So, you shot pictures copiously with your iPhone 3G. After shooting 20-50 so-so shots, you get one of your cat on a Roomba that you have to show everyone; you know it’s going to be a hit and you want to print it.

Here’s the issue: at 2 megapixels, and 300 ppi (pixels per inch–many refer to it as dpi, but really mean ‘ppi’), you can get a 5.8″x3.8″ print–not even a standard 6×4″ print. It’s true that you could reasonably print at 240 ppi and the difference wouldn’t be visible, so you could yield some extra increased paper real estate in both directions, but we’re going to stick with the tried-and-true 300 ppi resolution here for the sake of this discussion.

So, what do you do if you want an 8×10″ print or larger? Are you out of luck? No, not really…thanks to a great Photoshop plug-in called Genuine Fractals from OnOne. I have been using GF since a very early version and have consistently got great results. The product which has passed through the hands of several companies until it found a home with onOne, has been in the market for something like 10 years now and has proven its worth to me over and over.

Note that you will face the same enlargement issues when you shoot with a DSLR or a point & shoot. While you might easily print an 8×11, if you want to go bigger, you might have to use GF to help you with that.

Now it’s true that Photoshop and most other image-editing programs have their own algorithms for interpolating or ‘up-sampling’ images to larger sizes. However, none of them, in my experience, does as good a job as Genuine Fractals does. You can visit their website for more details and a comparison of GF to Photoshop’s own interpolation capabilities. So, while ‘bicubic smoother’ in PS CS4 won’t cause you complete embarrassment, it also won’t do your image as proudly as GF will.

Basically, Genuine Fractals which comes in a Standard ($159.95, for a limited time only $129.95 – please remember to use our Amazon portal to purchase if you decide to buy it) and Professional Edition ($249.95), applies fractal algorithms to your image to which insert extra information and thereby blow-up your image to much larger sizes with no (or very little, depending upon how large you go) visible distortion. The ‘Pro’ version gets you CMYK image blow-up capability plus integration with LightRoom and Aperture. Personally, I think the standard version has everything you need, assuming you use Photoshop.

onOne claims that you can blow up a 2MP to something equivalent to 30″x42″ at 300 ppi. Based on my own results with this amazing plug-in, I can believe it. I have blown up 2-3MP images to at least that size and carefully viewed the image for artifacts and aliasing and have been pretty amazed at the results. I have shown blown-up images of my enlarged photos and artwork to many people and have gotten nothing but compliments (of course, that could be to spare my feelings as well, I guess). But even if you don’t want to go this big, just being able to blow up your 4″x6″ to 12″x18″ without distortion would be pretty welcome, no?

The product’s stability as a plugin within Photoshop is very good and the user interface by and large is also pretty good. I can’t vouch for how well it co-exists with Photoshop Elements or Aperture, though, since I haven’t used it with those programs.

GF 6 is compatible both with Photoshop CS2-Cs4, and Photoshop Elements 5-7, but only the professional version is compatible with Lightroom 2.x and Aperture 2.x.

Chances are, if you shoot on average 1 or more pix with your iPhone a day (as the statistics indicate most iPhone owners do) and many more than that per month with your digicam or D-SLR, than you probably will have at least a couple a year that are important to you to save and to view at larger sizes. If that’s true, then–whether you print images yourself or send them to a printing service electronically–you can benefit from spending $159 on GF. Keep in mind, as implied in the preceding sentence, that you can use GF not just on your iPhone pictures, but on any digital image. You can take a 12MP image and blow it up to 75×115″, again with no apparent loss of quality.

You can download a trial version and try it out before making a purchase decision. Check it out…

[This article was adapted from a post which originally appeared on iPhonePhotoVideo.com. It is published here with their permission]

Contrary to the iPhone being a lousy HDR camera platform, the iPhone is a good companion when you head out with your DSLR to capture HDR images. Why?

