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Posts tagged with "camera"

iPad 2 Gets “Real” Photo Booth with IncrediBooth Update

Apple’s Photo Booth software that comes pre-installed in the iPad 2 is great and offers lots of fun, but if you’ve been looking for an actual photo booth app with the vintage look of photo strips to virtually print with your friends and loved ones (who hasn’t done that at least once), then you should consider re-downloading IncrediBooth for iOS, which has been updated to natively support the iPad 2.

I was one of those that bought IncrediBooth last year but never really used it because the iPhone’s screen was too small to have fun with my friends in front of the camera. But on the iPad? Should be much better. As usual, you can take photos with 4 different effects, share to Facebook or email, save to the camera roll. In this update, a new photo setting has been introduced: Betsy X.

Combined with Apple’s Photo Booth, IncrediBooth is one of those apps that will grant you hours of fun and picture taking. Go get it in the App Store at $0.99.

Pano for iPhone Adds Tap-to-Focus

Pano, the popular application to take panoramic shots with your iPhone, has been updated to include support for tap-to-focus and exposure points. Even though the developers of Pano are promising a huge update is coming soon (perhaps with iPad 2 support and a revamped user interface?), this new version is worth mentioning as it adds a functionality requested by several Pano users in the past. As you take your pano shots, you can tap on screen to set the squares for exposure and focus. It works like in Camera+ or the default Camera app, and it’s a great addition to Pano.

Many users still prefer Pano to most recent alternatives like Occipital’s 360 to take panoramic photographs with their iPhones. While Occipital’s app lets you create your pano shot by just waving the iPhone around, Pano works by snapping a series of pictures and then blending them together in the processing section.

Pano is available at $1.99 in the App Store.

Labelbox Prettifies Your Photos, For Free

Labelbox, a free iPhone app by Stepcase, has been quickly climbing up the App Store charts lately thanks to a neat functionality that enables you to apply colored tapes to your photos to make them prettier, and share them online with your friends.

Labelbox is free, but doesn’t have any sort of ads and comes with a polished interface to edit your photos. Once you’ve loaded a photo from the camera roll, or shot a new one directly within the app, you’ll be able to swipe on it to apply a “tape” that can also contains a written description with a custom font. So, say you want to add some style to your photos or a few words to better describe the subject, Labelbox has got you covered. You can choose from a variety of colored tapes (some are really cute), and even mix them to create a “frame” to place around your photo. To remove a tape you simply have to tap & hold, but you can shake your iPhone to clear the whole screen.

You can share your photo creations to Twitter, Facebook and tumblr through the Step.ly network. The best results are achieved when you combine the filters offered by an app like Instagram with the colored tapes of Labelbox.

The app is a free download in the App Store.

iPad 2 Getting Augmented Reality Apps

With two cameras on board, it’s no surprise that developers are considering the possibility of photography and video apps for the tablet – in spite of its form factor that’s not exactly meant for quick picture taking or video shooting. Still, as Apple has proved at its March 2 event, there’s plenty of room for iPad apps that use the camera without forcing you to hold the device upright – such as FaceTime or Photo Booth, two pieces of software that use the iPad’s cameras to create unique (and funny) experiences. So while it’s likely that we won’t see a Camera+ for iPad in the near future, I believe several developers are playing around with the idea of alternative applications for the iPad that revolve around the use of the camera.

Self-portrait photography and video-mirroring apps sounds pretty obvious right now, and augmented-reality software for the iPad looks more promising in my opinion. As reported by All Things Digital, developers Total Immersion have announced AR Magic Mirror, an augmented-reality app that’s based on the camera to let users virtually try out different “hairstyles, outfits and accessories”. It sounds very similar to the French app for iPhone that let you try virtual glasses using a face-tracking technology, and indeed Total Immersion will use a technique to recognize a user’s face in order for this to work.

With the portability, processing power and broad consumer adoption of the iPad 2, a simple face tracking app today could soon become an essential makeover tool with beauty products at retail. Likewise a traditional game of online chess could become a massive, multiplayer game in the real world playing alongside vivid 3D characters and environments.

AR Magic Mirror will be a free download in the App Store, and it will be among the first augmented reality apps for the iPad – a trend that will evolve and proliferate in the next months. Check out the video below. Read more

iPad 2 Camera Examples & iMovie

The iPad 2 is outfitted with a pair of cameras that allow for intimate FaceTime and HD recording sessions, but how do these cameras rank on the still photo front? Several blogs have posted some pics already, but I wanted to do a few examples of my own (including a homemade movie) that really shows off what you can expect to do with your new tablet.

