Adobe has released its long-awaited and highly controversial Creative Cloud suite of applications for both longtime professional devotees and the newcomers it hopes to attract. Having historically operated on an upgrade schedule of every 12 to 16 months, Adobe is now releasing new subscription-only versions of its flagship Photoshop image-editing program—called Photoshop CC (for Creative Cloud)—along with more than a dozen of its other creative apps.

While the merits of Adobe's new subscription model promise to be a continuing topic of debate, the apps themselves are the same creative-suite products that photographers, artists, videographers, graphic designers, animators, and other people in creative fields have become attached to over the past 20 years. Although Adobe has dropped some software packages and consolidated others in the lineup since last year, the basic Creative Cloud suite will look familiar to veteran users.

As always, applications reside on your hard drive—you do not have to be connected to the Internet to use any Creative Cloud application after you’ve downloaded it. The system requires a connection every 180 days to double-check your annual subscription status (every 30 days for month-to-month subscriptions), but that is the extent of cloud involvement with typical app usage.

Old-timers are back

Released alongside Photoshop today are Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Flash Professional, Audition, Dreamweaver, InCopy, After Effects, Prelude, and SpeedGrade, in addition to companion and add-on software packages such as Edge Animate, Bridge, and Media Encoder. Muse, the year-old visual Web-design program, has entered the mix. Edge Tools & Services, also part of Creative Cloud, includes Edge Animate, Edge Inspect, Edge Web Fonts, Edge Code (Preview), Edge Reflow (Preview), and PhoneGap Build. All are available with the basic $50 subscription. Fireworks is still around, but with minimal updates. Photoshop Extended is gone, folded into the main Photoshop program. Flash Builder Premium, Acrobat XI Pro, and now Lightroom are also part of the suite. Lightroom and Acrobat XI are available both in subscription format within Creative Cloud and boxed on their own the traditional way.

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Adobe has added some nice features to its new, subscription-based, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud; it also rolled all of the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. The inclusion of 3D tools aside, Photoshop CC isn’t the most feature-packed release ever, but it has some good stuff, especially in the realm of actions, filters, and enlargements. Unfortunately, Bridge CC, Photoshop's perennial file management sidekick, didn’t fare as well—it's had several useful features removed.

New features

Photoshop CC, which you download and install locally on your hard drive, fully supports Retina displays (Apple’s superhigh-resolution monitors); you’ll spot a new 200 percent option in the View menu (which lets you see Web graphics at the size they’ll appear in a browser). Several plug-ins also support these crystal-clear displays including Liquify, Save for Web, Merge to HDR, Vanishing Point, Adaptive Wide Angle, Lens Correction, and the Filter Gallery. And look for two tiny new icons at the bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading artwork to the collaborative, online Behance community.

One of the most useful new features in Photoshop CC is for conditional actions; it lets you record an action that chooses among previously recorded actions and runs the one that matches criteria you set (in order to account for variables such as document size, color modes, adjustment layers, and so on). The Image Size dialog box was simplified and includes a resizable image preview that lets you see the results of your settings before applying them. And a new Preserve Details interpolation method sharpens areas of fine detail in your image in order to produce higher-quality enlargements (this new method includes a noise-reduction slider, too). Happily, all interpolation methods now have keyboard shortcuts, and the new Fit To drop-down menu has a handy list of size presets.

Introduced in Photoshop CS6, the Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift filters make creating blurry backgrounds easier than ever. In CC, those filters work with Smart Filters, so you can run them nondestructively. They also take advantage of OpenCL, a technology found in newer graphics cards that lets Photoshop tap into the card’s processing power whenever it wants. As a result, previewing and applying these filters is noticeably faster.

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The fifth incarnation of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom arrives as both a preview and an adjunct to the company's new Creative Cloud cross-platform suite of apps targeted to photographers, graphic designers, Web developers, and cinematographers. While Lightroom 5, released Monday at midnight Eastern time, is nominally part of Adobe's new subscription-based Creative Cloud successor to Creative Suite, it differs in that it is not subscription-based, but rather available as a traditional software license in a box. Lightroom 5 was released as a public beta in April.

Lightroom is popularly considered as a competitor to Apple's Aperture—which is not strictly a photo editor, but a photo management tool. That said, both have extensive photo editing capabilities—so much so, that many Adobe photo hobbyists may now consider Lightroom a substitute for much of what they can accomplish in Photoshop, for a lot less money.

