Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

Help! My images disappeared from my iPad and iPhone

Understand the limits of the Photo Stream and how to save images from it so they aren’t removed from your iPad or iPhone

Sometimes you may know that you had some images on your iPad or iPhone but suddenly you find that they’ve gone.

This happens to me when I drop some images into my Photo Stream on my Windows PC that I want to use on my iPad. I drop images into the Uploads folder on my PC and, via the iCloud, they are synced automatically to my iPad. I know the images got there safely – I put them there months ago and I know that I saw them on my iPad but suddenly today they aren’t there. Confusing? Happened to you? It probably has and here is the explanation as to why they disappear and how to stop them from doing so.

The issue is the Photo Stream. The photo stream on the iPad and iPhone only store the last one thousand images – if you shoot lots of images and, say have your iPhone and iPad synced then you’ll run out of space pretty quickly. When you do then images are knocked out of the Photo Stream to make room for more recent ones.

The issue doesn’t happen on your Mac or PC because they have plenty of space so photos in your Photo Stream folders there are always there – it is just a protection against junking up your iPhone or iPad with ‘stuff’.

So, what do you do when you want to keep some of the images from your Photo Stream permanently and you don’t want to lose them? The answer is to move them to an album or to your Camera Roll. The images in your camera roll and in albums are there to stay. And just to clarify, you don’t have to move images from the Photo stream that you captured with that device – because images you capture on the iPad for example are in the Camera Roll and stay there. The images you want to save are those that get synced to the iPad via iCloud from other devices such as your iPhone or PC or Mac – they are the ones that only hang around for a short time.

How to move images from your Photo Stream to an album

So, to move a lot of images to an album (an easy solution for lots of images that you want to save to somewhere that isolates them from all your other images), tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream.

You should now see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Then tap Edit.

In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now tap Save and choose to Save to an Existing Album or Save to New Album.

I have an album for images I want to edit and play with on the iPad called Editable Pix so I typically tap that to select it. This lets me store those images so they are isolated from all the other images in my Camera Roll.

How to move images from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll

It is also possible to save photos from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll. The advantage of this is that they are in the Camera Roll itself and in some situations that might work best for you.

To do this, again tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Again tap Edit. In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now, tap the Share button in the top left of the screen:

And choose Save to Camera Roll. (It is very confusing that these two processes that really are so similar are handled so differently in iOS6).

How to save one image from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll

Now, if you just want to save one image from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll, tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Tap the one image that you want to copy to the Camera Roll so it is showing full screen. Now tap the Send to button that is a box with an arrow coming out of it in the top right of the screen and choose Save to Camera Roll from the menu.

Now you will never again lose images off your iPhone or iPad that you really want to keep.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 am1 Comment links to this post

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Sync photos from iPad or iPhone to your Mac

Learn how to download photos from your iPad or iPhone to your Mac


I’ve been using iCloud on the PC for a while now to sync photos from my iPad to my PC and it works well. On my new Mac, however, I had a problem, you see the feature is built in so you don’t have to install it – but you do have to find it! Here’s how:

1. Assuming you already have an iPad or iPhone and you have been taking photos with it, then you want to get them to your Mac. Start on your iPad and make sure it is set to sync. Do this in Settings – scroll to find Photos & Camera and make sure that My Photo Stream is turned on. This means that when you are on a wifi connection your photo stream will be synced with iCloud.

Note:
The photo stream has some limits. One is that iCloud itself only stores images for 30 days so after that they disappear. However provided you are connected via wifi on a regular basis these will be synced frequently so that won’t be a big issue.

On a device like the iPad and iPhone the photo stream will only contain those most recent 1,000 images – older ones are removed. This is because you have less space on your iPad and iPhone than on a Mac or PC. Remember too that the photo stream contains images from the iPad/iPhone and from your Mac or PC so this 1,000 image limitation is for images from all devices in total, so it’s not as big as it might seem.

On the PC that is less of a problem because you have a special Photo stream folder that you put images into to sync them, so you know how many you are putting there. It is more of an issue on the Mac because the process is more automated so you have to be mindful of what is happening. On your Mac or PC all the images from your Photo stream are stored – because there is more storage available on them.

2. To set up the Mac. You need to click iPhoto to launch it and then click Web: Photo Stream and turn this on.

3. Now, if you are connected via wifi you can wait as your photo stream downloads automatically for you otherwise this will happen automatically next time you are connected.

