What learning curve?

As opposed to Photoshop, and even simpler solutions like Photoshop Express or Pixelmator, Snapseed has little to no learning curve. It keeps editing options grouped intelligently and doesn’t overwhelm a user with toolbars and menus. Instead, you have three types of Basic Adjustments, and seven varieties of Creative Adjustments to work with. Within each of these, you get more fine-grained control, but even then, Snapseed makes sure to walk you through the basics, and all changes you make are instantly previewed on your full, working image in real-time.

For family albums and the average user, I’d be willing to bet that quick use of the Basic Adjustments alone would be enough to satisfy most needs. You can likely accomplish the same changes in Photoshop Express and Pixelmator, too, but Snapseed will save you a step or two and that can add up if you’re churning through a backlog of accumulated photos.

Easy effects without the cookie-cutter look

For people who want to share their photos on social networks or use them on personal and professional websites, the Creative Adjustments can really help simplify getting unique and interesting effects. Because each is infinitely tweakable, and because effects can be stacked, you also should be able to create images that don’t look like they came off a filter effect assembly line — something I find can happen far too often with apps like Instagram.

Just be careful when you’re stacking filters; I had one isolated incident where a photo developed some kind of digital noise as a result of combining effects. Luckily, Snapseed uses non-destructive editing techniques, so my original was preserved, but picky users might want to wait for a bug-busting update that addresses this small issue.

Lots of control, but not as fine-grained as the big boys

The lack of dedicated toolbars and brushes in Snapseed means it can’t achieve the level of specific manipulation possible with Photoshop and Pixelmator. You won’t find a blemish brush here, for instance, and while you can add control points that provide impressive control over specific parts of images, there’s no lasso to let you painstakingly stake out an exact, finite area to apply your effects.

This is, I think, both a blessing and a curse. For the average hobbyist user, the lack of fine controls merely means Snapseed’s interface is less cluttered and confusing. It also makes working with Snapseed feel less like work and more like fun, in my opinion. If there’s a blemish or a speck of dust you’d just love to zap away, however, it’ll be frustrating to have to do without.

A tool for photographers, not a profession all its own

The bottom line is that Snapseed, like its iOS predecessor, is a fun, useful tool that should help those who take photos for fun get even more enjoyment out of them. Unlike more full-featured editing suites, it won’t require you to dedicate time and effort to becoming not only a good photographer, but an expert on editing software as well.

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Of course, all of that comes with a price, and a recurring one at that. Carousel is a subscription service that ordinarily costs $99 per year (or $9.99 per month) but that is available at an introductory price of $59.99 (or $5.99 per month) annually. Luckily, Carousel also comes with a 30-day free trial subscription so you can see if you’re into what the service is selling.

Isn’t this just Photo Stream?

It’s understandable to assume that Carousel and Photo Stream are basically the same. Both advertise the ability to sync your photos across devices. But Carousel is actually quite a bit more sophisticated. It offers impressive yet easy-to-use editing tools (which use the same tech found in Adobe’s Lightroom program) on any device you happen to be using, as well as ample sharing options.

Editing

Carousel’s editing choices are impressive. There are a number of quick-hit filters you can apply with a single click (17 in total), which act like Instragram filters to give your pictures a stylish and distinctive look. You can also quickly adjust white balance, exposure and contrast (including using auto settings for the first two), and you can crop and rotate your photos on any platform (iPhone, iPad and Mac all have similar but specifically tailored interfaces).

All editing is nondestructive, too, so you can peel back effects at any time and restore your original image. This also allows you to compare various effects with others when applying filters. It’s remarkably powerful and very easy to use.

Sharing

Photo Stream is great for automatically keeping all of your photo libraries the same, but it doesn’t offer you much in the way of sharing photos beyond the service, outside letting you email, tweet or message images. Carousel also lets you share individual photos directly via email and Twitter and also via Facebook and Tumblr.