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QuickShot: The First iPad 2 Camera App with Dropbox Uploading

If you just got a shiny new iPad 2 at your local Apple Store and you’d like to try out the cameras as proper photographic tools, take a look at the latest QuickShot update. We’ve already reviewed QuickShot here and it was a great and simple iPhone app that mimicked the default iOS camera app, but had Dropbox integration built-in to instantly upload photos to Dropbox.

The new version of the app comes with full iPad 2 support and we believe it’s the first iOS application to have Dropbox camera uploading for the new device.

Get the app here.

Instagram 1.5 Released: Tilt-Shift Effect, News Feed

Image sharing service Instagram, very popular thanks to its 2 million users but still available as an iPhone-only app, has released a new update today bringing the application to version 1.5. The new Instagram introduces a new effect, performance improvements for previous ones, a completely revamped news feed and the possibility to share photos via email.

The new filter, Tilt-Shift, comes after several requests from users that were forced to apply this specific effect in other iPhone apps like Tiltshift Gen; now Instagram integrates the possibility to blur a portion of an image with a slider directly into its interface without leaving the app. All you have to do is pinch to adjust the orientation of the blur and focus area. Other filters got a speed bost as well and now feel much more responsive, especially on iOS 4.3.

The major new feature, however, is the News Feed that’s been redesign to include more activity from your friends. Together with follow and comment notifications, you can now see what your friends are doing, the comments they post, the photos they like and the people they start following, too. I’m not sure I like this News Feed as it brings a lot more social information into the stream and it might get annoying over time, but we’ll see. For now, it’s clear that Instagram is moving towards a more social approach besides the “simple app that takes photos” concept.

Upon taking a picture, you can also share it via email to your friends and family. I’m pretty sure this sharing option should also allow you to drop pictures onto your Dropbox using this service, and I’ll make sure to try it later. This is a welcome addition to the app. Last, you can tap & hold a username to initiate a reply – I don’t use Instagram much to reply to people but I guess the heavy Instagrammers out there will insanely love this option.

Instagram 1.5 is propagating now in the App Store; it’s available for free here. Check it out, it’s a nice update. More screenshots below.

Update: Associating a Send To Dropbox email address to Instagram won’t let you automatically save photos into your Dropbox. Just a text file with the email you shared.

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This Video Was Shot With The iPad 2

With all the hands-on videos and first impressions about the iPad 2 we collected from around the web last week, we didn’t have the chance to take a look at the actual quality of videos recorded through the new device’s cameras. The iPad 2 features both a rear and front-facing camera to shoot videos and photos, use Photo Booth and have video calls with your friends and family using FaceTime. The front-facing camera is a VGA one, whilst the rear one allows for 720p HD video recording at 30 frames per second, with zoom up to 5x for stills. Apple didn’t provide detailed specs on the megapixels of the rear camera, but it appears that it will be a 1 MP one similar to the camera found on the iPod touch 4th gen.

So how will videos shot on the iPad 2 look, exactly? We don’t know yet, but the video embedded below was indeed recorded with the iPad 2’s back camera. The video doesn’t offer precise indication of how videos will look on the new tablet, mainly because it was shot in low-light conditions, shared via email and then uploaded to Youtube – which applies compression to video files.

Some quality got lost in the process, but it’s one of the first examples of how iPad 2 videos will look on Youtube, right? Check it out. [via iPadevice] Read more

Socialcam, The “Instagram for Video”, Now Available. Our Review

A few weeks ago we talked about Socialcam, a new iOS and Android app from the creators of Justin.tv that’s aimed at revolutionizing the mobile video sharing space by offering a friendly user-experience heavily inspired by the current winner of mobile photo sharing apps, Instagram. Socialcam is finally available for free in the App Store and, after some quick tests, I can say this new app / service has a lot of potentialities to become the “Instagram for video”, but it needs a series of refinements in the settings to allow users to upload videos at the quality they want.

The strongest selling point of Instagram, in fact, is that it’s easy to use and, while images get compressed to enable faster uploading times on WiFi and 3G, users won’t notice the decrease in quality thanks to the filters provided by the app. Filters in Instagram are both a nice photographic addition and a way to “hide” the fact that photos are compressed at lower quality. Socialcam, however, doesn’t come with filters and videos are heavily compressed even when uploaded through WiFi. From what I’ve seen so far, this will make most videos look crappy on the iPhone 4 which, by the way, can actually do HD video recording. Socialcam should definitely offer some settings to allow users to upload and wait for the quality they want, as this could be great for videographers willing to share their creations on the go. Read more