Once images are downloaded to iPhoto they will be added to the Photos folder so even if you turn off Photo Stream at some time the images that are already downloaded will have be stored there permanently.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:38 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Improve your photography today with apps

image credit: © istockphoto.com, Yuri Arcurs

Learn how you can improve your photography with handy apps

Among the thousands of new apps and programs we’ve seen in the last couple of years, there are many that are ideal for photographers, both amateur and professional. Whether you’re a professional looking for a way to edit and share your photos, or someone who simply wants to do more with photos with your phone or tablet, there are dozens, if not hundreds of apps and programs designed to help you out. What you choose to use will depend to some extent on how serious a photographer you are, but ultimately there is something for everyone.

Here is a look at how to improve your photo taking and editing through 5 simple apps and programs.

Photoshop Express

This is a fairly self-explanatory app – from the makers of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements which most photographers will be familiar with. This app is by no means as complete or effective as the full version program, but the interface is simple and easy to use, and for basic effects on the go it is a handy app. It is free in its basic form, but has additional features available for purchase.

Camera+

If you’re looking for an app that improves the quality of your photos without any complicated editing, this is the one for you. Basically, Camera+ is a better version of the basic camera in your smart phone, and has the ability to take clearer, more sharply focused photos. You can apply basic effects such as contrast, color schemes and retro effects as well as crop and rotate the photo to improve the quality of photos that your phone’s camera captures.

Dynamic Light

This is a great app for manipulating the lighting in your photos. The end result can look more artistic than natural, so if that’s something that interests you as a photographer, this is definitely an app for you. You can select a photo and an effect, then adjust the “dynamic light” dial to control how the effect is applied to the image or you can shoot the image using the app. It’s a great way to turn an ordinary image into a striking one.

Filterstorm

A great app for photo editing, Filterstorm essentially takes the best features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and puts them in a simple app. It’s more about adjustments than filtering, but does allow you some simple effects for manipulating lighting, colour, and brightness among other things.

This is a guest post by Dylan Bailey. Dylan is a freelance writer and keen amateur photographer.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:43 amNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

Add images to your iPad & iPhone photo stream from your Mac

See how to upload images from your Mac to your iPad or iPhone

Sometimes you will get images on your Mac that you want to share with your devices such as your iPad or iPhone. To do this you can add them to your photo stream and they will be synced automatically next time you are connected using a wifi connection.

To do this, from inside iPhoto, click the image(s) to add to the photo stream then click the Share option on the toolbar, click Photo Stream > My Photo Stream. The images will be uploaded to your photo stream and then downloaded to other devices when they next update via a wifi connection.

Of course, for this to work the images have to be in iPhoto. If an image is not, for example, it is on the desktop – you can add it to iPhoto by dragging and dropping it into iPhoto and then add it to your photo stream.

Of course if you have your iPhoto set up to automatically send all new images to your photo stream the very process of adding images to iPhoto will add them to your Photo Stream. To do this in iPhoto, choose iPhoto > Edit Preferences > Photo Stream and, under My Photo Stream (which should already be enabled), check Automatic Import.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:35 am1 Comment links to this post

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

Updated review – Photoshop Express for the iPad

I’ve been revisiting some of the apps I’ve previously reviewed to see what changes have been made to them recently and how they have developed. One of these apps is Adobe Photoshop Express for the iPad. This app is free but it does have some in app purchases – one of which – the Camera pack that includes Noise removal – you can safely ignore. I think it is expensive and not worth the $4.99 that Adobe charges for it. However, ymmv.

The free Effects in Photoshop Express are pretty limited and there are just nine of them so unless you buy the add on Effect Pack ($2.99) you won’t have a lot of creative options. That said, the Effect Pack has a lot of fun effects in it. You could get access to similar effects for free in other apps, but if you want everything in one place you might consider this pack worth shelling out for. There is also a Border pack for 99¢.

Like many free apps the add on borders and effects are shown in the app so you can see them but not use them unless you buy them. You can’t hide them either so this might be a bit off putting – personally I’d rather not see what I don’t own, but that’s my take on it.

One change to the app that I like is the on screen prompts showing you how to use the app. This was a huge complaint that I had initially with the app as it had no indication as to how you made your adjustments. I thought at the time that this made it very hard for inexperienced users to use the app as it wasn’t clear how to do so. In a free tool aimed at beginner users I thought this was inexcusable.

Now the first time you choose an option like Brightness and Contrast an overlay appears showing you how to adjust these options. It’s much less confusing and a whole lot easier to work with. So much so that I’d wholeheartedly recommend this app for beginner to intermediate users.

