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Friday, 17 June 2011

Canopy Camera Tools – Create Time-Lapse Movies & Take Better Pictures On The Go [iOS]

class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/intro2.jpg" alt="time lapse movies" />Quality, free and above all useful camera apps are often hard to come by on the class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/ios">iOS platform. Both class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/share-life-photos-free-instagram-app-iphone/">Instagram and class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/snapbucket-fun-mobile-photo-styling-sharing-app-photobucket-ios-android-smartphones/">Snapbucket are great for quickly sharing stylised snaps, but they don’t add any genuinely useful features for everyday shots or video.

class="vt-p" href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/canopy-camera-tools/id417407454?mt=8">Canopy Camera Tools is an app designed to help you get the most out of your mobile photography, and much like class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/frame-frame-free-photography-app-ios-stopmotion-antishake/">Joby’s Frame X Frame it has been created with a specific attachment in mind – the Kapok Canopy Case, with tripod mount. You don’t need a tripod to benefit from this one, as there are plenty of features you can use in your hand. You could always fashion something to hold your device steady (I find Blu-Tack works well without leaving a mess) if you fancy creating a class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/chronolapse-desktop-client-create-timelapse-screencasts-ease/">time-lapse sequence.

Getting The Basics Right

The iPhone (or any iOS device) camera isn’t the be-all and end-all of mobile photography. Whilst the iPhone is the most popular and oft-used “camera phone” solution; Apple’s in-built app leaves you wanting a bit more control and a few extra features.

Without being overly complicated, Canopy places 6 main buttons on your viewfinder, which can be toggled on and off with a tap. These are persistent in both Camera and Video modes, which are selected at the bottom of the screen, along with quick access to existing photos and app settings.

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1.jpg" alt="time lapse movies" width="580" height="387" />

The left hand side of the screen allows you to choose between front and rear facing cameras, toggle time-lapse mode and the camera timer which is perfect for group shots and also works with video. On the right hand side of the screen there are buttons for controlling flash behaviour, toggling exposure lock and white balance lock.

The lock buttons are especially useful, and add some genuinely useful functionality to your phone. For example, whilst taking a video by default the camera will adjust exposure as light changes. Should you want to maintain exposure throughout the video, exposure lock allows you to do this and your camera won’t re-balance every time you move.

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/settingslocked.jpg" alt="iphone camera apps" width="580" height="387" />

This also goes for white balance, and if you’re really serious you could use a piece of white or grey card to take a perfect white balance reading and lock this for the duration of your video or photo session.

Advanced Features, Better Results

Of course Canopy also includes the aforementioned time-lapse mode, which automatically stitches your photos into a video. It works, though as the handy notification I received pointed out – phone calls will interrupt any sequences you’re working on. The best way around this is to activate Airplane Mode from your device’s Settings.

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/timelapse.jpg" alt="iphone camera apps" width="580" height="387" />

Time-lapse photography takes up a decent wedge of battery (I’ve yet to use an app which is “light” on power for this task) so make sure you’ve got enough battery to complete the sequence and find your way home afterwards. It works well, and doesn’t fill your camera roll with hundreds of images – great news.

The Settings menu afoot the viewfinder is also full of goodies. Much like Frame X Frame there is a spirit level (for that perfectly straight horizon) which – unlike Frame X Frame – does work in landscape mode. There’s also a grid that can be activated for aiding composition.

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/settings.jpg" alt="iphone camera apps" width="580" height="387" />

Saving the best till last, it is also possible to use touch gestures to control the camera and this can be customized in the Settings area. As you can see from the screenshot below, the default configuration is pretty intuitive.

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/tap_gestures.jpg" alt="time lapse movies" width="580" height="387" />

Conclusion

Canopy Camera Tools is probably the best free camera app I have used on the iOS platform. Features like time-lapse, exposure and white balance lock along with well-implemented touch gestures make it a joy to use, and provide some excellent results. You really don’t need a tripod, Kapok case or Gorillamobile to enjoy Canopy. Grab it now and start taking better pictures!

Have you found any similar great tools we’ve yet to feature? Do you like Canopy Camera Tools? Do you own a tripod/mount for your device? Let us know how you shoot on the go in the comments below./>/> Follow href="http://twitter.com/MakeUseOf" target="_blank" >MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.

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Thursday, 16 June 2011

Take a Screenshot & Upload To Your Site In One Step With UpScreen [Windows]

class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/uparrow.jpg" alt="upload screenshot" />When you’re an online writer, you really have to spend a lot of time taking screenshots. This need also extends well beyond the online writing world. Maybe you need to create a web-based manual for work and you need to capture screenshots for it, or maybe you are a teacher trying to create an online how-to guide for your students to use at home.

