Bits Blog: Instagram Will Begin Showing Ads in the Photo Stream

Gadgetwise: Getting the Right Light in a Photo

The eye can see a much greater range of light and dark than a camera can, which is why windows look like glowing boxes in daylight photos taken indoors.

That is where H.D.R. (High Dynamic Range) photography comes in. It takes a series of overexposed, underexposed and properly exposed photos and then mashes the best parts together to cover a full range of light. It makes images that are much closer to what the eye actually sees.

But there have been barriers to using H.D.R. The primary issue is that moving subjects change position from shot to shot in the series and appear blurry in the final images. That limits H.D.R.’s use to still-life photography conducted under careful conditions with a steady tripod.

But a new H.D.R. software program from Unified Color, called HDR Expose 3, does two things well that other H.D.R. programs generally don’t (especially the H.D.R. software built into cameras). One is to line up pictures from slightly different angles, which eliminates the need for a tripod. If you’re taking hand-held H.D.R. photos, though, be sure your shutter is set to a fast speed, burst mode and auto bracketing — and you’ll still have to be as steady as possible.

The other thing that it does is make moving objects, like people walking through the frame, solid instead of a blur. In the software, you pick the frame in which you like the positioning of the people (or kites, clouds, animals — whatever is moving) and the program compares that frame with others. It eliminates the elements that are in different positions from the frame you picked when it mashes them together.

H.D.R. has been criticized for the otherworldly look it can impart. Expose 3 settings allow it to be much more subtle and natural, though it also has a “grunge” setting that delivers striking effects.

There is a little bit of a learning curve to the product, which is available either as a stand-alone program or as a plug-in that works in other programs like Adobe’s Photoshop. The video tutorials on the Unified Color Web site are a big help, especially because the software isn’t foolproof — you need to learn a few manual fixes.

The stand-alone version of HDR Expose 3 is $120, or you can buy a $90 version called 32 Float V3, which adds Expose 3’s features to Photoshop. ROY FURCHGOTT

Gadgetwise Blog: Free Lightroom 5 Photo Editing Software

Lightroom 5’s Radial Gradient feature can be used to create a vignette, where a picture darkens towards the edges.

Adobe Systems has begun giving away the newest version of its photo editing software, Lightroom 5. But there is a catch.

Lightroom 5 is a public beta test version of a sister product to Adobe’s Photoshop. Lightroom is easier to use than Photoshop, but just as powerful for making overall adjustments to things like color, shadows and contrast. However, it is not as good for extremely detailed editing and has fewer tools.

At the top of the list of Lightroom’s new features is an improved ability to erase and replace objects in photos. The older Lightroom was best at erasing small aberrations, like dust spots. The new Lightroom lets users pick a larger area in any shape to replace. It’s still not as powerful as the Photoshop tool called “Content Aware Fill,” but it’s close.

Adobe has also added a feature called Radial Gradient, which lets photographers draw a circular or oval area in which to apply effects. It can be used to create a vignette, where a picture darkens toward the edges, for instance. So you could circle someone’s face, and have the picture dim as it moves away from her, creating a spotlight to draw the eye.

A new feature called Upright examines the horizontal and vertical lines of a photo to correct for lens distortion. So if you shot a photo with a wide-angle lens, and things at the edges look warped, Upright would adjust it to look as though it had been photographed with a more neutral lens.

The Upright feature.

Slide shows can now include video clips, and you can make and save custom design pages for photo books. There are other enhancements as well.

So what is the catch? When the beta test is over, you won’t be able to use Lightroom 5 anymore unless you buy the new version. Upgrade pricing will be available to people who bought an earlier version of Lightroom.

Bits Blog: Twitter Adds Photo Filters in Battle With Instagram

Twitter

So many filters, so little time.

Twitter on Monday announced a new feature that will allow people to edit photos and apply photo filters from within Twitter-built applications.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Coleen Baik, a senior designer at Twitter, said that sharing photos has been an important part of the Twitter experience.

“Starting today, you’ll be able to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter,” Ms. Baik wrote. “The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet.”

As I first reported last month, Twitter has been hard at work on filters for some time, hoping to allow people to bypass other photo-sharing services, like Instagram, now owned by Facebook.

Last week Instagram eliminated the ability of its users to share images directly within Twitter. The two companies, once friends, are now direct competitors.

The Twitter app will offer eight filters, which the company said would include black-and-white and a vintage look, and come with a “bird’s-eye view” mode that shows in a grid view how a photo would change. People can also crop and enhance images from within the app.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm, said Monday’s announcement was no suprise given the popularity of filters with today’s smartphone-using consumers.

