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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It's been a long time since anyone got excited about the Flickr app for iPhone. Its longevity, its association with a tired, clunky website, its inherent weaknesses and limitations, and the rise of powerful competitors heavily depressed its initial "wow" factor. It did not help that the free iOS program languished for years under Yahoo's neglect.

With new management shaking the Yahoo foundations, the company recently released Version 2 of Flickr for the iPhone, and suddenly—almost miraculously—Flickr was once again cool. And for good reason. A refreshed, modernized interface optimized for the iPhone 5 has reset the focus on good, old Flickr just as the public expressed deep skepticism about its more recent and newly Facebooked darling, Instagram.

The new Flickr, for the very most part, is a delight, and it's on its way toward fulfilling its long-ago promise to let users integrate, access, and share their photos between nearly all platforms. The renewed push toward sharing and, to a lesser extent, creative effects is Flickr 2.0's opportunity to advance the old and introduce the new. At the same time, Flickr continues to cater to its loyal following. With this new release, Flickr is sure to attract an army of new adherents.

Overall, I was impressed. Flickr 2.0 is quick, efficient, and intuitive. But it comes with drawbacks: it still has some quirks and glitches, it is not a universal app for the iPad (you have to work in 2X mode on the tablet), it's not video friendly, and it otherwise does not stun with unique new features.

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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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Popular microblogging site Tumblr jumped into the business of sharing photos from your mobile phone a few months back when the company released Photoset for iOS. The app—available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch—doesn’t require any type of Tumblr account, and instead uploads your photosets to photoset.com and provides a shortened link for sharing. You can, of course, post your photoset directly to Tumblr as well.

The app’s concept comes from a feature of the same name, added to Tumblr three years ago.

“Photosets have been one of our favorite additions to Tumblr. You’ve surprised us a thousand times over with your creativity,” Tumblr’s Justin Ouellete wrote on the staff page. “It’s hard to imagine Tumblr without photos, and we love the power a set of photos has to tell a story.”

Tumblr user or not, navigating the app is pretty straightforward. You are given the option to capture new pictures or use those already in your photo gallery. That said, each picture taken or selected has to be one at a time, making large photosets cumbersome.

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There are plenty of iPhone apps that improve or expand on the basic camera built into the iPhone and iPad. You can think of BlueStone Pond's SetMyCamMx 1.0.3, on the other hand, as a $4 app designed to replace the old-fashioned depth of field calculation wheels, which serious photographers sometimes threw into their camera bags back in the days before the Internet. You can use SetMyCamMx as an interactive tool for fine-tuning your exposure to ensure you’re choosing the right settings to capture your shot.

SetMyCamMx’s primary job is to help you figure out how to get the depth of field you need for a particular shot. Just dial in the focal length of your camera’s lens, an f/stop, and the distance to the subject—the focusing distance. SetMyCamMx will immediately tell you the closest and farthest distances at which the camera will be able to deliver an acceptably sharp focus. In other words, it tells you your depth of field.

That makes SetMyCamMx a superb learning tool as well as a field guide. You already know that a larger f/number gives you a greater depth of field. But SetMyCamMx will tell you exact numbers: 50mm at f/5.66, focusing at 10 feet gives you 3.3 feet of depth of field. At f/32, the same lens and focusing distances delivers a huge 65 feet.

Even better, SetMyCamMx shows you all this visually. Every calculation is accompanied by a graphical depiction of your camera, the subjects, and a yellow rectangle that represents the depth of field. You can get the same data from other depth of field calculators, but SetMyCamMx shows you the data in a way that leaves no room for confusion.

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In an eternal quest to become the next big thing in social media, many iOS developers have tried to do for video what Instagram has done for still photography. But this endeavor can get tiresome, and sometimes producing high-quality results trumps the desire to produce shareable content.

Echograph, a photography app for the iPad 2 and later, which allows you to create animated GIFs and MPEG 4 video from still photos, might seem like another Cinemagram (and in theory, it is), but Echograph distinguishes itself as a more professionally inclined program. Rather than touting social networking features, it's focused on providing the tools to make high-quality cinemagraphs—and for the most part, it does this very well.