By itself, Lightroom 5 has some handy new features, including a more advanced, flexible healing brush, the Upright straightening tool, a radial highlighting gradient, smart previews for remote editing, video slideshows, and advanced photo book creation capabilities, among many other enhancements.

Advanced healing brush

While the Healing Brush—used to remove unwanted objects or people from photos—has been part of Lightroom (and Photoshop) for some time, the new Lightroom version features more advanced technology. Previously, the brush offered only a circular shape, making it difficult to remove oddly shaped objects from a photo. Version 5 lets users adjust the size of the brush and move it in precise paths. Sliders let you adjust the size and opacity of the fix. This improvement will prove especially convenient for removing facial flaws from portraits.

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Animated GIFs—we’ve all seen plenty of them. They’ve become the de facto standard for Internet memes and funny animations, but they’re also useful as alternatives to short video files—any modern browser (or in-app Web view) displays animated GIFs, so you don’t need to worry about which video formats a particular browser supports. In fact, some software vendors have taken to using animated GIFs instead of videos for short demos.

But how do you make good animated GIFs? The easiest method I’ve found is the $5 GIF Brewery (Mac App Store link). This nifty utility is simple to use, yet it offers a slew of useful features for creating your own animated images.

To create an animated GIF, first you open your source video in GIF Brewery. The app works with any video format supported by QuickTime on your particular Mac, which means it also works with formats supported by QuickTime plug-ins you’ve installed. GIF Brewery presents an editing window that looks much like what you’d see in any standard video-editing app. Buttons in the toolbar let you resize and crop the video to best fit the size you want for your final animated image.

If you don’t want to use the entire video in your animated GIF, you simply drag the playhead to where you want your animation to start, and then click Set Start. Drag the playhead to where you want the animation to end, and then click Set End. (The app offers many keyboard shortcuts for editing your clip.) You can preview the video at any time by clicking the Play button; however, oddly, instead of playing just your selection, GIF Brewery plays the entire video. In addition, according to the developer, OS X limits the in-app preview of your animated GIF to 10 frames per second. To view the GIF at full framerate, you need to export it (see below) and then open it in your browser.

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We all receive photos—scads of photos—via email, many of which we ignore because they’re not worth the bandwidth. But what if you want to show your kid that cute picture of a cat dressed up as a scuba diver—the one you got some past Halloween from who knows whom? As time passes, it’s harder to sort out, much less find and archive, such images. That’s where the appropriately titled Lost Photos (Mac App Store link) comes in.

A lightweight utility from Space Inch, Lost Photos (free; $3 to download unlimited photos) has a fresh, clean interface. The app connects to your IMAP email accounts using a secure connection and extracts all the photos from each account quickly and efficiently. Just type your email address and password into the Lost Photos window, and the app sifts through every message on the server, scraping up any photos it finds and placing them into a folder, named for that email account, on your drive for later viewing. (The app does not remove images from the mail server; it just finds and downloads them.)

The app provides some simple filters to help spare you the agony of viewing every company logo and headshot you receive: For example, the program can skip images under 8KB, as well as GIF files. (In my testing, it took about 25 minutes for the app to crawl through some 1300 email messages with these two options enabled.) You can also choose to ignore any images received before a particular date—so, for example, you can have Lost Photos search only messages received in the past two years.

Once Lost Photos finishes its search, the app offers buttons for adding all found images to iPhoto or showing your found photos in the Finder (where you can choose to manually import only some of them to iPhoto). You also get buttons for posting your found scuba-kitty image to Twitter or Facebook, emailing it to your friends, or posting it on Flickr.

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Both digital cameras and iPhoto have been around long enough that few long-time Mac users have what you would call an entirely manageable iPhoto library. Their libraries are instead often bloated, full of duplicates, or so ungainly that some have opted to simply create new libraries rather than slogging through an old and slow one. Apple has made little provision for these issues: Unlike with iTunes, iPhoto has no Find Duplicates command; and although you can create a new library by holding down the Option key while launching iPhoto and clicking Create New, you can’t merge libraries or easily copy images between them.

