These black-and-white photo apps are 50 shades of great

Something that nearly all digital photos have in common—regardless of their camera of origin—is that they’re in color. Although that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it may seem counterintuitive, given the evolution of photography. Before digital replaced film as the photo medium of choice, color and monochrome shared the limelight. Today, if you want to channel your inner Ansel Adams with your own moody wide-angle vistas, specialty black-and-white apps are the path to achieving your monochromatic vision.

Hueless takes black and white seriously, offering a detailed and feature-laden set of controls.
Based on the reality that you do most of your shooting on the camera in your pocket, Curious Satellite’s Hueless is built exclusively for the iPhone and designed for skilled hobbyists, with an emphasis on shooting high-resolution JPEGs and TIFFs. The app is easy to use and navigate, though perhaps not ideal for that superquick shot when there’s just a few seconds between the train coming and your image of it emerging from the tunnel.

A button opens the interface to reveal several discrete controls that let you create presets, frame images, tap to focus, use composition rules, constrain dimension, adjust exposure and contrast, set geotags, and even apply colored filters for assorted monochrome looks. Despite its power and precision, don’t look for Hueless to convert existing images from your camera roll into black and white. Instead, treat Hueless as a film camera loaded with black-and-white stock. Shoot with Hueless when you want black and white through and through—monochrome from start to finish—absent color reinterpretation.

For the one-click joy of simply converting your iPhone’s native color images to black and white, focus on Pacific Helm’s Camera Noir. You can shoot original monochrome images through this app or retrofit older color photos. Shooting is intuitive via the camera icon, which lets you tap to focus, frame, and adjust exposure.

You can frame and focus your shot through the Camera Noir app, or just bring in a color image from your camera roll for the black-and-white treatment.
This minimalist app offers little in the way of controls, providing just low, medium, and high settings for exposure, plus crop marks and a level to assist in composition. While somewhat limited in functionality, the app is streamlined, quick, and easy to use. If you don’t have the time or inclination to mess with settings, Camera Noir will rescue your shoot.

Dramatic Black & White has a huge collection of adjustable filters.
For high drama, you can rely on JixiPix’s Dramatic Black & White for the iPhone or iPad. The app offers numerous settings, presets, and adjustments to fit the mood. Start with three levels of intensity: simple monochrome, high-key black and white, or infrared.

But that’s just for starters. Within those categories, multiple presets can feature colored tones to impart unique flair. The adjustable spotlight tool centers the effect on the canvas, while the crop tool lets you fine-tune the picture using popular aspect ratios.

Want to get more granular? Dramatic Black & White is happy to oblige by letting you adjust the tone, brightness, and contrast with each setting. It even offers a slider for adding old-time film grain to your photos. Shoot with the app’s camera, or import an image from your camera roll to give it the dramatic treatment—the results are uniformly stunning.

Simply B&W is not the only app to feature nontinting colored filters as an adjustment, but it’s the only one that tells you what they mean. That makes the app a lot more friendly.
Like Camera Noir, Simply B&W lets you either shoot an original photo via the app or desaturate a previously captured color image. The app concentrates on borders and vignettes, on the theory that simple framing goes a long way in improving black-and-white images. True to form, its frames and vignettes are either black or white. However, the app also lets you adjust brightness, contrast, and grain to make your pictures sing.

This app, unlike some others, actually has a set of filters that apply red, green, blue, yellow, and orange filters. These are not tints, but filters, just like the ones you use on your camera lens or in your photo-editing program, and they have roughly the same effect. The really neat part is that each filter has a key, so you know how to best use it—and when not to use it—on your photo.

Choose the default desaturation, or tweak within the app to adjust for black or white exposure, frames, and vignettes.
Apptrio’s Photo Noir lets you take control of specific aspects of your image. As with other apps, you can shoot through the app itself or you can import images from your camera roll and give them the monochromatic treatment.

Capable of working in portrait or landscape (with the app’s icons rotating according to orientation), Photo Noir specializes in exposure, framing, and vignettes. Presets cover a broad spectrum of basics, but they aren’t adjustable—all you can do is switch them on or off. How very black and white.