The term "cinemagraph," coined by photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, refers to still shots that contain some moving elements. Usually, they’re published in GIF format, at a higher resolution than most viral GIFs that populate the Internet. (Echograph calls its GIFs "echographs," but they’re essentially the same thing.)

Echograph is at its most beautiful with hi-res video, like that shot from a DSLR. But you’ll definitely need to use a tripod when shooting. There is no anti-shake correction, so if you move even a little bit when filming your clip, your echograph will have an annoying and undesirable shakiness in certain areas. You can use video recorded from your iPad if you want, though that defeats the purpose of creating higher-quality results.

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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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Photosynth started life as a high-end computational demonstration at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington. The first demos involved selecting publicly posted photos taken by dozens or thousands of people from sites like Flickr of a popular destination, such as Notre Dame in Paris. The software would assemble the varying views into a browsable three-dimensional model. It was breathtaking. The technology has developed into a Windows-only desktop program desktop program that can both create these kinds of models and more conventional panoramas. The panorama feature by itself makes up the the free Photosynth for iOS. It’s a bit of magic, too.

You may be slightly taken aback by the interface, which is closer to the Zune music player’s design of a few years ago (which I quite liked). But it doesn’t detract from utility, just familiarity.

The steps Photosynth uses to create a panorama are among the easiest, and provide some of the best results. Tap a camera icon at the bottom of the screen, orient the iOS device in portrait or landscape mode, then tap to begin. Photosynth uses a rectangle with a centered dot to indicate the area being captured. From where the first image is captured, the app paints edges using dotted lines to show what’s missing.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

VeprIT’s Resize Sense (Mac App Store link) is an all-in-one batch resizer and cropping tool that will save both time and tedious labor in getting one image—or hundreds of images—to exactly the right size for webpages, email, and layouts.

Resize Sense’s tri-partite single-window interface is clean, and the panes are an unobtrusive gray color, which makes it easier to concentrate on your images. The toolbar contains all the basic controls for adding and removing images, saving images, copying, pasting, rotating, or resetting crops. The app also has a full-screen mode and a search box.

There are numerous ways to change the size of your pictures with this app, and in many cases, you can do so without having to change the composition. However, some settings (fixed width and height and fixed dimensions) will change the aspect ratio or distort the image in order to achieve the size you specify. The “Crop the image to avoid deformation” control offers a choice of cropping the image or reformatting it to fit your specifications.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Due to a production error, we inadvertently published an version of this review written about the 1.0 release of JPEGmini. This review now rates the current 1.3 release of JPEGmini, including the capability, added in version 1.2, to process lower-resolution photos.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot of photos stashed on your Mac. And if you’ve been faithfully snapping away with digital cameras for the better part of a decade as I have, those photos are taking up a lot of space. The arrival of the iPhone and its always-close-at-hand camera is only adding to the capacity crunch.

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With its rugged-looking interface and sample videos depicting slowed-down mountain biking and ski jump shots, SloPro seems to cater to a particular set of X Games surf/snowboard/skater enthusiasts. But even if you don’t generally shoot fast action sports videos, SloPro is fun to use. With a few taps, you can speed up or slow down video of any subject—from a passing cityscape to a child blowing out her birthday candles—without relying on desktop video-editing software like iMovie or Final Cut Pro. There are some limitations to what you can accomplish with SloPro, and editing can be annoying, but the app produces cool results.

SloPro takes the pain out of manually speeding up or slowing down video, allowing you to quickly generate those effects directly on your iPhone or iPad. Extra-smooth slow motion, a new feature with the current update, is only available for the iPhone 4S, though the app is compatible with all devices running iOS 5.0 or later.

The process of slowing down video is easy, but you are restricted to preset speeds. The Speed drop-down button at the top of the Edit screen lists a decent number of choices for speeding up and slowing down recorded clips, including super-slow settings that render your video a painstaking speed of 1000 fps. With the eight options you’re given, you can speed up footage as fast as four times the shoot speed or slow it down to 1/4 the shoot speed without additional rendering. It’s not a major hindrance if you’re just out for a cool effect, but if you’re trying to achieve more specific timing, you may be disappointed.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

ImageOptim 1.4.0 helps not just the developers and designers who use the software, but also any of those users’ users, too. Let me explain: The free utility takes in your PNG, JPEG, and GIF files (including GIF animations) and optimizes them by shrinking their file sizes, often considerably. And it does so without affecting the image quality.

