Windows Phone Photography

It shouldn't be a secret that Nokia likes to hold photo contests from time to time to showcase the cameras on the Lumia line of Windows Phones. The latest Nokia Lumia Photo Challenge dared readers to capture adventures at night with their Lumia Windows Phone.

The winner was announced over on Twitter and we would like to extend our congratulations to Windows Phone Central reader aaa6112 for his photo of the Scripps Pier in San Diego. The above photo was captured with his Lumia 920 and the prize for this wall hanger of a photo, a new Lumia 720.

Not sure what the next Nokia Lumia Photo Challenge will be but we'll keep an eye out for it and let you know.

Source: @Nokia_Connects

Adobe has released Photoshop Express for Windows 8 and Windows RT. If you've been around digital photography for any amount of time, Adobe Photoshop should be a familiar term. The Photoshop editing software has dominated the digital photography market for years.

It's nice to see a Photoshop editor land for Windows RT and 8, especially for the tablet devices. Photoshop Express could be the answer to a lot of photographers who are looking for a mobile solution or an entry level editor for Windows 8/RT.

Memorylage is a photography app for your Windows Phone 8 device that lets you view your photo albums in collage style, create collages, share your photos and use them as your lockscreen collage-styled wallpaper. It's a nice alternative to the native Pictures Hub and was recently updated to version 1.2.

The update brings a handful of new features and performance tweaks. Lockscreen collages can now be automatically generate (you can still manually create them) and updated periodically from your collage library. You can now adjust the margin between images and select which photo albums you want the collage generator to pull the photos from.

We knew that Camera360 was a popular Windows Phone photography app but apparently it has become the first mobile photography app to pass 100 million global users.

Granted Windows Phone can't take claim to all these users with Camera360 being available over on iOS and Android devices. But still, 100 million is impressive.  

Creative Studio is a very nice photo editing app exclusive to the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices. Creative Studio was updated today to version 5.0 and adds four new editing tools to the mix.

You have two new features to blur images, Focus Object and Radial/Tilt Shift. These features allow you to select areas of your photos to keep in focus and the areas you want to blur.

It was announced today that Nokia will be bringing “Amber”, a software update package that will coincide with Microsoft’s GDR2 update later this summer. We got a quick look at some of the new camera functions, which will launch on the Lumia 925 and then come to all Windows Phone 8 Lumias via an over-the-air update.

So what can we expect? FM Radio, up to 3200 ISO support, less noise, enhanced color profile, image quality improvements and more. One of those new features is of course the Smart Camera app that you see demoed here in our video. Indeed, we’re quite excited for this feature to come.

Nokia has updated their filter list on #2InstaWithLove app with the "Pureview" filter.  Likely in honor of all the news coming out of London.

The app, exclusive to the Lumia Windows Phone lineup, allows you to take photos, apply one of a handful of creative filters and then automatically adds the hashtag #2InstaWithLove to the photo, for sharing on your favorite social network.

Microsoft has been busy polishing up Skydrive. Starting today Skydrive will offer a timeline view of your photos to help you navigate through all your images a little more efficiently.

Skydrive users will also see improvements with respect to upload performance (twice as fast) with the Skydrive desktop app and full resolution uploads from your Windows Phone has become available to all markets.