In Apple’s world, this is considered a “rich third-party opportunity” and, in this case, that opportunity has been seized by Fat Cat Software with its $30 iPhoto Library Manager, an application that allows you to easily create and manage multiple iPhoto libraries, browse the images within multiple libraries, copy images between libraries, locate duplicate images within and across libraries, merge libraries, and rebuild corrupt libraries. We first reviewed iPhoto Library Manager way back in 2006; it's been updated many times since then.

iPhoto Library Manager’s interface is reminiscent of iPhoto—much more so today than when we last looked at the utility. In the toolbar, you find the application’s major commands—Create Library, Add Library, Remove Library, Reveal Library, Quit iPhoto, Find Duplicates, and Merge Libraries. Additionally, you can choose to browse the selected library as thumbnail images or in a list, with the latter providing metadata information such as title, date taken, keywords, place, and rating. (You needn’t launch iPhoto to view this info.) A Search field rounds out the toolbar.

Along the window’s left edge you find an iPhoto Libraries pane that includes any libraries you’ve added. (When you first launch the utility, your current iPhoto library appears here, and it will likely be the only library you initially see.) A Library pane to its right bears entries for recent images, events, albums, Facebook, Flickr, projects, and slideshows. You can instead select the Photos entry to view all the selected library’s images. Select an item in this pane and its contents appear in the large browser pane to the right. This browser lets you zoom in and out on images, much as you can in iPhoto.

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With smartphone cameras and their dedicated apps—primarily one app called Instagram—photo filters have emerged not only as a way of life, but as almost a de rigueur aspect of mobile shooting and sharing.

Today, a vast preponderance of iPhone and Android photo editing apps contain a module that lets you adorn your snaps via filters with names like Lo-fi, Toy Camera, Holga, or something similar. All these filters can add interest and uniqueness to run-of-the-mill photos and I pass no judgment on whether or not they achieve that goal or whether people should just shoot better photos so they don't need to artifically dress them up. What really matters is whether a filter visually enhances a photo or gives the viewer a unique take on a subject. The free Alt Photo for iPhone is one app that does so in a gratifying way, and I repeatedly turn to it for nearly all my photo filtering.

Alt Photo is a consumer level, easy-to-use app from Alien Skin Software, a company best known for its pro-level, high-end Photoshop filtering packages like the Eye Candy series or Snap Art, which routinely cost around $200 a pop. Alt Photo offers a different take on arty filters: Instead of offering simply styles, Alt Photo seeks to give your iPhone photos a variety of film-like looks, something that is rapidly becoming as historical as Kodachrome. Alt Photo, somewhat of a takeoff on an Alien Skin desktop program called Exposure, emulates the effects of old film stocks and printing styles.

Alt Photo opens to a camera LCD-like interface with a large button in the middle. You can shoot from the front or back camera in landscape orientation. Tap to use flash or not. The square trigger next to the shutter coaches you on how to use the button for burst mode continuous shooting or to review your single shot. The next square lets you choose aspect ratio, so you can select to shoot in 1:1 or 4:3 aspect ratio. After you shoot, your image fills the screen and is ready for editing. But you do not have to shoot your photo in the app to apply filters and borders. From the opening screen a preview to the left of the shutter button gives you access to your entire camera roll. 

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a slideshow is a great way to tie together multiple pictures to tell a story. The popularity of slideshows has constantly increased in the past few years, spurred by their effective use by a number of filmmakers—most notably documentary director Ken Burns, after which the homonymous zoom-and-pan technique is named—and aided by software programs that make creating sophisticated slideshows easier and easier every year.

This brings me to Aquafadas’s PulpMotion for OS X, which takes the art and craft of slideshows very seriously, indeed. The app requires Snow Leopard or above, and comes in two versions, Standard ($49) and Advanced ($129), with free trials available for both; the latter supports a wider range of effects and capabilities, as well as professional-grade features like additional motion blur settings and interoperation with Apple’s Aperture.

The Advanced version of PulpMotion comes with roughly 150 templates, whereas the Standard edition comes with 130 or so. As in other apps of the same type, these templates can be used as a sort of blank canvas to which you can add your own pictures and music to create a slideshow. Having so many of them seemed a little gimmicky at first, and, therefore, I spent some time picking-and-choosing my way through the available selection; as it turns out, the templates that come with the app are quite advanced, with visual effects that take full advantage of OS X’s ability to generate complex 3D animations and lighting.

Kickin’ up your photos

The user interface is simple to use—in most cases, generating a slideshow is a matter of picking media items, such as images or videos, from your hard drive or iPhoto album and dropping them directly on the slideshow’s timeline. PulpMotion takes care of positioning them appropriately and transitioning from one to the other according to whatever rules the template calls for.