In Photoshop Express you can edit images from your Camera Roll or capture images using the app. What you cannot do is upload images to Adobe Revel – the new online replacement for photoshop.com (and which was previously called Adobe Carousel – have I confused you yet?). You can also not download images from Adobe Revel to edit them in the app. Since Adobe owns all these sites and apps it would be nice if all its apps and storage locations talked to each other instead of operating in isolation.

Other changes I noticed is that the feature for adding effects and borders has been revamped allowing you to see the full range of effects and borders in one large screen already in place on a small version of your images. Those that are not enabled have a blue mark on the corner and there is a shopping cart link in the bottom right of the screen that you can use to buy add on packs, if desired.

So far as sharing is concerned, Photoshop Express is light on options when compared with some other apps. You can share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and email images but that is all. You can also save images to your Camera Roll.

In all, the changes to Adobe Photoshop Express are welcome and make the app a lot more usable for its target audience. I now actually like this app and would heartily recommend it particularly for beginner to intermediate users looking for a simple and easy to use photo fixing tool.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:57 amNo Comments links to this post

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

OmniSketch Mirror Drawing Video Tutorial

In this video I demonstrate having a little fun in the iPad app OmniSketch, which lets you create tons of funky and interesting brushes.

Transcript: 

I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial on creating a mirror drawing in OmniSketch on the iPad. If you followed my previous tutorial you know how to create this sort of Seurat background. Now we’re going to create some hearts.

So the first thing I’m going to do is select here and click this box here that has lines through it. This means that we’re going to start drawing four things at once and then I’m going to select a brush to use. So I’m going to start with probably this second brush in the top row and we’ll just see how we go. I’m going to choose a sort of red pink because I think I’m going to make some red pink hearts here, okay. And now I’m going to start drawing and you can see that I’m actually drawing all four at the one time.

Now everything is a bit light here so let’s go and see. Let’s increase the width and fiddle with the adjustments. So you can see now that I can get a heavier rendition of these hearts. So I’m going to change brushes and see if we can’t find some brushes that will go down a bit more quickly. Okay, the opacity is really low on that. The width is really low. Let’s go and get some change of color. You can see how these brushes all paint very, very differently. OmniSketch would be probably one of my favorite applications simply because it’s just totally funky. You can get some really, really interesting effects with it. And it’s the kind of application that you can play with for hours.

So I’m just trying to give you a look at – ohhh. Okay, probably not the bubbles. I’m trying to give you a look at some of these different brushes. But let’s just undo that one and let’s go and get a different brush. Okay, this one is pretty good. And for all these brushes you can adjust their opacity and width. And of course you want to keep changing your colors as you work so that you get some interesting designs happening. And I want to fill this one in pretty fast so this is usually a pretty good filler tool. And let’s make it pretty wide and let’s start filling it in. Of course we can always go back to our Seurat dots which are the dots that we used to create the background. I don’t want them to be very wide but you can slowly just draw in this area. And of course I can draw in any one of these and right now I’m working in the top left corner. But I can change and draw on any one of these that I like because wherever you’re drawing you’re just repeating all the way around the image.

So I just kind of work and build up, that was not a happy brush. If you make a mistake just tap Undo and wait as it undoes. It’s probably a little bit delayed here because I’m screen recording at the same time. I’m just going to change the color and yes, let’s just dial down the width on this brush. This is a really nice little brush. And I tend to use it a bit but sparingly because it does really, really funky things so I’m going to see. Sometimes it’s really not clear what adjustment does but varying it just has an interesting effect. I think I need this to be wider and certainly adjustment is going to help me here with this brush. This is really a nice little brush. I think I’m going to darken it up and use it quite a bit for my heart here.

So I’m just looking at building up an overall heart shape. And let’s go back to this brush and I think it’s a small width. I’m just testing this one here. We’ll just undo it. This is a brush I like to use at the very end because it has this really nice little spiky effect. So sometimes I’ll use it for sort of like the star effect because if you just tap you can get this like star happening on your heart shape. So let’s call that good for now. You can obviously work on something similar yourself.

Let’s have a look at what I’ve done in the past. I’m just going to save this and we’ll go back and have a look at some of the hearts that I’ve created previously. This is one of the hearts and it has that same effect down the side. Let’s just open this up. I’m not quite sure why it’s upside down but let’s just go with it. It’s got those little edges around it.

