One of my favorite services, Dropbox, is now available not only on Mac and PC, but also as an iPhone app. It allows me to sync files between all three as I see fit, plus it adds viewing capability of all kinds of file formats to my iPhone. Cool!
But the iPhone app has another trick up its sleeve: Immediately synch your iPhone photos to the Cloud, and thus to all your desktops. Here’s how it works:
- In Dropbox on your iPhone, click on Photos
- Click the camera icon in the upper right
- Either use the camera app to take a photo or select an existing photo from the camera roll
- Once selected, Dropbox will upload it immediately into the Cloud and from there automatically downloads it to all your PCs and Macs
- Rinse and repeat
Very cool. In my case, I don’t upload photos as I take them – I usually take a bunch of photos and when on a break, I upload them all.
One minor downside: Dropbox uses its own version of the picture viewer, which currently does not support pinch to zoom when viewing photos in Dropbox. That’s not important to me at all – I solely use Dropbox to upload images and Apple’s Photos program to view them.
Verdict: Highly recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!
Price: Free from iTunes.
If you want to learn Photoshop with the help of your iPhone, here’s your chance.
This week only, RHED Pixel offers Understanding Photoshop – Quick Fixes for just $0.99. For that price you get a 165 MB download that is full of training videos and quizzes. Specifically, Understanding Photoshop includes:
- 17 training videos edited specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch, including zooms and close-ups of the action
- Every lesson includes hands-on files that you download to your computer, so you can try your newly learned techniques at home
- Interactive quizzes
- Search and bookmarking your progress
- Photoshop quick reference guide
- Interact with the trainer with comments and a Twitter client.
The application was developed with host Richard Harrington who is well known in the Photoshop world. He has written over 20 books on digital photography and design, is a contributor to Photoshop User and Layers Magazine, an Adobe Certified Instructor and a member of the Photoshop World Instructor “Dream Team.”
Both Joe and I are pretty fluent in Photoshop, so we passed on this app. But this might be a good app for you, if you like to use your iPhone as a learning tool, maybe even while you travel.
Price: $0.99 from iTunes – only this week!
It’s not too late to enter our contest! We just gave away a copy of “The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects” eBook thanks to no starch press. Congrats to the lucky winner!
Enter our new contest by Wednesday September 30, 2009, 23:59 Pacific, for a chance to win one of two prizes:
- First prize: Up to $50 worth of merchandize (books, e-books, posters, mugs,…) from no starch press
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In addition, we are randomly giving away other prizes for just entering into this contest. Watch Twitter for hints and clues when these prizes will be given away to increase your chances…
To be eligible to win, simply do any one or all of the following by September 7, 23:59 Pacific (if you do all, you increase your chances of winning):
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If you are already subscribed to our email updates or follow us on Twitter, you are automatically entered into the contest.
The rules for this contest are:
- You must be at least 18 years of age.
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We check our email subscription log to find your subscription. We check our link logs to find the clicks to our site from you links. We check our Twitter notices to learn when you started to follow us. We throw all this information at a random number generator and pick a winner. If you are the winner, we will notify you and you will have to provide us with proof of your age and an address to send the giveaway to. Sorry, no P.O. Boxes.
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Masking within an image is not easy on a PC or Mac. Thus, our interested was piqued when we learned about Green Screen Studio, an app that not only lets you mask and replace a selection with a monochromatic background (such as a green screen) on your iPhone, but then even replace the monochromatic background with another picture.
The app works pretty straight forward. Shoot or select a photo, then use one of six tools (Magic brush, polygon, trace, eraser, paint or replace automatically) to create your selection and replacement with the monochromatic background. Tap on Background, select one of the included backgrounds and you are done.
As always, the devil is in the details. In my test image, I picked one part of my messy desk and tried to replace everything else with the Statue of Liberty. Easier said than done. The magic brush had issues with the grains of my floor and armoire and had parts of them “see through” (see black dots in the sky – there were more but I painted most of them over). Paint, Trace and Eraser are simply not granular enough to create a half-way precise selection. Additionally, since your finger obstructs the screen as you trace, it became very frustrating to try to paint a selection when you could not really see what was on the screen (check the right border where the sky meets the mess on my desk). This is a task where I really need a mouse – a task that I always perform on my Mac and never on the iPhone.
Maybe this app works for you. For me it does not. And it cannot in the future, since I removed it from my iPhone.
The free version is ad-supported.
Price:
Green Screen Lite: free from iTunes
Green Screen Studio: $2.99 from iTunes