ImageOptim’s interface is Spartan but functional. Drag images onto its window or Dock icon, or click on the plus (+) button to select images from a standard Open dialog box. The app immediately starts optimizing the images, using one or more of a slew of command-line image optimization tools: PNGOUT, AdvPNG, Pngcrush, extended OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpegrescan, jpegtran, and Gifsicle are all seamlessly integrated. ImageOptim doesn’t offer a whole lot of insight into what it’s doing, but you can mouse-over an individual image on the list to see which tool the app is using to shrink the image.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

The original Comic Life made a splash with its Mac debut seven years ago, by taking a specific task—turning your photos into comic book-style layouts—and perfectly balancing ease of use with a sense of fun. The follow-up from developer Plasq continues that fine tradition while adding some welcome features to the mix.

Getting started with Comic Life 2 is as simple as choosing a template—the application supplies 25 different themes, along with a couple of blank templates if you’d prefer to forge your own path. Comic Life’s main window includes a photo picker that makes it easy to drag images out of your iPhoto library or track them down through the Finder; a Camera option even lets you snap pictures with your Mac’s built-in-camera for photos on the fly. From there, it’s simply a matter of dragging in different speech bubbles and stylized text to give your final project the look you desire.

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Cinemagram answers the burning question a fair number of folks between the ages of 8 and 28 have these days: How can I create those fancy animated GIFs of cute cat expressions like a professional? The app has quite a bit more charm than making videos of felines, however. It lets you capture a taste of motion across a slice of time. Its key feature? Choosing just the region you want animated, instead of converting the whole video. Cinemagram is also a highly social app, although you can choose just how much you care to share.

Animated GIFs on the Web date back to its early days, and various desktop image-editing programs have always allowed their creation with varying degrees of difficulty. The format has made a comeback recently as a kind of ironic, low-fidelity, low-bandwidth way to illustrate a point. But animated GIFs can also be used to create an embeddable kind of video snapshot without turning to Flash, HTML5, or other methods. Nearly every kind of device that can display a GIF can show its animated form, including low-end mobile phones and tablets.

Creating a moving GIF in Cinemagram takes four steps after you tap the Capture button. First, shoot fresh video or select a previously stored video on your Camera Roll. Videos must be static shots with moving elements within them to work best. If you're selecting a previously shot video, the app prompts you to ask whether the video was recorded using a tripod, and applies some anti-shake correction if it was not. Only 2 to 3 seconds of video may be chosen, and a selection bar at the top allows scanning through the video and previewing a given section.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

PhotoSweeper (Mac App Store link) is a handy utility for quickly organizing photos on your Mac. The app aims to help trim down your photo library by analyzing your photos and finding duplicate and similar images.

Here’s how it works: Drag and drop single images or entire folders of images into the app (you can add images from almost any location on your computer—iPhoto, Apperture, Lightroom, and even external devices), and then specify how you want to compare these images. PhotoSweeper quickly analyzes them to find similar and duplicate images, which are grouped together. From there, you can move, delete, or rename your images.

There are six different options available for comparing your photos, depending on how closely you want to look at them. You can compare by Bitmap, Histogram, Time Interval, Time and Bitmap (which is the default search setting), Time and Histogram, or Duplicates, which will find only exact duplicates.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Sometimes, the best apps are those that are really good at doing only one thing. Cross Forward Consulting’s InstaBackup (Mac App Store link) does just that. It’s a simple utility for Instagram users who want an easy way to back up their Instagram photos.

InstaBackup’s best feature is how easy it is to use. Simply log in with your Instagram account, choose a backup volume (you can choose an external device or a folder on your computer) and hit backup. The backup process takes only a few seconds, even with a few hundred photos. Once finished, photos appear in a folder tilted “InstaBackup” in the location you specified.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Bronson Watermarker (Mac App Store link) fills a small—but vital—niche for those who need to create watermarked PDFs and images.