“Twitter is more valuable to most users than other filtering services, such as Instagram,” Mr. Gartenberg said in an e-mail. “Lack of allowing content to flow where users want it to flow means consumers will choose the service of greater value.”

One of the main reasons the company is using its own filters is because of the company’s Very Important Tweeters, known internally as V.I.T.’s, who are usually celebrities and media personalities. Until now, most V.I.T.’s have taken photos with other apps, including Instagram, where they have larger followings. With the latest addition, Twitter hopes to keep those people inside its own service.

Twitter’s photo filters were built by Aviary, a company that offers software to mobile and Web developers.

Opinion: A Lament for the Photo Album

THERE was a time when you’d come back from Spain, or even just the Jersey Shore, with a couple of rolls of film tucked safely into your toiletry bag. A few days later, you’d find yourself in line at the photo desk of your local pharmacy, waiting to retrieve your developed images with a sense of nervous anticipation.

It took willpower to make it onto the sidewalk without sneaking a peek inside the envelope. Invariably, half of the pictures were out of focus. Sometimes, you’d find that your head had been cut off. But typically there would be at least one fantastic shot as well, with all of you looking radiant and spontaneous, and a few more than that would be passable. For your efforts, you’d come away with something with which to fill a few pages of an album, with enough room left over to add the occasional matchbook front or dried flower.

The digital photography revolution roughly coincided with the births of my two daughters, now ages 4 and 6. Finally, I had something to immortalize in an album besides my dysfunctional romantic life. And so I immortalized — and then some. No event seemed too trivial to capture. When they dressed up in tutus and swim goggles just to be silly, when they danced suggestively to Miley Cyrus, I felt compelled to capture the image for posterity’s sake.

For a while, I kept up with the sorting, naming, uploading and ordering (and editing of) prints. The albums featuring my daughters as newborns are both masterpieces of discernment. It was some time in 2009 that I fell behind, then so far behind that I nearly stopped taking pictures of them, since the very thought of new images of their grinning punims became synonymous in my mind with hard labor. Indeed, for my past efforts, I now had a hard drive filled with hundreds if not thousands of photo files that I lacked the energy to go through. Never mind to look at again. On my bimonthly to-do lists, along with “Clean out basement” and “Write thank-you note to Mom’s best friend for educational toys received a year ago, Christmas,” I now found myself adding, “Deal with photo nightmare.”

The years passed. Digital photography and I were at a stalemate until October, when my dad died. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still shocked me in a way that only the child of a deceased parent can understand. I simply could not believe that he was gone from this earth — that he’d never totter up the front steps of my house again, as he did every other Sunday, and hook his cane around the interior knob of the front door.

I couldn’t believe I’d never see his face again either, even if the blank and gaunt one that I witnessed at the end bore almost no resemblance to the quietly beaming Dad I’d known in the family, or the quietly intense one I’d see practicing, teaching or onstage. (He was a cellist.) The loss of my father and the resulting disorientation made me crave paper photos in a way I hadn’t in years, especially ones of him before Parkinson’s disease stole his last facial expression. They were no substitute for the man, but at least they could be touched and held — and beheld — unlike my father, who was now unreachable and unable to be seen.

I found I wanted hard copies of my still-living family members, too — concrete facts to counteract the sensation of sloshing sea beneath my feet. My mother must have felt the same way. The morning after my father died, she got out her old albums from the 1970s and early ’80s — fat, crepitating affairs with gilded vinyl covers in turquoise and maroon, featuring page after page of fading Kodak snapshots of the family that she and my dad had raised together.

Here, undeniably, was our family’s past, dated by year, and laid out for all the world to see: our holidays in Cape Cod, Canada and Vermont; our house exchanges to Twickenham, England, and Lausanne, Switzerland; our circuitous drives to Wisconsin to see my dad’s cousin who owned a dairy farm; our Thanksgiving dinners and concerts, birthdays and graduations. The setbacks and sadness, anger and boredom that mark any human existence were nowhere in evidence, but that was O.K. It was still a record of my dad’s and our lives: my sisters learning how to horseback-ride; my hideous Dorothy Hamill haircut; my dad chasing down a ball on a tennis court. I’d never been so thankful for the diligent organizer that my mother has always been.

Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Pretty One.”

Bits Blog: Twitter to Add Photo Filters to Compete With Instagram

Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can’t buy it, build it.

In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network, according to people who work at the company but asked not to be named as they are not allowed to discuss unannounced projects. The filters on Instagram make photos look like they were shot with 1960s Kodachrome or with 1890s sepia tone film.

Although adding photo filters to Twitter may seem like a trivial addition to a social network that processes nearly a billion 140-character missives every two days, it could prove to be an important part of the company’s business.