Also, you can share an entire Carousel (you can create up to five on one account) with a person or up to five people. Users will be notified via email that they’ve received access, and they can then check out the full gallery by downloading and installing one of the Carousel apps on any platform. It’s a huge advantage over Photo Stream in my opinion, and one many MobileMe Gallery users are likely missing from Apple’s iCloud offering. You and people you share Carousels with can also tag images as favorites, so that you can see which they like most and vice versa.

Control

Photo Stream has taken a lot of flak for the absence of a delete option for single photos (you have to reset your stream completely to erase them), and Carousel doesn’t make the same mistake. You can individually delete any photo you add; just hit the share button and a big red delete button also appears.

You also don’t automatically add every photo you take to Carousel, as you do when Photo Stream is turned on for iOS devices. Instead, you select them from your phone’s image gallery and camera roll. Imported photos are then grouped by date (something I do wish could be tweaked). For some who appreciate the automatism of Photo Stream, this will be a drawback, but for people who want control over what does and doesn’t go to the cloud, it’s a plus.

Great service, but is it worth it?

For a just-launched service, I was amazed that Carousel was so easy to pick and jump into, and that it worked out of the box exactly as advertised. There were no launch-day hiccups or syncing issues, and inviting others to check out my shared galleries worked smoothly, too. There’s no doubt, for me, that Adobe has produced something better than Photo Stream (it feels like what Photo Stream should have been), but the only question that remains is, Is it something I’d be willing to pay for long term?

There are lots of free options for sharing and storing photos, and even basic services like Flickr can accomplish a lot of what I want to do with Carousel’s sharing features. But Carousel really impressed with how slick it is and how much control it provides a user over what gets posted and who can see it. Adobe also did a great job of taking the most important Lightroom features and packaging them in a simple, accessible way for the average consumer.

In the end, I’m leaning toward signing up because I can already tell this will be the perfect tool for sharing photos with my far-flung family members in a more private way than other alternatives, and because in addition to the existing iOS and Mac apps, Adobe has promised that Android and Windows versions are in the pipeline, too. True cross-platform photo management, editing and sharing that lives in the cloud and works well is definitely something I can get on board with.

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Tablets and other mobile devices acting as unique, flexible control surfaces that can act with or without direct connection to their parent programs is an area that so far has only been lightly explored. Perhaps that’s because much of the focus so far has been on whether or not post-PC devices can truly operate independently of traditional computers. In our haste to prove they can, we may have overlooked the fact that sometimes, hardware codependence is a beautiful thing. Other software companies should take a close at what Adobe is doing here and see if something similar wouldn’t benefit their own products. Even Apple’s Final Cut video editing software cut definitely benefit from something similar.

Photoshop Touch will first be implemented in three official Adobe apps scheduled for May release, called Eazel, Color Lava and Nav. Each app essentially transforms your iPad into an additional control device or surface for your desktop-based installation of Adobe Photoshop. Adobe certainly isn’t the first to attempt this (there are apps that act as control surfaces for video and audio editing software, too, and even apps that work as game controllers), but it is probably the largest and most influential company to do so, and it has also gone a step further and made these tools available to third-party developers for use with its software.

The apps Adobe showed off work in a couple different ways. Nav allows you to create a custom tool palette, and also use a color picker and zoom controls. You can flip through open Photoshop files, and open files directly from your iPad in your desktop Photoshop installation. Nav is pure companion app, and doesn’t exist independently of Photoshop on the desktop.

Eazel and Color Lava, on the other hand, can work both with or without Photoshop itself being open. Eazel is an independent iPad painting app that very accurately simulates physical paint media (if the demos are any indication). It works independently, but allows you to transfer your paintings to Photoshop at any resolution, which means you can resize for print without any loss of quality. Color Lava, as its name suggests, is all about creating color palettes and swatches. These can later be synchronized with your desktop Photoshop, or it can be used in real-time with Photoshop open.

