The three Adobe Photoshop Touch iPad apps announced a few weeks ago – Adobe Colour Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav – are now available on iTunes. These apps enable users to create custom colour swatches, paint directly onscreen and drive popular Photoshop tools from tablet devices. Pricing for the applications is £2.99 for Adobe Eazel, £1.79 for Adobe Colour Lava and £1.19 for Adobe Nav.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery 4.0 is a program that helps recover your lost photos from memory cards & hard drives. Sunil Chandna, CEO of Stellar Data Recovery, comments, “Our brand new version of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is specially designed for home users and brings back lost picture memories in 3-simple steps. The new version is vastly improved to support all consumer & professional cameras and recovers over 50 different image, video & music file formats.” The software is available in English, German, Spanish, French & Italian language editions and works on Windows and Mac computers. The price is €31/$39, and the company is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee on the product.

Adobe has released a document intended to help Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended users make the most of the program. The eleven-page PDF is divided into two sections, Essential Hardware and Key Steps to Optimise Photoshop CS5 Performance. The paper discusses topics like scratch disk allocation, hard disk defragmentation, setting the RAM percentage used by Photoshop, and more. The document can be downloaded from the Adobe website.

Website: Adobe

Topaz Labs have just released Topaz Lens Effects, a new Photoshop plug-in designed to help photographers quickly and easily achieve a wide range of lens, filter and specialty camera effects. With Lens Effects, users can create realistic enhancements for emphasising focal points, creating bokeh to blur distracting backgrounds, adding vignettes, and balancing color tone - in just a few clicks.“In addition to a novel approach of creating accurate depth maps for the most realistic depth-of-field simulation, Lens also uses brand new architecture that gives us the unparalleled agility to enhance our software’s capabilities and functionality with new ideas and suggestions that we constantly receive from the Topaz user community,” said Jawad Malik, project leader for the new Topaz Lens Effects. The application retails for $79.99, but is being offered at a special promotional price of $49.99 until 1st June.

XPro Software has released version 2.97 of GeniuX Photo EFX. The program is a standalone application for photo editing and digital painting, and offers both one-click operation and over 300 custom settings. Features include support for 20 different image formats, 15 advanced editing tools, 90 filters, 7 artistic brushes, and more. Version 2.97 incorporates a number of new features and a bug fix. GeniuX Photo EFX sells for $99. For more information, visit the website below.

Website: GeniuX Pro EFX

Independent developer Ken Tidwell has announced D200 DSLR v2.0 for iOS, another in his series of Min-U Guides to Nikon DSLRs. The opening screen of the Min-U (minimum menu) Guide consists of seven main chapter headings, each including a replica of the icon used on the D200 for that menu. The six Menu chapters include Playback, Shooting, Custom Settings, Setup, Recent and More, providing clear and comprehensive instructions for each important menu function. The app is a universal binary, and displays in the highest, native resolution on every iOS device. D200 DSLR v2.0 is available on iTunes for $4.99.

Photobucket has announced Snapbucket, the first of many upcoming additions to its mobile platform. Snapbucket, which complements Photobucket’s existing mobile app, enables users to “snap” photos from their mobile device, personalise those photos through unique filters, effects and frames, and then easily share with their social community. Both the original and personalised photos are automatically stored online in the user’s Photobucket account.

ab2labs today announced that an update of their photography app, Effects 3.0, is now available for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. The latest version adds filter layering, live preview of filters and frame effects, new actions and services to export and share images, and more. Effects 3.0 is available as a free download from iTunes.

A public Beta version of Filter Forge 3.0 is now available for download. The update adds support for multiple source images, enables faster image preview through the introduction of Progressive Previews, adds hexadecimal colour values in the Colour Picker, HDR and alpha channel support for filter controls, high-precision Colour Inspector, the ability to load recently-used images, a unified Bomber component and more. Filter Forge 3.0 Beta can be downloaded from the website below.

Website: Filter Forge

Decks by Cooliris is a new iPad app for Flickr users. This free app allows users to discover and follow their favourite public photos from Flickr all in a slick deck of cards that update continuously. With Decks for Flickr, you can create and follow album decks by user name, description or tag; flip any photo card to see photo description, location etc.; share photos as postcards through email, Facebook or Twitter; and share your entire Flickr deck with friends who have the Decks for Flickr app. The app is available for immediate download from iTunes.

