At the best of times, even with the smallest of images, photo editing has always been a challenging process for any app to cope with. This problem has only worsened with the ever-increasing number of pixels being added to sensors, and the ever-increasing size of the files those sensors produce. Add the uncompressed nature of RAW files into the equation, and you have a recipe for crash-inducing disaster — a disaster that is only avoided with highly skilful development.

Adobe has managed to avoid such troubles, in the shape of Photoshop RAW plugin, and with Lightroom, both of which are trusted by photographers the world over. Apple, too, has raised the standard of Aperture over the years, and it is now as good as any all-in-one you’d care to mention. And the choice doesn’t stop at the software giants — Capture One, darktable and CameraBag are great RAW converters as well.

Hoping to join this league is AccuRaw ($29.99), a new, lightweight conversion app from small development studio, PCDMagic. It looks the part and is well equipped on paper; but is AccuRaw an alternative that’s worth having?

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Import

Unlike some of the library apps mentioned above, AccuRaw stays clear of archiving and categorizing, instead focusing purely on the editing side of image management.

AccuRaw stays out of the way of organization; you just load images from your hard drive.

As a result, images are loaded directly from a target folder on your hard drive into AccuRaw via the in-built file browser, a process which is fairly smooth, though not blindingly fast. To aid your searching, you can adjust the size of the thumbnails and view incompatible image files — photos in formats other than RAW may be seen, but not edited.

Conversion

There’s good reason for this though; AccuRaw is very much a RAW converter, and not a general purpose image editor. As such, the adjustments included in this app are (nearly) all based on RAW data, and incidentally, nearly all are slider-controlled.

A touch of Lightroom pervades the interface.

This no-nonsense approach is reflected in the simple, practical layout, which has more than a hint of Lightroom to it. To the right of the picture being edited is the entire toolkit, topped by an RGB histogram. This array of controls can be supplemented by calling up the nicely detailed EXIF viewer.

All the usual exposure adjustments are included (Exposure, Contrast, Brightness, Highlights and Shadows) as are the colour adjustments you would expect (Saturation, Hue and Tint), and white balance can be set manually or via the eye-dropper.

In addition, there are three mouse-based tools; the first is merely a cursor for click-and-drag image navigation; the second is a crop tool, which only applies its framing when you export the image; the third is a recurrence of the eye-dropper.

It’s a shame that there are no lens corrections on offer (other than for chromatic aberrations; see below), but it is nice to see sliders for Exposing To The Right (ETTR), allowing for punchier highlights, and Tone Curve, which provides a far more natural look to contrast adjustment.

Sharpening

While most editors and converters cope perfectly well with all of the above, cracks often start to show when technically challenging adjustments, such as sharpening, need to be made. However, I see no cracks in AccuRaw here.

Artefacts are controlled nicely, as is noise.

Even pushing the Intensity and Radius sliders to their extremes produces an image that is essentially free from unwanted artefacts at 100% zoom, apart from the unavoidable increased noise definition.

Demosaicing

That said, noise suppression is another area of impressive performance. Chroma and Luna artefacts can be tackled separately, and although AccuRaw can’t compete with the aggressive, intelligent noise-cancelling found in products such as NoiseNinja, it certainly cleans up the grain nicely. The effective Post-Demosaic Filtering — the slightly obscure name for chromatic aberration removal — is another welcome inclusion.

Profiles and Presets

The collective settings you choose above can be saved as presets, but there are also default presets to choose from, such as the clean slate Zero’d and the colourless Monochrome. Equally, AccuRaw provides its own default camera profiles, although you can provide your own, if you wish.

Some unusual options are included in AccuRaw’s toolkit.

More unexpected are the two checkboxes in the Profile section of the control palette: Preserve Highlights and Scene Referred. The purpose of the former is reasonably obvious — it ensures that nothing of the image is “burnt out” white. The cryptically labelled latter option relates to a trend within RAW software, where images are processed to mimic the dynamic range of human vision. It isn’t a game-changing feature, but it is another adjustment to play with.

Batch Conversion

For me, though, it is AccuRaw’s batch conversion that is its most useful feature. This probably seems like a strange conclusion, given that multiple images can only be processed via one of the presets. However, the ability to convert multiple images without having to deal with a library is a real time saver.

Verdict

Speaking as a committed Aperture user, I find AccuRaw refreshingly lightweight. It very clearly isn’t the app in its class with the biggest inventory of adjustments, but it offers easy access to all of the basics. What’s more, the image quality it produces is impressive, and whilst it isn’t the fastest converter I’ve seen, it gets the job done at a fair pace.

There are, of course, areas for improvement. Distortion correction would be a great addition, as would a straightening tool. Some output options for batch conversions would be nice, too.

Overall, though, I would say that AccuRaw is a proficient, dependable introduction to RAW conversion, and a reasonably priced one at that.

For many of us, recording memories and life experiences is a labour of love — and as with most things in modern life, “there’s an app for that.” Or, more accurately, there are now many apps dedicated to personal journal-keeping.

MacJournal and the now-retired Chronories led the way on Mac, and in their wake have come new, original offerings such as Bits, as well as iOS imports such as Day One.

The latest addition to this genre is Life, a heavyweight diary app built by the folks at MacAppStudio, which features an advanced search and numerous methods of capturing day-to-day happenings, as you might expect of an app that costs $59.99. But does it make life-logging sufficiently frictionless to be worth the hassle? I went hands-on with the premium beta to find out…

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Environment

For me, a diary app should be as close to a physical diary as possible in terms of complexity — or, indeed, simplicity — of use. Unless you can be bothered to enter happenings into your journal, a long feature list is irrelevant.