As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock.

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswomen, declined to comment.

According to one Twitter employee, the company’s V.I.T.’s, or Very Important Tweeters, as they are known internally, usually celebrities and media personalities, would be especially happy to see filters in the Twitter mobile apps. Most V.I.T.’s now use Instagram to take photos, and then share them on Twitter, where they often have a larger following.

Although Twitter considered a photocentric product acquisition for some time, the move to build its own filters was hastened after Facebook said it would buy Instagram for $1 billion. (The deal ended up closing at $715 million after Facebook’s precipitous stock drop.)

After the Instagram acquisition was announced, Twitter executives explored buying a competing photo service or application. Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, both led the search, people close to the executives said. After meeting with and appraising some companies, Twitter’s executives decided the price tags were not worth the goods, and decided the company could build its own filters instead.

Although Twitter inked a deal with the photo-storage site Photobucket in June, the company has since started storing images on its own servers.

Twitter is exploring adding other tools to its mobile applications, one employee said, including the ability to upload and possibly edit videos without having to go through a third-party application or service, like YouTube.

Sadly, the Twitter-centric photo filters are not expected to be named after birds.

(Photo) Diddy & Cassie Step Out In Their Halloween Costumes!

Diddy and Cassie used try to play coy all the time about their romance, but that seems to have went out the window and the couple is showing public affection often whether it be in person, on Twitter, or on Instagram. The duo stepped out yesterday for a Halloween themed party and although they weren’t dressed in a certain theme, they still looked great together! Check out their costumes below.

Julie A.

Diddy dressed up as singer Prince while Cassie was dressed as Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra

(PHOTO) NBA: Birdman, DJ Khaled & Usain Bolt Courtside For Heat-Celtics Game!

LOVE that the NBA season is back!!!  I always like to see what celebs turn up courtside to show support for their team!  Last night as the season kicked off, Birdman and DJ Khaled  along with Usain Bolt were spotted at the Heat/Celtics game.

GameTimeGirl

*Check out the pic in the gallery above*

Photo via BR

Germany Reopens Investigation of Facebook’s Photo Archiving

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Bits Blog: Instagram Refreshes App by Including Photo Maps

The photo map feature in the new version of Instagram’s app.

Instagram may be waiting for its billion-dollar sale to Facebook to be finalized, but the company is not resting on its laurels. The company, working out of offices in San Francisco, continues to crank out updates to its popular photo-sharing application.

On Thursday, it rolled out the third version of its application. The update makes several improvements, including refreshing the look of profiles, smoothing out performance bugs and allowing users to mark comments as spam. But its main focus is the addition of a photo map that lets members plot their Instagram pictures on an interactive world map.

“If the last version was all about production and taking the perfect picture, then this version is really about new ways of browsing,” said Kevin Systrom, chief executive and one of the founders of the company. “You can explore photographs, not just in a chronological order, but in geography.”

The new features won’t automatically chart a user’s entire backlog of photographs across a map. Instead, it will scan for photographs that are already tagged with geographical data and let users decide whether or not to plot them. Instagram users can look through the photo maps of their friends and other users, and each time an Instagram user uploads a photograph to the service, it will ask them whether or not they want to add the photograph to the map.

Mr. Systrom hopes that the new features will warm users to the idea of adding geographical data to their pictures.

“We want to make it clear what geotagging is and show how it lets you curate your archive on a map,” said Mr. Systrom.

Currently, only 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users add their location to photographs. Someday the company hopes to offer the ability for users to see all of the images uploaded to Instagram around a certain location or event.

“If people produce more geo-data and understand how its being used, we can do more with it,” said Mr. Systrom. “Wouldn’t you want to look at the London Olympics as it happens on Instagram?”

Instagram now has upward of 80 million users and 4 billion photos in its system. And still, the service is “growing quickly,” said Mr. Systrom. He said the company has had little to no contact with Facebook regarding the latest version of its application.

“We’re independent until they say its O.K. to start collaborating,” he said. “We’re waiting on them to give us the green light.”

Photo Sharing Shows All Sides of USA Basketball

Step 1: Find a sleeping USA Basketball teammate. Step 2: Move stealthily into position. Step 3: Frame picture. Step 4: Click. Step 5: Tag the photo with “GotEm” or “gotem,” providing an exclamation point when warranted. Step 6: Post to Instagram, so anyone in the world with Internet access can see LeBron James wearing a not-so-manly sleeping mask, or Anthony Davis with an airline blanket pulled snugly around his neck.

Then, boom, “got ’em,” as Love would say.

Approached for an interview about the USA Basketball-Instagram trend he embraced and furthered, Love laughed. “I was about to post one right now,” he said.