There’s also a video demo (see below) of one third-party Photoshop Touch app by Shawn Welch making the rounds (via MacRumors). It looks to act as a high-level management tool for all Photoshop installations on a given network. For example, you can open images simultaneously on all connected computers, and you also have very granular control over every individual running instance of Photoshop. Looks like a very handy tool for design studio art directors.

The apps previewed by Adobe show the company has been thinking carefully about how to extend interfaces to mobile devices in a way that makes sense. Each of the apps seems to work particularly well with a touch interface, and they do much more than treat the iPad as just another keyboard or mouse. These apps may leave some design professionals wishing the iPad had pressure-sensitive input (I know I was thinking wistfully of the Wacom-penabled Axiotron Modbook), but to dismiss them because of those kinds of hardware limitations is a mistake.

Adobe announced the Photoshop Touch apps and SDK alongside its CS5.5 paid mid-cycle upgrade, but according to the company’s official press materials, Touch apps will work with existing installations of Adobe Photoshop CS5 thanks to a free patch available May 3, 2011. I’m happy Adobe isn’t limiting the availability of these new features to CS5.5 customers, and I can’t wait to see how they work in an actual photo-editing workflow. Does anyone else think Adobe’s on the right track here?

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Through the past three quarters, Aperture users (like myself) have only seen two updates to the pro-level photo processing and organization application from Apple — and those have really only been stability type releases. About a year ago we saw Aperture’s consumer-level sibling get places and faces and some of us figured Aperture wasn’t far behind. Seems we may have figured wrong. I think Aperture users have been patient enough — we want a meaningful update already!

First, to clear the air: I like Aperture, and it works well for me. But it’s application envy that’s got my level of rile slowly compounding, as I watch the ‘little brother’ (iPhoto) get powerful features, and the competing Adobe Lightroom continue to wow and delight users. And at a $200 investment in the software, I feel like I need to stay committed to it and get my money’s worth. But I wonder at what point those of us using Aperture have begun suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, and are defending our captors rather than breaking free for greener pastures.

As a potential conflict of interest, I co-manage a Denver area Photoshop and Lightroom user group. It came about mostly out of my enjoyment of mingling with other shutter-happy folks, but has resulted in slowly painting me green with envy. Lightroom does some seriously awesome stuff! Starting with the fact that it’s 64-bit (which is huge when handling large image processing tasks), and it can handle area-specific color editing with brushes, and so on. It’s a super solid photo processing and organization tool. To boot, Adobe is very public about making its beta release of the upcoming version 3 available for anyone to try. It’s getting harder and harder to rationalize my devotion to Aperture.

Look, I realize Aperture isn’t broken, but neither was my last MacBook when I replaced it. I think we’re all guilty (at some level — I’m closer to the top, I’m sure) of wanting more. More power, more bells and whistles, more better! But If Apple’s going to offer a pro-level tool, it needs to give it care and feeding, thusly, showing some love to those who’ve shelled out good money for it. Here are some features I think Aperture needs to keep current users happy.

64-bit

Snow Leopard supports it now, so what reason is there not to offer this? I had a post similar to this ready around Snow Leopard launch, and trashed it because I figured it was a no-brainer that we’d see an update along these lines to Aperture in the following weeks. I am Jack’s broken heart.

Faces & Places

Aperture should at least keep up with its consumer level sibling. Faces and places are very useful tools — and it drives me batty having to manually tag my Aperture photos with this information.

Fix Tethered Shooting

To my knowledge, it’s probably limited to the Canon 40D, but Apple broke the ability to shoot in tethered mode for my dSLR a while back. This is lame. I want a fix!!

Focused Editing

Taking a page out of the Adobe book, I’d like to see the ability to apply edits to only select parts of a photo. Sometimes you only want to lighten, darken, or change color of a specific part, not the whole thing. I realize this is more an image editing feature, and not processing, but I’ve seen it in Lightroom, and I desire it.

