big fan of the interface. However, thanks to iOS 7, ProCamera 7 has received a major facelift, making it fit the aesthetics of the OS quite nicely, but without changing too much of what previous users are used to. The interface is flat and uncluttered, but the features remain the same, and it’s very intuitive to navigate your way around. There’s also the transparent header bar when viewing images, making it feel as native as ever. ProCamera 7 is as responsive as ever — I had no issues with lag or slow navigation on my iPhone 5.

Love photo sharing but wish you could tell more of the story behind each photo as you share it? Shadow Puppet is a new app that’s designed to help you do just that. Rather than simply sharing photos by themselves or with text captions, the app lets you share sets of photographs while narrating what the recipient is seeing.

The app was created by reader Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen, who have worked at Google and Facebook. Graham spent three years at Google as the product manager for Picasa.

Once you tap the record button, all your sounds and actions are captured by the app. You can talk about the photos, zoom into them, tap areas in them to indicate what you’re talking about, and flip through the set.

If you have a happy trigger finger, and like looking over past memories, Memoir is for you. It’s an app that collects all your photos, tags places travelled, and steals your social media posts to provide you with easy access to all of them. Memoir can dig out photos of you and friends instantly if you request them, and can show you what you were doing at this moment a year ago, for nostalgic effect. However, if you want to forget something (trust me, we all do) then the app makes it easy to edit and remove “memories” too.

DogVacay: Best. Invention. Ever. Who likes sticking their dog in a kennel while they jet off to a romantic break/sun holiday/chinchilla ranch? Nobody, that’s who. Poor Fido stuck in a cage, freakin’ out because he’s a chihuahua with a rottweiler as a neighbour. Well hey, here’s an alternative: DogVacay is like an AirBnB for pets. Book a dog-sitting stay through a fairly straightforward process in-app, cough up the agreed amount, et voila. Fido gets cuddles from a stranger instead of PTS.

Hamlet: Explore Shakespeare: Cambridge University Press has been releasing a series of Shakespeare plays as iPad apps in the last while; the latest of which is Hamlet (one of my favourites). You basically get the full text, an audio “performance” and photos of the more well-known productions of the piece, with a huge amount of interactive features all aimed to give you a better understanding the play. Especially good if it’s on a secondary/uni syllabus.

This video tutorial by photographer Glyn Dewis takes a look at how you can create a fake beard using Photoshop as well as a somewhat more useful application of the same technique for enhancing eyes in images.

You can find more interesting and useful tutorials on our Photoshop section here on Lensvid.

Tablets have huge potential for photographers. They are a great way of showing off your work to friends and prospective clients without having to carry a large portfolio case or computer, and there are some great apps that can make your life easier, by adding GPS tags to images, calculating hyperfocal distances, or even enabling a camera to be controlled remotely.

Adobe has produced some superb mobile apps such as Photoshop Express for making quick, simple changes to images captured by the on-board camera, and Adobe Nav, which turns your tablet into a tool box to save screen space when you’re working on your desktop computer.

Photoshop Touch goes quite a bit further than Photoshop Express, giving you a pretty comprehensive set of tools and features (including layers) to edit images.

It’s available for the iPad from the App Store, and for Android tablets via Google Play, and it costs £6.99 for tablets and £2.99 for phones.

Few are likely to switch to using Photoshop Touch instead of Photoshop CC, but it’s a great platform for thinking through ideas and experimenting with images. You can treat it like a photographer’s sketchpad.

However, if you want to edit images when you’re out and about, there’s an impressive collection of powerful tools that give some great results, and you can sync your images and projects with your Creative Cloud account to carry on working on your computer when you get home, or share the results on Facebook.

New York Comic Con isn’t too far away, and every year lots of photographers and people who call themselves photographers converge on the area to take pictures of cosplayers. Cosplay, for those not aware, is a portmanteau of costume and play–and it ranges back to ancient Chinese culture. And so at conventions, people often dress up as characters.

While some will sit there and simply snap photos of someone’s costume, others will actually try to create full shoots. And one of those photographers is Beethy. He has been well known in the cosplay community for a while. He recently sat down to talk with us about cosplay photography, honing your craft and how to make your portfolio of images better.

The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge.

Both hardware makers and software developers hope that wearables, like the smartphone, tablet, and television, will become a new platform for application development. The two most promising platforms are the headset and the smart watch. But while the only viable headset is Google’s still-in-beta Glass, smart watches and smart watch apps have arrived. These early smart watches may also help clarify what does and doesn’t work for software development in the broader emerging category of wearable technology.

Dragging in the Layers panel to reposition a layer below a Layer Group can give different results than expected. In the example below, dragging and dropping the texture layer below the Cactus Layer Group, results in the texture layer being added to the Layer Group (inside of it, instead of below it).

Everyone wants to have perfect profile picture, but we've all seen examples of Photoshopping gone wrong. If you've ever wanted to clear those blemishes or trim those 10 pounds the camera adds, but end up looking more like a distorted member of the Jersey Shore cast than a runway model, you're not alone.

Don't worry — we'll show you the most common Photoshop tips and tricks to ensure that you're always looking your most photogenic. Check out the video tutorial above to learn how to do the "eye pop" technique, remove shiny skin and more.

But use all these tricks in moderation. We think you look great just the way you are.

What are your favorite Photoshop tricks? Let us know in the comments section. Happy Photoshopping, everybody.