Ohanaware has updated its HDRtist Pro software to version 1.0.1. HDRtist Pro is an advanced HDR imaging tool that is able to wield and manipulate 128-bit floating-point images and can work with multiple exposures as well as single raw image files. The new version incorporates over fifty changes, including the addition of new features and the implementation of bug fixes. HDRtist Pro 1.0.1 is a free update for existing users. For new customers, HDRtist Pro 1.0.1 is $29.99 / £19.99, available now on the Ohanaware website.

Adobe has released an update to Photoshop CS5. Officially called Adobe Photoshop 12.0.4, the latest version enables specially designed apps on tablets, smartphones, and PCs to communicate with and control interaction with Photoshop CS5. (The first such apps have been developed by Adobe itself, and will shortly be available for purchase on iTunes.) To apply the update choose Help > Updates in your current version of Adobe Photoshop CS5.

RogueSheep today announced that an important update for its TouchUp App for iPad is now available from the App Store. The TouchUp app leverages the Apple iPad’s graphics processor and OpenGL graphics “to provide high-performance image editing in a refined user experience”. Users can apply a variety of effects to their photo which can then be “brushed” on or off any portion of the image. Users can stack any number of effects and adjustments on their photos to make even more impressive results. The update includes three new pixel-image effects, two new “Lo-fi” filters, adds Flickr import with full Set, Tag, and Favorites integration, and more. TouchUp for iPad 1.2 is available on iTunes for $9.99.

TIPA editors have voted Nik Software’s Complete Collection as the Best Photo Software for 2011. The collection is a suite of all Nik Software plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Apple Aperture, including the latest versions of Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro, Viveza, Sharpener Pro and Dfine. “We are particularly proud to win the prestigious 2011 TIPA Award for Best Photo Software, as this award is given internationally by the people who represent imaging and photography customers worldwide,” said Michael J. Slater, President and CEO of Nik Software.

Phase One has released Capture One 6.2, which adds camera support for a range of Samsung, Fuji, Ricoh, Panasonic, Canon, Sony and Nikon cameras, as well as the Phase One IQ180, IQ160 and IQ140. Further additions and improvements include local adjustment of saturation and clarity and the ability to copy a local adjustments mask from other layer, auto sync of XMP metadata, additional camera controls for Canon and Nikon, and improved OpenCL and 64 bit performance. Capture One version 6.2 is a free upgrade to current owners of Capture One Express 6 and Capture one Pro 6.

Canon U.S.A. has announced the addition of two new media types for use with its imagePROGRAF large-format printers. The 280gsm Premium Glossy Paper 2 and Premium Semi-Glossy Paper 2 are designed for precise, ultra high-quality print performance, and help deliver enhanced colour range and improved durability. The new papers are expected to begin shipping in June. In addition, Canon’s PosterArtist poster creation software has been updated with the capability to support 64-bit operating systems.

Akvis have released Akvis Retoucher 5.0 for Windows and Mac OS. This version introduces the Spot Remover tool which can remove small imperfections on an image easily. Support for files in raw format has also been added as well as an OS File Dialog for loading and saving files.Akvis Retoucher sells for $87.  For registered users of the previous version the upgrade is free.

Blurb has just released a new mobile publishing application called Blurb Mobile. Designed to enable easy and fast story creation using rich media content, the Blurb Mobile iPhone app enables easy media editing, including rotating, cropping, scaling, and drag and drop sequencing, plus geotagging, which can link the story to a location on a map. Available on iTunes, Blurb Mobile is free to download and each customer receives a story channel on Blurb.com/mobile to share their stories. In addition, Blurb Mobile Plus provides an in-app upgrade path for customers seeking additional photo, video and audio capability.

Dreamix Studio has released Album App 1.0 - a new digital photo album solution for the Apple iPad. The app lets you scale, rotate and move photos with a single touch, add pages to your album and get creative with the layout or use one of the 30+ predefined templates. With only a single tap you select a photo from your photo library and it will auto position on the spot you tapped on. Available on iTunes, Album App 1.0 is priced at $3.99.

Adobe has posted the final versions of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 6.4 and Photoshop Lightroom 3.4. Originally published as Release Candidates, these updates fix a few bugs and add raw file support for a number of new cameras, including the Canon EOS 600D (pictured), Nikon D5100 and Fuji FinePix X100 and others.

Website: ACR 6.4 for Mac | ACR 6.4 for Windows
Website: Lightroom 3.4 for Mac | Lightroom 3.4 for Windows