There are a lot of important reasons why people need to take screenshots and then upload them to the web for online publication. Here at MUO, I think we’re really covered the gamut when it comes to screenshots, such as class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-tools-for-creating-screenshots-and-screencasts/">Ben’s list of the 4 best screenshot and screencast tools, class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/everything-you-should-know-about-making-awesome-screenshots/">Ann’s list of tools for high quality screenshots, or the list of class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-google-chrome-extensions-great-screenshots/">Chrome snapshot plugins by Simon.

Believe it or not, there is another tool that you may want to consider if you want to shave even more time off your screen capturing efforts. Imagine being able to hit a couple of keys, draw a rectangle on your screen, and then have that area captured and automatically uploaded to your website or blog? In almost a single step you’ve cut four or five steps from the typical screenshot process. This is possible by using a cool little app called class="vt-p" href="http://sharpmindprojects.com/project/upscreen/">UpScreen.

One Quick Setup For Fast Screenshots

UpScreen is just an executable file. Download it and place it wherever you want to launch it from. The first time you launch the app, you’ll need to set up where the screenshots will get uploaded to via class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/free-ftp-clients-windows">FTP.

If you can, stick to using “www” in front of your domain rather than “ftp” so that the preview window, which I’ll show you in a bit, will work correctly. So long as you list port 21 the server will know to access the FTP account. Ideally, you should create a special FTP account for this purpose. In this example I created an FTP account and assigned it to an “auto” folder inside the wp-content/uploads/ area of my blog.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen21.png" alt="upload screenshot" width="423" height="290" />

If you do assign the FTP account to a subdirectory structure inside the “public_html” directory, you’ll have an opportunity in the next step of the setup to tell the application what that directory is. Make sure you type the right one so that the preview feature of the screenshot app works right.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen3b.png" alt="upload screenshot online" width="426" height="290" />

Now, when you run the application, you will see crosshairs show up on the screen. You can now draw the area that you want to take a shot of, and the application will capture it and upload it. But if you would rather take a full screenshot or check your FTP settings, right-click anywhere on the screen and you’ll see the menu appear.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen4.png" alt="upload screenshot online" width="303" height="213" />

Options is where you can re-configure FTP settings if you want to, or you can alter what image format you want the screenshots saved to. The five characters refer to the 5 random characters assigned to the screenshot name. You can assign more characters if you think you’ll be taking lots of screen captures over time.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen5.png" alt="upload screenshot online" width="257" height="324" />

To take a screenshot, just draw the rectangle as shown below. A gray box will appear over the area that you’ll be capturing as a new image.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen51.png" alt="" width="566" height="523" />

The moment you release the mouse button, two things happen at once. First, the application captures the screenshot of the area you assigned. Second, it immediately connects to your FTP host account and uploads the file. That’s it! All of those ftp/upload steps are erased when you use UpScreen to do your screen captures.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen7.png" alt="instant screenshot upload" width="569" height="552" />

The screenshot I captured above is a screenshot of a Firefox window that I had open, which was displaying an image on my website. UpScreen took a snapshot of the area of my Firefox window that I had boxed, uploaded it to my website, and then displayed a preview of the snapshot as shown above. Now all I have to do is use that image link anywhere in my blog posts that I like.

Now, all this is well and good, but what good is it to have an executable you have to keep launching in order to do screenshots? The solution for this is to assign a hotkey to launch the app whenever you want to do a screenshot upload. There are lots of ways to create HotKeys in windows – I prefer to use the class="vt-p" href="http://directedge.us/content/winhotkey">WinHotKey app.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen9.png" alt="instant screenshot upload" width="509" height="496" />

Here, I’ve defined Control-U as the hotkey to take a snapshot using UpScreen. That’s all there is to it.

A few final things you should know about Upscreen – taking a full desktop screenshot is as simple as running the app, right-clicking, selecting “Full Screen” and then double-clicking anywhere on the desktop.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen10.png" alt="instant screenshot upload" width="253" height="189" />

Here is my full desktop snapshot instantly uploaded to my website using UpScreen. This procedure took me just about 5 seconds and it was instantly on my site.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/upscreen11.png" alt="upload screenshot" width="580" height="361" />

You can also take a quick snapshot of a single window by double-clicking on the title bar of that window. UpScreen will capture the window, upload, and then display a preview of your uploaded picture in your web browser.

UpScreen is good for anyone that does a lot of screenshots, but it’s really worth its weight in gold if you do a lot of “how-to” articles that require constant screenshots. The ability to cut several steps out of the process can really save a lot of time in the long run.

Give UpScreen a shot and see if you find it as convenient as I do. What do you like about it and what would you change? Share your thoughts in the comments section below./>/> Follow href="http://twitter.com/MakeUseOf" target="_blank" >MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.

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