The simple interface makes the app a snap to use—without sliders or gestures, you just tap the buttons and see what happens. And if you are not pleased with the result, it takes only one tap to revert to the original and start again.

This simple app is surprisingly effective in giving you a range of black-and-white effects. You shoot directly through the camera and enable the Vignette size slider and Intensity options slider. Use just these two settings for a theatrical tableau—with flash on or off.

Noir Pro gives you a bit of black and white with a twist: postcards that you can actually mail, in addition to sharing on your social networks.
Along with the usual sharing options, you’ll find the Postcard feature, in which you can use the photo to create a geniune postcard that Fuerte International will send to any destination. Just as with a regular postcard, you fill in a message and an address; you may also add an optional profile photo.

B&W Master offers presets to cover a multitude of common shooting situations. The in-app purchase lets you preview the paid filters before you buy.
You can use Black & White Master both to shoot new pictures and to drain color from the images that are already in your camera roll, either in their original aspect ratio or in the trendy square format. Either way, the app lets you choose from a number of Instagram-like presets to easily apply the right monochromatic tone for your photo.

After you decide whether to reorient the shot, the app offers thumbnails of your picture with effects such as Bright, Contrast, Fog, and more. Once you tap one to preview it, you can slide your finger up and down on the screen to tweak the contrast, and slide left and right to adjust the brightness. The sliders disappear when you aren’t using them—a neat design touch, sure, but that also makes them easy to miss.

A $2 in-app purchase offers access to ten additional effects, and the app lets you preview all of them before you decide to buy. This is a neat, easy app to use, with lots of variety even in the free version.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an honest-to-goodness black-and-white app for Android. With Appija’s Black and White Camera Pro, you can shoot through the built-in camera (front or rear) or bring in older pictures from the Gallery to edit. A handy slider lets you dynamically adjust exposure and set tints in several colors.

The ad-supported free version offers the same functionality as the Pro version, but the ads are pretty annoying.

Black and White Camera Pro lets you shoot through the app or bring in a color photo for editing. Just adjust the exposure with the dynamic slider, and pick a tint. Retro Photo Camera gives you minimal control over your picture, but it applies a sepia or grayscale tone to your photo, complete with decorative borders.
Dexati’s Retro Photo Camera provides several stylized monochrome and sepia-toned choices, complete with borders. You can take pictures right in the app, or pull in older ones from your Gallery or even from your Facebook albums (a nice touch).

Once you take a shot or import your photo into the app, all you have to do is tap the B&W Photo or Retro Effect button to preview the results. This app has no controls, so if you’re satisfied with the default—and thankfully, the defaults aren’t bad—then you’re good to go. With no cropping or adjustment tools, Retro Photo Camera is definitely not for tinkerers, but if you just want to desaturate a photo quickly, it’s worth a try. A welcome addition would be an option to toggle the borders on and off.

The app also lets you create wallpaper from your photo. Frequently, a color photo serving as wallpaper looks too busy under a mess of colorful app icons and widgets, making your home screens hard to read. But the same photo turned to black and white can make excellent wallpaper.

Camera Magic Effects offers several layers of editing capabilities, and you can use them to shoot with the final black-and-white output in mind. Although it is not a pure black-and-white app, it does have several black-and-white filters. Shooting with the app lets you set up your image for desaturation later. White balance and scene modes provide the backdrop, and after completing your shot, you can apply filters such as Negative Effect, Gray Scale Image, Snow Effect, Sepia Effect, Engrave Effect, or Emboss Effect.

While not precisely a black-and-white app, Camera Magic gives you a number of monochromatic filters to work with, and lets you set up a color shot with black and white in mind.
The free version is ad-supported, and while we didn’t find the ads too intrusive, if you use this app a lot you’ll probably want to shell out about $2 for the ad-free Pro version. 

Why the NFL and YouTube would make such great teammates

I'm a long-suffering Philadelphia Eagles fan. Not only am I apparently destined to be perennially underwhelmed by the team's on-field results, but as a resident of New York City, I'm forced to make my way down to the local sports bar where I'm subject to the conversational whims of inebriated Giants fans. Since I’m not a DirecTV subscriber and therefore don’t have access to the NFL Sunday Ticket offering, the local sports bar is my lot in life if I ever want to watch my team on television on most Sundays.