Here’s another set of hearts. This has been drawn on a white background but again it’s had these black hairs around it. Now I’m thinking with the black hairs I might have erased in the middle here as I was working after I did the black hairs. But this mirror drawing is really interesting. You can get some really, really nice effects with it. So there’s a little bit of an introduction to the wonders of OmniSketch on the iPad. And as I’ve said it’s probably one of my favorite applications for drawing because you get these wonderful, wonderful brushes to play around with. I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more iPad tutorials as well as Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements on my YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials. And please subscribe to my YouTube channel and Like the video if you liked it. Thank you.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:00 pmNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

Photoshop – Make more canvas

One of the issues that I’ve had with painting on the iPad is I quite often run into the top of the canvas leaving the image no breathing space.

For example this image created in Art Rage tips the top of the canvas with plenty of spare room at the bottom.

The simplest solution is to email the image to myself on my desktop computer and then open the image in Photoshop.

To begin I cropped this image to a 1 x 1 ratio by clicking the Crop Tool, set the ratio to 1 x 1 and then drag on the image. Once I let go the Crop Tool I can then drag outwards on it to add some extra canvas at the top of the image.

Right now I’m looking for a smart crop plus some extra room at the top that I will fill with canvas shortly. So the blue area in this image is the bit I need to “manufacture” to get the result I want.

Once the image is cropped I’m ready to get rid of the blue and create some canvas from it.

One issue with this particular image is that the canvas itself has a texture in it so just filling it with white or a plain color won’t work.

So, with the Layers palette visible I’ll click on the Add Layer Mask icon to add a layer mask to the background.

Then I select black as my foreground color, a solid round brush with a hard edge and with the mask targeted I’ll paint out the entire painting, leaving only the textured canvas visible. It’s really important to get rid of all the original painting.

Because this is just a mask the image hasn’t actually been removed, it’s just been hidden for now. Grab the Magic Wand Tool, click on the image layer itself and make a selection of the area you want to remove.

To fill it with texture, choose Edit > Fill, set the Use list to Content Aware and click Ok.

The colored area will be removed and will be replaced with a texture matching the remainder of the image.

To finish, drag the Layer Mask onto the trashcan. When asked whether you want to apply the mask before removing click Delete and the mask will be removed leaving the image in place.

Choose Select > Deselect to remove the selection and then save the image.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:23 amNo Comments links to this post

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Bulk delete photos from the iPad

 

 

I’ve been taking a lot of screenshots lately and I have over 1,200 photos on my iPad – a lot more than I really want to store there.

When I went to delete the photos in bulk, I banged my head pretty quickly up against a problem with the iPad. It’s not immediately apparent how you delete a lot of images at one time and deleting them one at a time will get very cumbersome very quickly.

Here’s how to do it:

To begin, launch the Photos app, tap the Albums link and then make sure you’re viewing the Camera Roll or the place where your image are stored. I wanted to remove them from the Camera Roll so I tapped that.

 

 

Now press the bent arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen and you’ll see options on the left for Share, Copy and Delete.

 

 

Tap an image to select it and then go ahead and select each of the images to delete – they’ll get checkmarks on them to show they are to be deleted. To undo the setting, tap the image again.

 

 

Then when I you have those you want to delete selected, tap the Delete button and choose Delete Selected Photos to remove them.

 

 

It is, as you might have expected this is ridiculously simple once you know how to do it but difficult until you do.

The good news is that the images aren’t removed from your iCloud download folder on your PC. So, for example, if you’ve previously had the images synched so they appear on your PC in a folder of iPad downloads, the images will still be on your PC at the end of the process – they’re just removed from your iPad.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am2 Comments links to this post

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

iPad style Apps come to Photoshop – At last!

If you envy your friends their iPhone Instagram app and their iPad grunge photo editing apps then PSKiss has the solution. PSKiss recently released its PSKiss Photogram which is the first ever (at least as far as I’m aware) app like extension for Photoshop. It has all the coolness of an iPad app and it works on the desktop.

PSKiss Photogram is an extension so it installs like any extension and, when running, you see an iPad style interface with Instagram like features all running in a panel inside Photoshop.

You can download the extension from pskiss.com and right now the starter price is $9.90 which is comparable with many iPad apps. The extension is called Photogram and it has a distinctly retro look – it’s tag line is “Bringing the 70’s into Photoshop”.

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file, unzip it, fire up your Adobe Extension Manager and install the ZPG file. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista you may need to run the Extension Manager as an Administrator to install the extension in the correct location. To do this, right click the Adobe Extension Manager in your Start menu and choose Run as Administrator.

Once installed, close Photoshop if it’s open and then re-launch it. Start by opening an image that you want to work with. I grabbed an image of some graffiti I shot this morning  with a view to using it with this extension.