These are just a few ideas, things that are ultimately important to me (though I think they’re general enough that others would agree). But what else? Let’s hear from the Aperture users, or potential Aperture users. What would you need to see in a hopefully sooner than later update to Aperture, to keep you happy and on board with Apple? What would cause you to jump ship and pursue other solutions?

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Last month, reinstalling Leopard on my G4 PowerBook broke Photoshop Elements 6, and one reason I’ve been able to procrastinate about the necessary application reinstall (there oughta be a better way, Adobe — nothing else broke) is that Pixelmator is getting so darned good that I haven’t really needed Elements for anything yet.

PSE 6 still offers several high-end features that aren’t supported in Pixelmator — automated panorama merges, group shot merge, cutouts, red-eye correction, advanced black & white conversions, the new Quick Selection Tool, and camera lens distortion correction. However, for most image editing tasks, Pixelmator, a Mac-only Elements challenger by UK-based developers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, is coming on strong. Updates are released every couple of months, with the latest version 1.4 “Sprinkle” being the program’s fourth major update. With this update, a new painting engine, Adobe Photoshop brushes support, a clouds filter, and document presets were added.

“The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor”

Pixelmator, claimed to be “The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor,” is engineered to tap into powerful OS X native graphics technologies like Core Image, which use your Mac’s hardware video muscle for image processing, as well as Open GL and ColorSync. The relative power and sophistication of your Mac’s graphics support will determine, to an extent, Pixelmator’s performance. If you have a high-performance graphics accelerator with lots of video RAM, you will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations very lively, but I’ve found the program quite usable even on a 1.33 GHz PowerBook.

What grabs you when you start up Pixelmator the first time is its user interface: windows bordered in translucent black, black tool palette backgrounds, and colorfully-styled tool icons that magnify and show tool tips OS X Dock-style on mouseover. I found the spectacular appearance a bit distracting initially, but have gotten used to it.

Layers and Smart Palettes

Like Photoshop, Pixelmator is a layers-based image editor that supports linking and blending layers, changing opacity, and creating clipping masks or layer masks to hide some layer portions. You can quickly create layers from photos, other pictures, selections or even iSight input.

Pixelmator’s Smart Palette Hide feature eliminates palette clutter when using adjustment tools or filters, making all unnecessary palettes temporarily dissolve when any of adjustment tools or filters are in play, allowing you to focus on just one image and your chosen tool.

I especially like Pixelmator’s color correction tools, which allow you to fine-tune color values like hue, saturation,color balance, luminance, color levels, channel mixing brightness and contrast.

Pixelmator’s Curves adjustment is notably nicer and more intuitive to use than PSE’s. There is also an Auto Enhance command if you want to let the program make the value-judgments with one-click convenience.

Pixelmator has more than 130 filters and special effects, and supports over 100 different file formats including PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS, and you can open and save Photoshop files with layers data preserved.

Organizing Principles

Pixelmator doesn’t have anything in photo organization support to rival Photoshop Element’s Adobe Bridge CS3 organizer application (previously only available with Adobe Creative Suite applications) that lets you browse through your hard drive to locate photos you want to open and edit, but you can use Pixelmator’s Photo Browser palette to access images in your iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums, and your Pictures folder.

Pixelmator 1.4 requires Mac OS 10.5.5 or higher, is available as a free 30-day demo and can be registered for $59. Version 1.4 is a free update to current registered users.

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Funtastic Photos taps into OS X technologies like the Quartz graphics engine, Spotlight, and ImageIO Kit, and offers advanced photo enhancement technologies like non-destructive editing with unlimited “rewind” undos, shadows and highlights, blurring, digital flash, contrast, saturation and more.

The app opens with a browser window that displays photo archives stored in iPhoto, folders, or even on other connected volumes. A tool bar at the top of the window taps into Apple’s OS X Leopard Quick Look feature, with buttons for other basic navigation and organization tasks.