But there may be a glimmer of light in the distance: According to reporting from AllThingsD, Google has begun early negotiations with the National Football League about putting out-of-market NFL games on YouTube. This could prove to be a wonderful thing, for both Google and for NFL fans.

First, we must note that these are little more than conversations between two large corporate entities. Companies have conversations all the time, but that rarely means that anything will come of it. Heck, Yahoo was having conversations with Mark Zuckerberg about buying Facebook back in 2006. Still, Google teaming up with the NFL at this particular time would make sense for a variety of reasons.

First, Google has a lot of money—certainly enough to best DirecTV’s $1 billion-a-year deal with the NFL (and Google has been more than willing to engage in billion dollar deals as of late). For its part, the NFL may indeed be interested in teaming up with Google, but at the very least is willing to let DirecTV—whose contract ends at the end of this season—know that it has other pigskin suitors.

Google has been on the fringe of TV for years, but has never been quite able to make its way into the endzone of the American living room. This is something the NFL can help with. Hands-down, professional football is the most popular sport in the United States. And aside from the eyeballs and attention it brings, NFL games carry the cachet of being all-American, mainstream, apple pie. It was arguably the NFL that gave legitimacy to the upstart Fox network (then associated with low-brow fare like Married with Children) when it first won the rights to broadcast NFC games in 1994.

Mainstream cachet—and ubiquity—is something that Google desperately wants right now for its video-on-demand options. This is particularly true now as the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant may have finally discovered the key to America’s collective living room in the form of Chromecast. At only $35, Google’s little TV dongle will give every modern TV access to the Web via Google in a way that Google TV has never been able to accomplish over the past three years. Since its introduction last month, Chromecast has sold at a brisk pace—so much that Google has had problems keeping up with demand.

It is also important to note that Google was represented in its talks with the NFL not only by CEO Larry Page but by YouTube content boss Robert Kyncle as well. YouTube has been steadily building its brand recognition as an original content studio, rather than a mere conduit for adorable cat videos and other meme-ish oddities. In just the past year, YouTube has championed paid subscriptions for its popular channels, established original content events like Comedy Week and Geek Week, and re-vamped its mobile app to make it more Chromecast-friendly (and therefore, friendlier to living rooms as well).

 Whatever happens, Google appears to be making all the right moves to make YouTube a content network, not just a user-submitted video repository.

Easy polyscreen access to America's favorite game might be coming soon.
As consumers lurch over the tipping point of comfort with streaming content, there is increasing competition to become the go-to conduit for streaming-to-TV access with suitors in the form of Microsoft, Apple, Roku, and countless others.

The NFL could prove to be just the product that could tie America’s heart to one preferred medium—as the league did for Fox two decades ago. And as with Fox in the early 1990s, Google may be willing to take a financial loss with expensive NFL rights—at least, at first—as the real return on investments will be further down the line in the form of brand legitimacy.

This is all conjecture, of course, but a theoretical YouTube NFL channel would give fans more affordable access to the out-of-market game across multiple screens. (It's very unlikely the NFL would give up very lucrative in-market network TV deals for now.) Unlike with DirectTV, YouTube would be able to offer access to just the NFL channel. Currently, Direct TV requires users to buy a DirecTV home subscription when available. (The provider does offer online access to Sunday Ticket without a home connection for $300-a-season, but only when DirecTV is not available).

Google could certainly offer a better deal than this. In the process it might sell a lot of Chromecasts and—more importantly—get more eyeballs acquainted with YouTube on the TV.

For the 2013–14 season, Sunday Ticket remains a DirecTV exclusive. So for the next several Sundays, as I’m forced to interact with with drunks recalling all of the Giants’ past Super Bowl victories, I will have at least some hope that in the not-too-distant future, I may yet get access to the NFL in the comfort of my own living room.

In praise of mob rule: Great ideas get crowdsourcing boost

A Kickstarter project called Tile set out to raise $20,000 to create small, flat, battery-powered stickers that you attach to your stuff, enabling you to find anything with your smartphone.

They've raised more than $1.6 million so far.

But why?

Tracker gadgets have been around for years. They're useful for finding your lost remote control, keys and other objects. But Tile does something incredible that no other tracking product can. Here's how it works.