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ACDSee Pro is a feature-rich photo-management and photo-processing app aimed at serious photographers. ACDSee Pro for Windows, now at version 6, is fast and flexible, and competes with other big-league programs such as Adobe Lightroom. The much newer Mac version, ACDSee Pro 2 ($100), resembles its older Windows sibling in many positive ways, but it's not as mature.

Manage mode

ACDSee Pro 2 has three modes: Manage, View, and Develop. With its easy-to-use tools for "tagging" (rating), labeling, and applying keywords to images, ACDSee Pro's Manage mode is definitely the program's strong suit.

Like similar modes in iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom, ACDSee Pro 2's Manage mode lets you view thumbnails, find images in almost any way you can think of, select images and edit metadata, and, of course, delete images. But like Google's freeware app Picasa, ACDSee Pro does not require you to import images in order to view them. Instead, it relies on your computer's native file system for basic organization; to view images, you simply navigate your way through the folder pane on the left and click a folder that contains images.

Because ACDSee Pro 2's batch-processing feature provides access both to image-adjustment presets and to file-manipulation commands such as copy, move, and resize, ACDSee makes it possible to do in one step a series of actions that most other Mac programs—including Lightroom and Aperture—do in two. Admittedly, the user interface for ACDSee Pro's batch-processing feature is a bit geeky. It's more like the Mac OS X Automator utility than Aperture's lift and stamp commands—that is, the user interface makes you think like a programmer rather than like an artist. And the batch-processing user interface is the closest thing ACDSee Pro has to an export option, something I found hard to get used to. Still, once you figure it all out, the batch workflow can be flexible and powerful.

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Adobe has released Photoshop Elements 11, a new version of its consumer-level photo organizer and editor. In an effort to deliver the power of professional products in a friendly way, Adobe made big changes to the interface.

Targeted to hobbyists and enthusiasts—not those who edit photos daily in their jobs—this release focuses on improved usability and performance. Version 11 also includes new guided edits, and enhancements straight from Photoshop CS6 that makes it possible to select hair and fur.

Elements Organizer views

Returning to the light-gray interface of older versions, the Organizer sports a toolbar of large buttons at the bottom that let you fine-tune the organization of your photo collection with additional information. A handy Folder view sits on the left, enabling you to navigate your photos based on the folder structure of your hard drive. It’s not new, but enhanced to be faster and easier to find.

At the top of the window, you’ll spot four new tabs that change your view. Media displays everything you’ve imported using the Organizer. People taps into facial recognition technology and people tags to create stacks of photos; point your mouse to a stack to see miniatures of the photos inside (you can choose to see whole photos or faces only, just like iPhoto) or double-click a stack to open it. While you’re in the main People view (not inside a stack), you can create groups of people for quick viewing of friends and family.

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I’ve loved Nik Software’s Snapseed iOS photo-editing app since its release last year, and it's clear that others shared the sentiment—Apple awarded Snapseed an iPad-app-of-the-year award for 2011. So when Nik Software announced Snapseed for Mac, I was eager to test it out. What I discovered was a Mac app with features that are almost identical to those of its iOS counterpart, but with quite a few advantages thanks to the Mac platform.

The biggest difference between the new Snapseed for Mac (Mac App Store link) and its iOS sibling is the use of image-editing sliders in the desktop version. And that’s a good thing. The Mac's mouse-pointer-focused interface is considerably different from working on a touchscreen, and Nik Software has adjusted Snapseed for Mac accordingly.

Still, Snapseed on the desktop sports the same simple interface as its iOS version. When you launch the app, you’ll find all of the editing tools in the tool bar to the left. To the right is a large space that instructs you to “Drag a photo here to get started.” You can drag and drop from the Finder or even straight from iPhoto. It’s also possible to open a photo using the File-menu command and navigating to the desired image.

Once you’ve got your photo in the app, you have access to all of Snapseed’s basic editing tools, filters, and more. The editing features are divided into Basic Adjustments, which includes the app’s Tune Image, Crow & Straighten, and Details tools; and Creative Adjustments, which includes various filters, frames, and special effects.

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Challengers to Adobe's photo editing software are few and far between these days, and many who step into the ring with the behemoth are knocked out in the first round. With Pixelmator 2.0 ($30), the Pixelmator Team shows that it has a lot of fight in it.