Two weeks ago, Love had never heard of Instagram. Now, because of the photo-sharing Web site and other social networks, he considers himself the unofficial team photographer. In recent days, Love posted snapshots of himself dressed in preppy Ralph Lauren attire (Caption: “Getting my Justin Timberlake on”) and of Carmelo Anthony asleep with teammates celebrating in the background (“Weekend at Bernie’s. GotEm.”).

Love is far from alone. His teammate Deron Williams persuaded him to join Instagram. Chris Paul is on it, too, along with James, Paul’s brother and Anthony’s best friend.

Those who follow their feeds regularly could be forgiven for believing all the United States men’s national team players do is sleep.

Such self-documentation is nothing new, of course, not in this age of social media, of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But this is uncharted territory, too, a glimpse inside areas of the Olympics once closed to the public — like the team bus.

That means fans can now view drool frozen on James’s chin. Or see famous American basketball players dining together at Johnny Rockets, oversized sunglasses covering their eyes.

For all the comparisons between this United States team and the Dream Team from 1992, imagine a picture of Michael Jordan inside a casino or sprawled on the team bus. Imagine Magic Johnson in a sleeping mask, or Larry Bird giddily typing a “gotem” tag. As times changed, so did fans’ access to athletes, if not their actual relationships with them.

“It’s moving in a more accessible direction,” Love said. “Fans dig that. I dig that. It’s a way to share the experience with everybody. They almost feel like they’re with you here.”

Sports, at least from the behind-the-scenes perspective, were not always this way, not even in recent years when it was safe for an all-N.B.A. forward to catch a catnap without fear of a photo op. In those days, athletes might say “got ’em” when they scored an actual basket or won an actual game.

Nate McMillan, a United States assistant, played and coached in the N.B.A., and in all his years, he witnessed something for the first time this week: players preparing for naps by covering their faces with blankets.

“It’s reality,” McMillan said. “That’s what everybody wants now. They want reality TV. They want the instant photographs. The cameras are there, in our locker rooms, huddles, interviewing coaches during games. What happens on the bus was once sacred. Now, it’s part of what the fans want to see.”

The American team took its Instagram cues from Paul, who said his Los Angeles Clippers engaged in a similar practice throughout last season. Their photographs, Paul said, often ended up on “SportsCenter,” fueling the number taken.

Love saw the photo wars as another route to camaraderie, another way to bond. His favorite picture captured seven sleepers: Paul gripping a pillow in a bear hug, James Harden with that unsightly beard tucked into his chest, Russell Westbrook wearing sunglasses inside and even Coach Mike Krzyzewski in the background in what looks like the coach section of the plane.

“They got me yesterday,” Anthony said, his smile stretched as wide as a basketball court. “There will definitely be payback. It’s going to be trouble for Kevin.”

Gadgetwise Blog: A Photo App That Pays You

Usually you have to pay for an app, but Foap is an app that proposes to pay you.

Foap puts your iPhone photos up for sale online.

The offer is pretty straightforward. Take a picture with your phone (or load one from your camera to your phone), then send it to Foap. It then goes to Foap’s virtual stock photo agency, which puts it up for sale at a price of $10. If it sells, the fee is split, $5 to Foap, $5 to the photographer. Payments are made through PayPal.

Not all the photos will be accepted. The company said it reviews each photo for its commercial prospects and accepts those it thinks will sell. It said the process should take less than 24 hours, often less than 12, but in my test it was much longer than that, close to two days.

As with any judging panel, what is picked and what is not is something of a mystery. Foap said it did not want photos that use filters or effects (sorry, Instagrammers), or anything that makes the pictures arty. Yet if you browse the choices, you’ll see plenty of both. I submitted 25 photos: 21 were published. One was clearly a photo illustration and was turned down for being too small an image (it was taken with an older iPhone).

A potential hitch is that all rights are sold when the photos are sent in. If you send in a picture of your grandmother and it shows up on a poster saying, “Help Elderly Drug Addicts,” tough luck. You have no recourse. The company said it was looking into a way for photographers to give approvals for the use of their work.

The company said it paid out $15,000 in its first week. I have no idea how fast payment is — I haven’t sold anything. Not even photos of Gary Raad, the Neighborly Cat, which I thought would appeal to someone, somewhere.

The app could use a few tweaks. It would be good to allow commas in the tags, which would improve searches. Without commas, my photos of New Zealand have separate tags of New and Zealand.

If you don’t want to just post random images, Foap posts “Missions,” which are assignments for specific images. Currently there are a number requesting photos of Skane, in Sweden. At $5 an image, you’ll have to sell a lot of them to afford the airfare.