The iPhone 4S' camera does an admirable job in a variety of lighting conditions, particularly when you remember that the device is a phone first, and a camera second. Still, if you find yourself shooting in low-light situations, you probably have noticed that your photos look blurry or grainy. Cortex Camera is a $2.99 app that can reduce this graininess or noise when shooting in low light. Here's how it works:

Instead of taking a single, still photo, Cortex Camera actually captures a short video when you hit the shutter button. Thus, you will need to hold your iPhone still during the 3 seconds or so when Cortex Camera is taking this video, or use a tripod. After another few seconds of processing, Cortex Camera merges 100 frames of video into a single image, saving it to your iPhone's Camera Roll. You can tap to focus and pinch to zoom.

A shot taken with the iPhone 4S' native camera app.

In my experience, I found that Cortex Camera greatly reduced noise in low-light conditions. And I was able to get crisp shots without the need for a stand or tripod. Photos taken with Cortex Camera are a bit narrower than what you get from the iPhone 4S' camera. For more comparisons, check out this page from Cortex Camera.[Read more]

Have you heard the news? Mitt Romney wants to be the President of the United States of "Amercia."

The Republican candidate's campaign yesterday launched a free iPhone app called "With Mitt," allowing people to snap photos and then superimpose one of 14 messages atop them for posting on social networks or e-mailing to friends.

There's just one problem: one of the messages that can be superimposed onto a photo promotes "A Better Amercia," rather than America.

As one might expect, the Twittersphere exploded last night with news of Romney's app mistake. As of this writing, "Amercia" is still a trending topic in the U.S., giving the Romney campaign some attention, but probably not the type it's after.

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According to the Washington Post, which spoke with the Romney campaign, it has submitted to Apple an update to fix the typo, so if you want to snap some photos with hop... [Read more]

Microsoft's Photosynth panorama application is now available to Windows Phone 7.5 users.

The Photosynth application has been around for quite some time, but this is the first instance of it coming to Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace. The application lets users snap a photo with their Mango-based device, and continue doing so until they have a full panoramic view.

According to Microsoft, the application helps users share panoramas on Facebook and Twitter, as well as publish them to Bing, so they appear in search results and Maps.

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For iPhone users, having Photosynth available isn't all that spectacular, considering the app has been available to iPhone users since last April. Microsoft needed additional time to bring the program to its own OS.

Now that it has ... [Read more]

Adobe Systems released Lightroom 4.1 last night, supporting new cameras and lenses, squashing some bugs, adding a couple of notable features -- and in at least one high-profile case, contributing to the angst of a customer of Apple's rival Aperture software.

Aperture beat Lightroom to market and leapfrogged it with lower pricing in this category for higher-end photo editing and cataloging software. But this market is Adobe's bread and butter, and the company is working hard to turn the crank for improvements as fast as it can. More on that competition and customer angst later, but first, here's what's up with the new features in Adobe's $149 program.

New HDR image support For Lightroom 4.1, the first new feature is the ability to import HDR (high dynamic range) files, typically made by combining multiple photos that span a broad range of exposures. Photoshop can produce these files, though HDRsoft's Photomatix got the jump on the market. Regardless of how you obtain your HDR file, though, Lightroom now can edit it, which is nice for people who prefer its editing controls for tone and color.

Adobe, naturally, recommends using Photoshop; whatever tool you use, the company recommends importing a "flat" HDR image in TIFF form, then using Lightroom for the tone-mapping process used to decide which parts of the image should be ... [Read more]