The app is simply designed by the team at Quote-Unquote Apps, opening with a single dialog that asks you to drag and drop an image or PDF for watermarking. Once you do so, a two-pane window opens with a preview of the file on the left and controls for watermarking on the right.

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Here are a few examples: The auto save and recovery features keep you from losing all your work if you suffer a crash; the new Content-Aware Move tool lets you scoot objects around the canvas; the new blur filters create shallow-depth-of-field and tilt-shift effects in no time flat; the new Adaptive Wide Angle filter fixes in-camera lens distortion; and a new Oil Paint filter lets you create a painting with nary a brushstroke. Whew! But that's just the beginning.

Many items that have been parked on customers’ wish lists were incorporated into this version, too, such as duplicating and changing the blend mode of multiple layers at once; creating dashed and dotted lines; a Migrate Presets option that lets you easily share all your presets; and more. Video editing is also included in the Standard version of Photoshop CS6 (previously it was available only in the Extended version). All this adds up to one of the most feature-packed releases Photoshop has ever seen.

As in the past, Adobe offers two versions of the program—Photoshop for $699, and Photoshop Extended for $999. Photoshop Extended has all the features of the standard version, but adds extensive 3D capabilities, quantitative data extraction, and DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) file support.

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With last week’s unveiling of iPhoto for iOS, Apple provided the missing link in the company’s lineup of iLife mobile software. Two years after it introduced the iPad, Apple has released a version of iPhoto made especially for mobile devices. The new app is a full-service viewing, editing, and sharing tool for both the iPad and the iPhone.

In the interim, literally dozens of other app developers created photo-related apps—exposure adjustment and cropping here, special effects and filters there. Now, Apple has built and polished its own interpretation of the ultimate photo app for its iOS devices.

The result is iPhoto for iOS, and it is worth the wait. The beauty of iPhoto for iOS is that, at its core, it’s iPhoto by different means—very easy to learn and use, while retaining and simplifying the desktop application’s best attributes. It does not match the Mac program feature-for-feature, but its overall functionality is so similar, that users of the desktop version will instantly recognize the app’s conventions and parameters and what it can accomplish.

The program works on the iPad 2 or later and the iPhone 4 or later, but disappointingly, not on the iPod touch—not even one with a built-in camera. Each mobile version feature is distinctly tailored for the device you’re using. The iPad and iPhone interfaces are similar but not identical, and the subtle variations between the two versions work in the user’s favor.

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New software versions offer new features to entice upgrading. And Lightroom 4 certainly has expanded its functionality with video editing, book creation, geotagging, soft proofing, and more. But at the core of of this latest release is a refinement of what many already admire about this application: its ability to help you produce beautiful imagery. And in this category in particular, Lightroom 4 does not disappoint.

Better Develop Module

On top you’ll see the Temperature and Tint controls for white balance, followed by Exposure and Contrast for luminance, then Highlights and Shadows for tonal recovery. Once you have the tones and color to your liking, add a bit of refinement with Clarity and Vibrance, and more often than not, you’re finished.

In Lightroom 4, Adobe revisited the interface for these controls. All of the Basic sliders, except for White Balance, are “zeroed-out” in the center of the scale. Start with Exposure, for example. Move the marker to the left to darken the bright tones, and to the right to lighten them. It’s intuitive, and it reflects the way many photographers think about their photos.

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Corel has undertaken a big challenge in trying to squeeze a pro-level photo management application into a market crowded with heavy hitters. At first look, you might be tempted to compare AfterShot Pro to Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. But I think a more fitting comparison is to Adobe’s Bridge and Camera Raw (both adjuncts to Adobe Photoshop and the Creative Suite) for managing and editing images. Corel provides similar flexibility, but in a more integrated environment.

Raw shooters who use a variety of cameras and workflows may also consider augmenting their existing workflows with AfterShot because it provides features not available in their primary applications. Either way, it’s certainly worth a closer look.

Basic interface

Getting around in AfterShot is fairly intuitive. The adjustment tools are in the right column and the file system is on the left. In the middle you can toggle between Thumbnail, Standard (image plus thumbnails), and Image views using the icons in the upper right corner. If you want to focus your attention on the image itself, the side columns are easily hidden using the L and R keyboard shortcuts.

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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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