As you might expect, Pixelmator shares many features with Photoshop CS 5 ( ) and Photoshop Elements 10 ( ). There’s a full complement of photo editing tools and adjustments, such as red eye removal, healing brush, auto enhance, color balance, and levels. Additionally, artists will find familiar tools like the smudge, sponge, and brush (with full support for drawing tablets). Pixelmator even shares most keyboard shortcuts with Photoshop, making migration to the app markedly easier.

One of the first things you notice about Pixelmator is that the interface is incredibly clean and fluid. Palettes are streamlined, subdued, and black, and do not distract from the canvas. Navigation is smooth and slick, and some actions show additional detail as they’re performed. Examples of these small but significant extras are that you’ll see the current angle displayed next to the cursor when you draw out a gradient, and when you choose undo/redo, a subtle pop-up in the middle of your canvas tells you what action has been undone/redone. The only disappointment is that palettes do not snap (or dock) to each other.

Slick interface

Pixelmator’s Brush palette is a perfect example of how this slick app can outstep Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. The palette shows thumbnails of all brushes within the currently selected brush set, and you can expand it to show brush settings via the contextual menu at the right. All important brush details can then be configured within a single palette, including scattering, shape, and color jitter. Photoshop provides so many controls—many which go unused by the average user—that it must spread these settings across multiple subsections. (It’s also worth noting that Pixelmator supports Photoshop brushes, though the maximum size of any brush is limited to 1000 pixels.)

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Chances are, you’ve taken more than a few photos littered with unwanted objects—or even people—that you’d rather remove from the scene. (Sorry random pedestrians, but I’d prefer if you weren’t in my family shots at Coit Tower.) Macphun's Snapheal (Mac App Store link) is a Mac application that lets you do just that with a few strokes and clicks.

Snapheal sports an interface similar to that of Macphun’s other Mac apps, Color Splash Studio ( ) and FX Photo Studio ( ), with the photo-editing area to the left and your editing tools to the right. The app is simple to use and easy to navigate, and features five editing tools: Erase; Clone and Stamp; Retouch; Adjust; Crop; and Rotate/Flip. (Even though erasing undesired objects from photos is the central feature, users can also perform basic image edits using Snapheal.)

We recently looked at Inpaint ( ), another Mac app that lets you remove objects from a photo. While Inpaint is less than half the cost of Snapheal, Inpaint is a one-trick pony—you paint over a selected area and click Erase. The only adjustment you can make is in brush size. Snapheal offers a bit more.

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Adobe has announced version 11 of its Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements desktop software for Mac and Windows. This photo and video editing duo—joined by a free helper app called the Organizer—lets users manage, edit, create, and share photos and videos in a variety of ways. Both are shipping now.

Friendly, streamlined look

The Elements programs now share a streamlined, updated interface. They default to a friendly, light gray background with a redesigned set of larger, more colorful icons than the previous version. Overall, the interface has a cleaner, more open look than in the past, with a simplified, visual way of organizing and searching for photos and videos via the Organizer's People, Places, and Events tabs. The new Elements offers fewer top level navigation choices and commands, while reorganizing and adding new features.

As always, the Elements package is targeted to craft-oriented consumers and hobbyists who want their growing collection of images and videos to look nice and to use them for projects such as cards, calendars, and photo books. The Photoshop and Premiere Elements features are designed to have an easy point of entry for novices doing simple tasks, but also seek to challenge users to tackle more complex projects.

With this new version, online sharing opportunities have changed somewhat. While Adobe is now partners with Vimeo and CEWE in Europe, not surprisingly, the Kodak gallery is gone.

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In addition to the many other updates Apple fielded on Wednesday, the company released updates to its two popular photo-editing desktop apps, iPhoto and Aperture, both centered on adding features present in iOS 6.

Both the iPhoto update and the new Aperture update include the ability to use Mountain Lion’s new Shared Photo Streams feature. And each app now features a menu command letting users open iPhoto libraries in Aperture—and Aperture libraries in iPhoto. Both apps also feature performance and stability improvements.

Additionally, iPhoto was tweaked to let users add comments to photos that have already been published to Facebook; the app also adds new card and calendar themes to its library of existing options.

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According to Apple’s release notes, the update addresses a problem that causes photos to be moved to a new event called “From MobileMe” during the migration of albums from a user's MobileMe Gallery.

The new iPhoto upgrade also fixes a (rare, says Apple) problem in which iPhoto can hang when upgrading your photo library.

The update is available now via Software Update, and weighed in at more than 600MB on two different Macs in our office.

