Instagram seems to be on a mission to add hipster photo filters to all your mobile devices this week. First, the long-awaited Android version of the popular iPhone app dropped and quickly racked up over a million downloads, and now an update opens up support to tablets and Wi-Fi devices in the Android universe.

The news is more salt in the wound of scorned iOS users who were apparently under the impression that their Vegas honeymoon with Instagram would live forever, but times are changing and it doesn't make sense for many apps to be monogamous these days. … Read more

Evidently the Canon 5D Mark III SLR must be a pretty hot item.

Because Apple just released an update to its Mac OS X camera support whose sole purpose is to let iPhoto, Aperture, and other photo applications view and edit the new camera's raw images.

Usually such Apple updates add support for a collection of new cameras, but time is of the essence now that the 5D Mark III is shipping. Many photographers who use this class of camera shoot raw images (data taken directly from the image sensor, not processed into JPEG by the camera) for the … Read more

Well, that didn't take long.

Less than four weeks after Adobe Systems released Lightroom 4, the company has issued a release candidate for Lightroom 4.1 to squash bugs and add support for one of the hottest cameras going right now, the Canon 5D Mark III.

The 22-megapixel, full-frame SLR brings new low-light sensitivity, faster performance, overhauled autofocus, and other improvements over its 3-year-old predecessor. But until now, Lightroom fans who have the coveted $3,500 camera could only see its raw files by converting them into the Digital Negative format with Adobe's DNG Converter software.

Other improvements … Read more

Apparently a lot of people are interested in the new beta of Photoshop CS6: the software has been downloaded more than 500,000 times, Adobe said yesterday.

That's a big number for a premium software product. But of course, the beta is free, and the final version won't be, so it's hard to guess what the conversion rate will be from beta downloads to actual purchases.

Still, as a marketing stunt alone, it has to be useful for Adobe. Photoshop's price -- $699 for the full standard version and $999 for Extended -- is a big … Read more

The original PhotoToaster ($1.99) was already a favorite among photo app users, and I've had a chance to check out a demo of PhotoToaster 3.0, which adds several new features to make the app an even stronger image editor.

New lighting adjustments and presets Several new one-touch presets have been added in the latest version including Clarify, Amplify, Bleach Bypass, Sketch, Dynamic HDR, and Dramatic. Each of the new effects I tried in my testing added even more options for playing with your images, and -- like the original -- you have the option to use sliders … Read more

Last Wednesday Adobe announced the availability of the public beta for the Photoshop component of its upcoming Creative Suite 6 image manipulation and design software, which users can try before the suite is officially released later this year.

While past versions of Adobe's products have offered a decent spectrum of support for existing operating system and computing environments, new features and development directions in the program suite have had Adobe making some adjustments to the platforms that will support the new software.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 puts a major effort toward performance enhancements, primarily with the implementation of the new … Read more

Adobe has spruced up Photoshop CS6's tool for creating HDR images--at the same time that it's updated editing tools with features that make high-dynamic range photos less interesting to me.

HDR images combine multiple shots taken over a range of bright to dark exposures. That means that the shadow detail can be taken from the bright images and the highlight detail from the dark images.

Used in a tame way, an HDR image shows more of the full range of tones the human eye can see. But plenty of people prefer the more unusual or even outrageous effects … Read more

Don't beat yourself up if you didn't know that some modest video editing abilities are tucked into the premium version of Photoshop CS5.

But expect a lot more starting today, when Adobe Systems releases an open beta version of Photoshop CS6 code-named Superstition.

The new version brings video from the higher-priced Extended version of Photoshop to the standard version, and it adds editing features such as the ability to apply Photoshop tone and color adjustments. And instead of relying on Apple's QuickTime, the new tool draws from Adobe technology elsewhere in the Creative Suite, such as the … Read more

There's so much big news surrounding Photoshop CS6 that I'm not sure where to start. This is Adobe's first-ever public beta of its most important product (expected to ship sometime in the first half of this year). It's the first Adobe product to incorporate the company's new DRM architecture. It's the first version of Photoshop to take video seriously and to make it into the Standard Edition of the product rather than the extra-pricey Extended version. It's the first version to integrate the company's GPU-accelerating Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). And for the first time in more than 20 years, Photoshop goes dark.

The beta, which is actually the Extended version of the product, is downloadable from Adobe Labs or Download.com, though at a hefty 1.8GB, it's not for the bandwith-constrained. While you can't run it simultaneously with previous versions, like every Adobe update it installs completely separately so that you can keep predecessors.

Dear Adobe: while that's very convenient, I still want the option to actually update from the previous version. I am tired of the cruft Creative Suite leaves behind every time a new version comes out; on my previous system, I had random directories left over from at least three generations of CS. Given that your new subscription model is designed to drive users to more-frequent updates, you'd better deal with better ways to clean up behind yourself.… Read more