My typical setup for an HDR shot in the field looks like this:

• Setup the DSRL on a tripod
• Use the spotmeter in my Canon 5D to meter the lightest and darkest parts of the scene
• Sit down and do the math how many shots it takes, what to set the Auto Exposure Bracket (AEB) settings to and how many AEB shots it will take.

The calculation can become quite challenging based on the limitations of your camera equipment. My Canon 5D only allows for 3 shot AEB with a maximum bracketing distance of 1 EV between each shot. If you need to bracket 7 EVs, you need 3 AEB shots with what settings for each shot? I guess you get the gist of the problem.

Two iPhone applications can help you with the math. My favorite is EVcalc – simply set the desired Aperture, the initial speed and the bracketing distance, then let it calculate the corresponding brackets. It’s quite simple and fast. The only improvement I would have wished for is to be able to pick the max EV and AEB settings for my camera from a picklist. But since I know these anyway, it was not too much of a problem. And the price is right: It’s free.

The other application is HDR Helper. It pretty much does the same as EVcalc, with one added feature: You can also change your ISO sensitivity in your HDR setup. This might be important for some photographers, especially when you shoot handheld, but I don’t need it, thus my preference for EVcalc. But if you want ISO support in your HDR calculations, $1.99 is a good price for a very capable iPhone HDR companion app.

[Posted with permission from iPhonePhotoVideo.com]

Let’s face it – the iPhone camera is not that great. We all hope for something better once iPhone 3.0 comes out.

In the meantime, there is some help. Pro Camera is one application with advanced features compared to the regular camera app and it has become my new default camera application. First of all, it supports a very basic image stabilization (in Canon-speak) or vibration reduction (in Nikon-speak): it utilizes the accelerometer to help you level your shots before you take them and has an user-definable anti-shake delay function so it won’t capture your shot until you hold your iPhone still. The results are noticeably better as you can see from the 100% crop from two images taken in my home office.

ProCamera also includes a timer for delayed shots or self-portraits. In addition, as is also visible in the image above, it applies color temperature correction to your shots, which makes them look a bit cooler. This might not be to everyone’s liking, but can be changed in Photogene (see our review) on the iPhone or your favorite photo editor on your PC or Mac.

One feature that takes getting used to is the background save function. While it’s great to have a buffer, so you can keep snapping pictures and don’t have to wait for every photo to be saved before being able to shoot again, you have to wait until the last photo has been saved before you can quit the app. Quit the application too early and you lose all the photos that have not been saved yet. I wish there was a warning when you try to quit before all pictures are saved. Fortunately, there’s a setting to turn this off, if you do not like photo buffering.

Price: $2.99 from iTunes.

Reposted with permission from our sister blog, iphonephotoshow.com

If you carry an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you also carry a great platform for displaying your artwork. While photographers such as Scott Bourne claim that they sold artwork straight after showing it on their iPhone, this has never happened to me. But I’ve shown my images in a number of casual settings, often by accident, since the topic just came up. Thus, it pays (literally and figuratively) to be prepared.

So how do you best showcase your artwork on an iPhone? Here are some tips:

Resize your images: The iPhone’s native resolution is 480 x 320 pixels at 163ppi. Since it allows you to zoom in, I resize my images to 960 x 640 pixels at 163ppi. You could make them even bigger, but since the iPhone’s storage space is limited, there’s a tradeoff between better resolution and more images.

Create portfolios: Similar to any showing of your artwork, create portfolios centering around subjects, trips or events, then pick only the best images. Store these as separte portfolios, then transfer them to your iPhone. When you show your artwork in a more ad-hoc or casual setting, people don’t have the time to look at 300 pictures. Thus, I typically pick between 10 and 20 pictures for a portfolio.

Adjust for the iPhone screen: The iPhone screen is not color-calibrated and to my eye, it’s very contrasty. Thus, I have to adjust my images, so they display at their best on the iPhone. Unfortunately, this is a manual process – there’s no one-setting-fits-all slider, button or action you can use in Photoshop. However, if you use a sequence of images in a portfolio that were all taken under similar lighting conditions, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom make it easy to apply adjustments to a set of images, so you do not have to do this manually for every single image.