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Alongside the new 15-inch MacBook Pro with its shiny new Retina Display comes a brand new version of Apple’s Aperture photo management program, designed to enhance your photo editing artistry and efficiency.

Aperture, now at version 3.3, also offers better performance, a unified photo library that lets you seamlessly switch back and forth between images stored in iPhoto (version 9.3 or later) and Aperture, and new adjustment tools.

Retina vision

First and foremost, the new version of Aperture is optimized for the new Retina-display 15-inch MacBook Pro. The update allows you to see more of your image when it’s zoomed in at 100 percent. For pros dealing with 30-plus megapixel images, this will make a huge operational difference on the laptop’s small screen. The effect on small thumbnails is also a big deal. Aperture 3.3’s thumbnails are greatly improved, and will likely save you time in your imaging decisionmaking, Apple says.

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There’s no shortage of demand for photo filter apps, Nevercenter's CameraBag 2 among them. The app is a revamped version of the company’s CameraBag for Mac; CameraBag 2 sports a bevy of new features, including more than 100 adjustable filters and dozens of editing controls.

CameraBag 2 offers more editing and filter control than the original Mac app or its iOS counterpart. Users can view all available filters for a photo using a tile-based system. Once you select a filter, you can make basic and more advanced edits: CameraBag 2 offers exposure, vignette, saturation, color correction, and curves controls. Most importantly, if you’ve designed a look that you’re especially fond of, you can save it as a new filter for later use.

Similar to more advanced photo editing software like Photoshop, CameraBag 2 features an active history timeline, allowing users to make non-destructive edits. You’ll also be able to layer different filters and adjustments on top of one another. Other updates include a brand-new interface, speedier image processing, raw format and metadata support, batch saving, and 32-bits-per-channel color depth.

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Keeping its tradition of releasing a free public beta of its professional photo management software in advance of a major new version, Adobe has announced Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta. It’s now available for download on Adobe Labs. The company seeks feedback from the community on how to improve the program before the final release of version 4, which will be sometime in the early part of the year.

Lightroom, which plays alongside Apple’s Aperture and the brand new Corel AfterShot Pro, is a photo workflow tool targeted to professionals and advanced amateurs to import, manage, enhance, and showcase their images.

The beta showcases the upcoming version's refined technology for shadow and highlight processing, enhanced support for DSLR video, the ability to create photo books, and send email from within the program.

The software's new tonal adjustment controls are designed to extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for shadow details and highlights. The upcoming Lightroom version features new local adjustment controls, including noise reduction, moire, and white balance.

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Announced on Monday at CES, AfterShot Pro is targeted to photo pros and hobbyists. It seeks to compete on the same playing field as Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom for the Mac, and is also compatible with the Windows and Linux operating systems. AfterShot Pro, based on technology from Bibble Labs, which Corel acquired last year, concentrates on photo management, non-destructive editing, RAW processing, and batch processing, while at the same time offering a flexible workflow.

Photographers can use AfterShot Pro to do quick touchups and adjustments to RAW images and then integrate their process with other image-editing applications for deeper edits. "We see AfterShot Pro as a jumping off point, an adjunct to Photoshop," said Jeff Stephens, AfterShot's product manager and former president of Bibbel Labs.

Workspace customization

The program features a default gray unified window interface with a vast variety of visual and photo editing options. There are various ways to customize the workspace, and the flexible tabbed interface and panel system give the program a clean, professional look. On the left side, the Library, File System, and Output tabs afford access to photos and printing options. Lining the right edge of the interface window are editing tabs such as Standard, Color, Tone, Detail, Metadata, and more. Each tab, when clicked, offers additional options. A line of thumbnails, showing images in a folder, appears in a panel to the side of the main image. You can choose to hide or show the tabs and thumbnails and work in full screen mode.

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If your Photo Stream exceeds 1,000 images, older images auto-imported from Photo Stream may no longer appear in Aperture 3.2.1, even if you have activated the preference to auto-import images from Photo Stream.

Here are the steps Apple provides to recover the missing images.

First, update to Aperture 3.2.2. After you complete the update, open Aperture and hold down the Command and Option keys until the Library First-Aid window appears. Then choose the Repair Database option and click the Repair button. After the repair has been completed and Aperture reopens, the missing images will once again be visible.

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The new iPad's Retina display is stunning for photo exhibition. If you want to maximize this special hardware's photographic potential and manage how much space your images occupy, here are a few ideas for preparing the photos on your Mac before transferring them to the iPad. The result: Major Wow for whomever you show them to.