Measuring Life by this yardstick, I think it does a pretty good job. Configuring your digital diary is just a matter of inputting your name and photo, and choosing how often (if at all) you’d like Life to prompt you. Not that any of this is actually required.

The overall design of Life is clean and practical.

The entry view — Life’s central hub (and the first thing you see when opening the app) — holds a simple, clean text area that is flanked on the left by a timeline of the day’s updates. The look is very flat and the icons are in the style of basic line drawings; I’m not sure I would quite put it in the “pretty” category, but it is handsomely practical.

Entry

Unsurprisingly, text is the primary method for the noting of events in Life. There’s no formatting in this beta version apart from bold, italic and underline, but Markdown support will be added in the future.

There are plenty of non-text inputs, too.

For folks who like their multimedia, there’s a very respectable array of supplementary inputs, too. Updates can be given a Type (text, photo, etc), assigned a Facebook-like emotion, and marked as notable. Equally, you can attach images to your entries via drag-and-drop, add a location, and enter tags.

Reminiscing

All of this data is for a purpose: making moments more findable.

The search engine is currently imperfect, but highly detailed.

Life’s much vaunted search is great if you’ve entered plenty of data with each entry, as results can be filtered by date, tag and type. Unfortunately, the basic term-based search engine struggles in this beta version, but the advanced search is as accurate as it is speedy.

The calendar provides a unique overview.

Life’s other main history-browsing option is a calendar view. Each date has coloured dots below it, with the colours signifying the Type of updates that were made and the tags that were used. Initially, this view is meaningless, but after a while you start to memorize the colours, and this area begins to provide a good overview of your updates.

The full version of Life will also include a map, which will turn the location info you’ve entered into an explorable digital atlas.

Outlook

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Life. Once Markdown support arrives, it will provide a wholesome, accessible writing environment, with just enough rich media to supplement the typed-out thoughts. The search is very detailed, the calendar view is nicely constructed and the map view will make for an interesting geographical insight.

In fact, the only thing to baulk at is the price; it would be unfair to judge the value of an app before seeing it in its complete state, but Life does need to bring some serious quality to the table to justify that $60 asking price.

Apart from beta bugs, though, I have to say that Life is a well-made product, and a very worthwhile home for your personal diary.

Four years ago I had the idea to build a blog network dedicated to reviewing and rounding up apps. We started with Mac apps and then quickly expanded to additional channels covering iOS, Android, Windows and Web apps. While the network has been successful in traffic and audience, reaching some 100m+ visitors over the four years, it’s ultimately not fit within our broader company mission. So I’m here today to announce that unfortunately after four years of app guidance, we’re closing AppStorm down.

As many readers will know, AppStorm is a product of Envato. Our company is dedicated to helping people earn and learn online, and our main products are the Envato Marketplaces, Microlancer and Tuts+. AppStorm has always been a bit of a fringe product for us, and one that loses money. Losses on their own would be OK if the site was a great fit for what our company purpose is. But despite my best efforts for the last couple of years, the fit has been loose at best.

If we are to do a good job of our core mission, it’s important that we are focusing our best efforts on it. So without the fit, even a route to profitability wouldn’t save the network for us unfortunately.

For a time we explored selling AppStorm to try to find a good home for the network so that our readers would continue to be served well, but we couldn’t find the right company to sell to.

So we’ve ended up here at a dead end with an announcement that at the end of December we published our last posts. The network will remain live here for at least 12 months, so if you’ve bookmarked posts, or use the network as a resource you can return still to do so.

I’d like to thank all our editors, writers and readers for supporting AppStorm over the four years. We delivered some amazing content, built a wonderful readership, and hopefully helped a lot of people meet a lot of great apps. And ultimately that was what this network was all about.

If you know of other great app review sites that readers will find helpful, please do leave a comment!

Thank you all!
Collis

Ever get frustrated with the color picker on your Mac? It’s nice, but it could be so much more. That’s why you need Coolorus, the one color picker to rule them all.

Coolorus is a Corel Painter like color wheel for Adobe apps (including all recent versions of Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, and more) as well as all native Mac apps that uses native Apple color picker. It started out as just an Adobe plugin, but was so useful the team turned it into a Mac plugin that’ll work in any Mac app, including the color picker you’ll see in apps like TextEdit, Preview, the iWork apps, and graphics programs like Pixelmator. Coolorus is customisable and configurable so you can use it the way it is most convenient. With 2 types of HSV color representations — Triangle (preferred by Digital Painters) and Square (Desigers) — simple and full Hue wheel spectrum, RGB/RYB wheel mode, and a swatch module, with 2 modes — color1-color2 or black-color-white — there’s everything you could need to pick the perfect colors.

There’s more, too. You’ll find themes to make Coolorus look just like you want, panel resizing, keyboard shortcuts, and more. All of that, with the fastest performance of any 3rd party color picker on the Mac. It’s the tool you need to get precise colors every time.

Get the Color Picker You’ve Always Needed

Ready to simplify picking colors on your Mac? Then it’s time to get your own copy of Coolorus. You can download a free 7 day trial of Coolorus to make sure it works for you, then get your own copy of Coolorus starting at $9.99 for use in Photoshop or Flash Pro, $14.99 for use in Finder and all apps that use the default OS X color picker, or $28.95 to use in Finder, Photoshop, and Flash.

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