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Entries in Photos (3)

Snapseed Makes HDR Easy

It isn’t going to satisfy ‘proper’ photographers or HDR proponents we realise, but the latest version of Snapseed (now offered for Free under Google’s ownership) has a new tool in its arsenal, known as HDR Scape.  

Now iOS photographers can have a stab at HDR photography whilst editing their photos in one of our favourite iOS Photography apps. 

Grey card test

To show just how powerful this new tool is we took out our iPad 3 on a very dull and grey November day here on the South Coast of the UK, and we grabbed one of the dullest photos we could, without giving it too much thought.

Live demo

Then we brought that photo into Snapseed on the same iPad and ran it through the HDR Scape tool to see what happened, recording it as a little screencast for you at the same time.

Whilst the results are far from great, we think it is pretty amazing what Snapseed was able to pull out of this dull, flat iPad photo and the potential is clear.  Check out the video and let us know if you have achieved any results with the HDR Scape tool in Snapseed that you would like to share with us (links to any examples would be nice too).

Is it time to switch on Photo Stream on your iPad?

As much as we wanted to use it, we haven't bothered with Apple's iOS5 Photo Stream feature so far because we simply didn't want every app screenshot we take, or fuzzy shot of our foot, ending up on all our devices.

Now that Apple have released iOS 5.1 we can finally select an individual photo and delete it from the Photo Stream for our account. For us, this makes Photo Stream worth switching on at last.

Why is this a big thing for iPad Creative? The imminent release of the New iPad and its 5MP camera, of course! Not to mention the even more fantastic photo viewing experience we expect from iPad 3's sharper and more saturated 'Retina Display'.

Finally we can look forward to having a camera in the iPad that we are not embarrassed to share the results from, or that we do not have to dress up with numerous filter apps to make useable (although we will still be doing that, especially with the release of iPhoto for iOS - but more on that soon).

What do you think?

We would like to hear from you, are you already using Photo Stream? Has the new update prompted you to turn it on now? Or is it something you just find no use for? Let us know in the comments.

Flickpad: now with added Flickr

We wrote about Shacked Software's Flickpad back in May and we liked it, but at the time it could only be used for viewing Facebook photos and albums. We liked the innovations that had been made with the interface though and the way that you could 'flick' photos around the virtual desk on the iPad screen, it made browsing Facebook albums a lot of fun.

Now Shacked Software have released a really nice 2.0 update to their app including access to Flickr photos as well as Facebook, which for us is a big change and probably the most compelling reason to buy it.  Now all that lovely UI goodness has been applied to our favourite photo sharing site too, and it is far more valuable having the two big hitters in the photo sharing world available through the same fun interface. Flickpad is now a real winner in our opinion.

One of the new feature we really liked (and would love to see on Flickr's own app) is multiple account logins so that more than one Flickr account can be used on the same iPad, handy for those of us who have a 'family and friends' account as well as a public account and, in our case, a third (iPhoneography) account.

Have a look at the above video to get a good idea of how the app works and also how fun the interface can be compared to some of the other photo browser apps.

Flickpad is available for £3.99 ($6.99) in the app store now, but if you are not sure about plumping for the full version, Flickpad have just tweeted this out in the last few hours:

Flickpad Lite was just approved and should be in app store shortly. For those of you on the fence about the full version, give it a shot!

The free Lite version is limited to 2 User Accounts, 5 active friends per service and 5 searches per app launch, but this will certainly give you a chance to try the interface out and see if you like it, so nothing to lose.  The Lite version is available now.