The basic steps to do this are: prepare your pictures so they look good using your favorite image editor, move them to the iPad, view, and enjoy. You could use the standard workflow of syncing images from an Aperture library via iTunes to transfer them to the iPad. And if all the variables are set correctly, such as using a large enough preview size in Aperture, this can work OK.

But what if you switch Aperture libraries, use Lightroom, or a variety of other exceptions? The following approach tackles this process differently. You prepare the images in any photo application, export them to a folder, then upload them to the iPad using a transfer app such as PhotoSync. This method provides more flexibility and more control. You can set the exact resolution and file size instead of leaving it up to iTunes to make those decisions for you. Let’s take a look at it to see if this technique might work for you.

Oh, what size?

The high definition display on the new iPad packs more pixels into the 9.5-inch screen than its predecessors. The resolution is 2048-by-1536 pixels at 264 pixels per inch (ppi). That’s higher density than the iPad 2 that weighed in at 1024-by-768 pixels at 132 ppi. To take advantage of the new iPad’s increased resolution, consider preparing your images with 2048 pixels on the longest side.

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When reviewing photos using the LCD on the back of my camera, it's fun to keep the navigation button held down and let the camera quickly zip through all the images. Especially since I frequently shoot in burst mode—holding the shutter button to shoot several shots in succession—the effect is like watching a stop-motion animation movie.

So on my daughter's birthday, I thought, why not do that on the Mac? Instead of pulling out just the handful of really good photos, I'd combine them all to make a movie that resembled the experience of scanning all those shots on the camera.

Here's how to do it.

1. Import the photos into iPhoto, where they appear grouped into a new Event.

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The ingredients for the workflow include Automator, a copy of Apple’s Aperture ( ), and a digital camera that can shoot while tethered—meaning that you can plug it directly into your Mac’s USB port and control the camera remotely as well as save its images to your computer rather than to the camera’s memory card. My Nikon D300 ( ) is just such a camera. Check your camera’s manual to see if it supports tethering.

Launch Aperture and from the File menu choose New -> Project to create an empty project. Give it an intuitive name such as “Export and Send.” Copy a single image into this project. Now choose File -> Export -> Versions. In the resulting sheet click on the Export Preset pop-up menu and select Edit. In the Image Export window that appears click on the Plus (+) button in the bottom-left corner to make a copy of the currently selected preset.

In the area to the right within this window, choose the image format you want to use (JPEG, in our case, as it’s web-friendly and the images don’t take up a lot of space) and choose a size for your images (we use 606 by 480 pixels). Give your preset a name—“Auto Export,” for example—and click the OK button to dismiss the Image Export window. Your preset’s name should now appear in the Export Preset pop-up menu in the sheet that remains. Click the Export Versions button to close that sheet. Aperture will export a copy of the image you added to the project.

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Considering how many photos are captured daily with iPhones all over the world, Apple’s Photo Stream (the imaging component of its iCloud offering) is a useful tool for getting pictures off our mobile devices and on to our computers and tablets. The challenge with Photo Stream is that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Either it’s on and sharing every shot you take, or it’s off and not helping you at all.

But there is a way to control this flow on your Mac. By using iPhoto as the dam, and Aperture as the final destination, you can enjoy the benefits of Photo Stream without drowning in a deluge of snapshots.

Photo Stream basics

You can enable Photo Stream on your iPhone after you sign up for iCloud. The images are available on iOS devices that use the same iCloud account, as well as your Macs. The destination for the images on your Mac is either iPhoto (9.2.1) or Aperture (3.2.1).

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The holidays are fast approaching and so is the pressure to send out your annual greeting cards to update family and friends about your fabulous life and beautiful children. We looked at five of the best, most user-friendly options that make it easy to design and send photo cards. Starting with the Apple programs you already have on your Mac or iOS device, and ending with sites you may not be familiar with, here's a walk through a veritable winter wonderland of photo card-making options.

iPhoto

If you already use iPhoto to manage all of your images, it might make the most sense for you to stick to this program. Start out by selecting a photo event with your desired shots. After you’ve found your favorites, click on the Create button located at the bottom right of the window, then select Card. This takes you to a carousel of cards, where you can choose from three different layouts—Letterpress, Folded, and Flat—and more than two dozen design themes. (Depending on your chosen theme, you can include between one and 13 photos on a single card.)