Double-clicking a photo in the browser directory opens it in the Edit Window, with a different set of toolbar tools, including a handy button that zooms your currently-selected photo to full screen size, as well as toggling various file and cropping functions. A helpful Before & After command in the View menu provides side-by-side renderings of pre- and post-editing changes.

Hit the “Advanced” button, and an expanded choice of image manipulation options (40 different effect modules) opens in a sidebar, with capabilities in many instances approaching what’s possible with full-featured image editors like Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. Advanced editing tools are grouped in four categories: Fixing Tools, Color Adjustments, Artistic Adjustments, and Finishing Touches. You select the desired tool using checkboxes, and the function will either apply automatically, such as with Sharpen (which is a little too aggressive, IMHO), or sliders will appear permitting manual adjustments of qualities like exposure, contrast, color balance, levels, and so forth. If you don’t like a result, each tool has a reset button.

Another hide-able button bar at the bottom of the Funtastic Photos window displays sets of one-click special effects and styles options, such as Framed Oil Painting, Wanted Poster, Vintage Camera among others which gives you ten style options including 1830 Daguerreotype, 1880 Sepia tone, Date & Stamp, or Faded Color Photo, plus Artistic Adjustments that include blur, line art, mosaic and more. I found myself partial to the line art conversion effect.

Funtastic Photos supports saving standard file formats as well as adding the photos to your iPhoto library, uploading to online galleries like Facebook, Picasa Web Albums, MobileMe and Flickr, or sharing via email, all from within the program.

The Print & Layouts window provides a selection of print layouts and allows you to print in a variety of image options including a mosaic or collage option, which can be useful for printing up Christmas greetings and such. Print & Layouts is live with changes instantly visible. Printouts can be saved as images and used in the main photo editor.

What didn’t I like? The Sharpen command, as noted, is a bit too enthusiastic and needs an intensity slider, and the crop tool, while it works, uses a non-Mac-like box motif rather than a cursor-controlled selection marquee tool. There is no free-rotate function. Help documentation is sketchy and organized mainly in tutorials rather than the searchable instruction manual format I prefer for quick reference. Also, even though Ohanaware says some of the 1-Click Styles and effect modules are up to 330% faster in Funtastic Photos 1.0.2, I found the program more than a little sluggish in response on my getting-long-in-the-tooth 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4, but I expect that any Intel Mac would address that complaint handily.

Funtastic Photos sells for $34.95, but during December, 2008 is on sale for $27.99.

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Macs are definitely not all-work and no-play machines, and this fact is made even more evident via a nifty little application called Poladroid. With holidays coming up, nostalgia will most likely be at an all-time high and Poladroid helps you inject some into your modern pictures in a very slick way.

Not content to just provide a Photoshop (or PhotoBooth) filter, the makers of Poladroid came up with a way to electronically “develop” your photos into Polaroid-like snaps, complete with the ability to shake the film while you wait!

Simply drag an existing photo onto the application, sit back and watch the results appear – slowly – right before your eyes. The process is done when the red mark appears and you’ll find a full-size JPEG, complete with oversized white border, in your “Pictures” folder ready to add to your online or in-print collection. You can save a copy of the photo during any stage in the “developing” process by right-clicking on the film and choosing “I want a sample now”. But there is one catch…you only get to process ten photos per application launch as that was the limitation in the original Polaroid film cartridges.

I have made the full size before and after images available, but the actual source photo was much larger. Poladroid auto-crops the images, so make sure you are working with what you want your end result to be. For those that make holiday DVDs through iMovie, you could save a photo at various points during the developing process to make for a very nice transition element or just use the resultant image to mark special moments on a timeline.

If you are inclined to share outside your normal circles, Poladroid has its own Flickr group and encourages you to add your own “new nostalgia” to the mix. If you are more of a DIY-type person, right click on the Poladroid application itself, “Show Package Contents”, and drill down into “Contents/MacOS/stuff” to find a Polaroid-style frame you can use in your own creations.

Poladroid is free, and available for download and is a great example of the fun one can have with REALBasic.

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