What other tricks do you use to best show your images on an iPhone?

Let’s face it – a lot of pictures taken with an iPhone and posted straight to Flickr or Facebook don’t look very good. But help is available for some quick adjustments through Tiffen’s Photo Fx. Simply take a picture, open Photo Fx, choose one of the 26 filters, use the sliders on the bottom to make your adjustments, then save the picture before posting it. It is a very simple and quick process which can yield quite dramatic improvements over your straight-out-of-your-iPhone pictures. Also handy is their before/after toggle, so you can always compare how the improvements look over the original. Of course, you can apply multiple filters on the same picture.

Supported filters include: Black and White, Black Pro-Mist®, Center Spot, Color-Grad® , Color Spot, Day for Night, Enhancer, Fog, Glow, Halo, High Contrast, Infrared, Looks, Night Vision, Old Photo, Polarizer, Pro-Mist®, Reflector, Star, Soft/FX®, Tint, Two Strip, Three Strip, Ultra Contrast and Vignette.

Our verdict: Highly recommended!

Price: $2.99 (introductory), later $3.99

CameraBits released version 4.6 of its popular PhotoMechanic software from beta at PMA today. The long list of changes since 4.5.x include a slick folder-watching Live Ingest function, a full-resolution loupe in the Contact Sheet view, additional upload templates for Amazon S3, Flickr, SmugMug and others, expanded GPS support, an option to export all program preferences for import into Photo Mechanic on another computer and much, much more. It is still very good at fast imports of images from your camera to a PC or a Mac. In addition, it allows for quick sorting, tagging and the creation of contact sheets in a color managed environment. The new version also adds support for the latest DSLRs.

Price: $150

Here’s a very nifty program: Vincent Cheung released version 2 of his ShapeCollage program, which allows you to easily create a collage of different photos which you can then arrange in the shape you want. Simply pick your images, drag them into shape collage, choose your shape or create one and you are done. Upload the collage to your blog or website, save it as a separate image then import it into Photoshop — there are no boundaries. Let your creativity reign.

Sure, there are other ways to create collages and shapes of collages, but not as easily as in ShapeCollage. Give it a try and see yourself how easy it is to be creative!

Highly recommended!

Price: free

Tiffen released version 2 of its Dfx software, which allows you to reproduce many of the most popular filters you used to use in the field. Overall, the new version includes more than 2,000 standard and special-effects filters, which can be used as-is or even customized and saved for future use. Some of these filters have been part of our workflow and have consistently produced superior results without going through a steep learning curve. While not inexpensive, these filters can save you endless hours trying to re-create a special look or effect in Photoshop.

Some filter examples: Ambient Light, Close-up Lens, Hazem High Contrast, Warm and Cool Polarizers or Wide Angle Lens.

Highly recommended!

Standalone price: $99.95, Amazon: $99.95
Photoshop plugin: $299.95, Amazon: $299.95
Aperture plugin: $299.95, Amazon: $274.85

If you are like us, you carry your iPhone whereever you go. Thus, I’ve been looking for a DOF (Depth of Field) calculator on my iPhone for quite some time. No longer! Bitwerks, a company from Switzerland, released f/8, its DOF implementation for download from Apple’s iTunes store. Once installed, it’s easy to enter through the familiar iPhone interface all of the required information about your cameras and lenses. Then, just pick a camera/lens combination in the field and calculate your DOF. It’s that simple.

Our verdict: Highly recommended!

Price: $3.99

Maximum Output Software released version 4.1 of its FileBack PC backup software which is one of our favorites for backing up on a Windows PC. The main new feature is support for multiple users on the same Windows PC. In addition, support for file and folder names with more than 256 characters has been added, while performance improvements have been made and bug fixes were applied. The Enterprise edition also allows for simultaneous compression and encryption of backups.

The upgrade is free for all registered users of version 4.x

Price: $55.00