Once you pick out a layout and theme, you can add text, edit your photos within the frame, import new photos, and even add effects like Black & White, Sepia, and Antique to the photos. You can also edit the fonts and the layout of the text in your cards—choosing the paragraph alignment, and the spacing of the lines and letters. When you’re ready to go, just press “Buy Card” and choose how many cards you would like. iPhoto unfortunately does not offer a discount on bulk orders. They will send them to your address in standard or express shipping, after which you will have to label them and send them out yourself. For more information, check out this in-depth guide to making cards with iPhoto.

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This article originally appeared as a Macworld Daily Reader iPad exclusive and is now available on Macworld.com for your enjoyment.

Despite iPhoto's outward simplicity, you can do quite a lot with the application—if you know where to look. Many advanced options hide away in the confines of the iPhoto menu bar, while others can be accessed through certain key combinations. Here are just a few of the best ones.

Folder hierarchy If you have several albums that could conceivably fit together, you can create a folder for them by going to File -> New -> Folder. Once you've created and named the folder, just drag and drop the albums you want organized on top of it (see "Top-Level Groups").

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This article originally appeared as a Macworld Daily Reader iPad exclusive and is now available on Macworld.com for your enjoyment.

iPhoto's traditional single-palette view is divided up into three subsections. The Source list, found along the left side, links to your library, recent photos, subscriptions, devices, albums, Web sharing, and projects (see "Unified Design"). To the right, the main panel view will by default display your events, as well as any content you're currently viewing or working on. Below that, the bottom toolbar allows you to switch into full-screen mode, search, zoom, create a slideshow, check information, edit a photo, create a project, add pictures, and share your images.

In full-screen mode, you lose some of the advanced nuances of the application, but gain a cleaner, simpler interface. The Source list disappears, giving the main panel full reign over the top half of the screen, while the bottom toolbar has been given a few new options—in addition to the Search, Zoom, Info, Edit, Create, Add To, and Share functions found in regular view, you can now select Events, Faces, Places, Albums, or Projects (see "New Tools"). You can toggle full-screen mode by clicking the Full Screen button or by pressing Option-Command-F.

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You can bring pictures into iPhoto one of three ways: from an external source (a camera or memory card), an internal source (off a hard drive or CD), or from an RSS photo feed. To import photos from your camera roll, you need only plug your camera or memory card into your computer and open iPhoto. When connected, it will show up in the Source list—the leftmost column in the application—under Devices. Click the camera or memory card name to bring up the Import pane (see "Preview Your Imports").

To keep your library from getting messy early on, iPhoto provides two extra import options at the bottom of the Import pane. If you've already imported some images from your camera and wish to avoid unnecessary duplication, you can select the Hide Photos Already Imported checkbox. (Even if you don't select this, iPhoto will still prompt you if it detects duplicates during the import process.) Alternatively, if you have multiple days' worth of photos and would rather break them up and organize them by day, you can choose the Split Events checkbox.

Within the pane, you'll see a summary of your device, including its name—if it has one—as well as a date range of when your photos were taken and how many pictures and video files you have stored on it. Below this, you'll also be able to browse image thumbnails. By default, these images are relatively tiny—allowing you to see four or five on a row—but you can use the Zoom slider in the lower left corner of the window to increase the preview size.

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This article originally appeared as a Macworld Daily Reader iPad exclusive and is now available on Macworld.com for your enjoyment.

Take your best pictures and make them better with editing. iPhoto includes most of the image-editing tools that casual photographers need to spruce up their photos. If you use iPhoto to manage your photo collection, try these fixes before cracking open a dedicated image editor.

Choose a view mode

By default, when you select a photo and click on the Edit icon, iPhoto opens the image in the program's main window. But if you'd like to get a larger view of your edits—or you simply don't want to be distracted by other programs—you can choose to edit in Full Screen mode instead (see "Pick Your View"). To switch to Full Screen mode, click the Full Screen button in the lower left corner of the iPhoto screen, go to View -> Full Screen, or press Option-Command-F. To exit Full Screen mode, click on the X icon in the editing toolbar or press the Escape key.

If you spend far more time looking at pictures in iPhoto than you do editing them, set the Double-Click Photo option to Magnifies in Preferences. That way, when you double-click on a thumbnail, you'll see a bigger version of the shot. However, when you do want to edit an image instead of just viewing it, all you have to do is hold down the Option key when you double-click. This takes you directly to Edit mode instead.

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