Run the extension by choosing Window > Extensions > PSKiss Photogram. The panel opens showing a series of image effects including Holga, Expired Polaroid, PolaroidPZ, Wrong Velvia and others. They are a mix of faux retro camera effects which are guaranteed to give your photos a very different look.

In addition to applying effects you can also crop your image to one of a number of crop ratios including No Crop, 1:1, 4:3, 2:3 and 16:9.

The app also lets you add light leaks by turning on the Light Leaks switch and add a date stamp which is set using the image metadata.

To apply an effect to an image, set the crop ratio, set the date stamp and light leaks switches then click an effect. You can wind back the processing using the History palette so click on Open in History to revert to the original image. If you choose a different effect it replaces the one you just applied and isn’t added to it so you don’t need to wind back your changes if you want to experiment with different effects.

The light leaks are random so they move around each time you click to add an effect.

If you want the same effect but a different crop, select a different crop and then reapply that same effect to it. You can tell which effect is in use as it has a glow around it and the title bar of the image indicates which effect is in use.

When you’re done, you can save the image as you would any regular image.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, June 3rd, 2012

Edit and Create on the go with Adobe Photoshop Touch

By Helen Bradley

On Monday, Adobe launched its Photoshop Touch application for the iPad. This long sought after app runs on the iPad 2, and not on the iPad 1, and it requires that you have iOS 5 installed. The app costs $9.99 which is at the high end of the price range for photo-editing apps in general but Photoshop Touch seems to have got the feature set about right so most people will probably consider it worth the money.

I use the iPad a lot for working with photos I’ve shot using a digital SLR camera in raw and which I’ve resized, converted to jpeg and downloaded to the iPad. Those images I have on the iPad are there because they are funky or because they lend themselves to some artistic play. So, I looked at Photoshop Touch in this light – I wanted to see if it would be part of my iPad image creative workflow. For heavy duty work, Photoshop and Lightroom will remain my tools of trade.

When you launch Photoshop Touch you get two options, viewing the tutorials or doing some work.

There are 10 tutorials that you can work through each of them is project based so you learn the program by learning a technique not by learning how individual tools work. These are text and image tutorials and not video ones, but they are interactive so you can learn as you go.

The second option is Begin a Project which is where I’ll start. You get the choice of adding an image from your iPad, the Adobe Creative Cloud, the Camera, Google or Facebook. I chose Local Photos then the Photo Library and an image from my iPad.

In the main editing area you’ll find the tools on the left, layers on the right and menus across the top. The program pays lip service only to Photoshop.  Some icons are familiar but others are more iPad than Photoshop so Photoshop users may find it a bit confusing where iPad artists will find it more familiar.

You can add multiple images and multiple layers. I wanted to texture this image so I clicked the Add Layer button and selected Photo Layer.

Once you select a second photo you get to size it as you import it – you can also rotate, flip or skew it too. Click Done to proceed to the editing area.

Now, with the layer selected, you can apply adjustments to it.

I chose Curves as this was a texture and I wanted more contrast. There are no adjustment layers so the Curves adjustment is being applied just to the targeted (top) layer. As you can see, you can adjust the RGB composite channel or the individual red, green and blue channels.

With the texture layer still targeted you can apply a filter to it by clicking the FX button. There is a range of filters including Basic, Stylize, Artistic and Photo. Some add things like drop shadows, blurs and glows and others are more artistic.

I chose Stylize > Old Photo, configured the settings and tapped Apply. Unlike Photoshop where the foreground and background colors need to be selected before you run a filter, here you can select the colors to use in the filter settings – this really is a feature that Photoshop should have.

To blend the layers you click the Layer icon and you get a choice of blend modes and the chance to adjust the layer opacity.

There are no masks but you can use a gradient to fade the effect – when you do the gradient is applied to the layer and you can only undo it by tapping Undo – you can’t go back and edit it.

You can also add a new Empty Layer and fill it with a gradient.

And then blend it using a layer blend mode as I have done here.

I finished by cropping the image and then saving it.

You can then email it or send it to the Camera Roll or upload the project to the Adobe Creative Cloud so you can access them from there.

There are limits to Photoshop Touch and one is the 1600 x 1600 pixel image size limit. The text tools are rudimentary and, as a long time Photoshop user, I’d like to see editable masks and editable text. That said, for fixing photos and tinkering with creative projects this program is a welcome addition to the Adobe family.

This app will appeal to a range of users. There are plenty of basic tools that are easy to use but also some more advanced features for working with images. The Scribble Extract tool does a reasonable job of extracting a subject from a background and you can tinker with gradients and fades to get some interesting effects. You don’t need to know how to use Photoshop to use the app but your knowledge won’t go astray.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

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