You attach a tile to your tablet, remote control, dog's collar or you drop it into your purse, backpack or briefcase. Use the smartphone app to register each Tile device—basically tell the Tile cloud service what object each Tile is associated with.

To find an item, you use the app to make it "ring," then follow the noise. Or you can walk around looking at a proximity display showing you when you're getting closer or farther away. It basically turns your phone into a divining rod.

But here's the awesome feature that drove Kickstarter contributions through the roof: If you lose something—say, your bike is stolen or you leave your phone in a taxi, you log into your online Tile account and report the item as lost.

At that point, every Tile gadget in the world keeps a lookout for your lost item. If your dog or phone or car or bike gets within 50 to 150 feet of any other Tile owned by any user, you'll get a notification showing you where on a map your Tile was detected.

How cool is that?

Crowdsourcing makes Tile different from any other tracking device. Tile leverages "network effect" like cell phones do, meaning that the value of Tile as a product gets higher as more people become users.

Come to think of it, so many of today's hottest products do something similar—they get their value from the collective actions of users. (See also "5 tips for running a successful crowdsourcing campaign.")

The most important web-based services on the Internet—specifically social networks and search engines—are spectacularly valuable and enjoyable sites precisely because they represent sorting algorithms applied to crowdsourced data.

Look what Silicon Valley giants are spending the truly big bucks for these days: Apps and services that do smart things with the data generated by massive numbers of users.


Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a service that's fun to join because it's full of awesome photos provided not by Instagram, but by other users.

Google paid a billion dollars for a tiny Israeli startup called Waze, which is all about crowdsourcing. Waze is a navigation service that you can use to get directions similar to Google Maps.

But Waze is also an engine of crowdsourcing. For example, the location of every opted-in user is uploaded anonymously to the servers. Waze then determines how fast each phone—and by extension, each car—is moving. That gives you real-time information about the speed of traffic. Waze also lets users report things like gas prices, observations about why traffic is jammed and the location of police cars.

You'll notice that both these billion-dollar startups are social networks acquired by bigger social networks. That's because social networks get all their juice from crowdsourcing.

Social network crowdsourcing is valuable to users because not only can individuals use social networks to do crowdsourcing of their own—for example, I crowdsourced ideas for this very column—but social action surfaces the best content on the social networks, either through Google+'s "What's Hot" list, Facebook's EdgeRank, or Twitter's Discover page.

There are two basic kinds of crowdsourcing—the kind where people consciously participate, and the kind where they don't.

Waze, for example, uses both kinds. The reporting of observations is conscious, the uploading of speed and location data is not.

Some of the coolest innovations in crowdsourcing tend to be invisible to the user. For example, Google owns a service called reCAPTCHA, which it acquired four years ago. You probably use reCAPTCHA all the time. It's primary purpose is to prove you're human. reCAPTCHA shows you two words with distorted lettering that make it hard for computers to recognize but relatively easy for humans to do so.

Here's the magic part: One of those words presented to you is a word scanned by Google from a library book or from the archives of The New York Times. Questionable scanned words are inserted into the reCAPTCHA rotation, and large numbers of users are shown the same word. When enough users type in the same word, that word is accepted as the correct one for the digital copy that will be stored and indexed for all time.

Google is using the amazing pattern recognition capabilities of millions of distributed human brains to perfect its optical character recognition software.

Other astonishing applications of the crowdsourcing idea can be found in CrowdMed, Deliv, Nike+ Places, Metwit, RideShip, Root Metrics, Quora and Weathermob.

Crowdsourcing has been getting some bad press lately, and for bad reasons.

For example, Google built a site called Google Flu Trends, which ideally can track and even predict the spread of flu across the world. In the past, Flu Trends has been accurate. But during the most recent flu season, Flu Trends " wildly overestimated" the outbreak.

Flu Trends crowdsources search queries for information about flu and thereby is supposed to indicate actual flu.

The problem with this assumption is that it doesn't measure actual flu at all—it measures public anxiety about flu, which is subject to media manipulation. People go rushing to the search engines to find out about flu symptoms when the news is hyped about a coming outbreak.

social networks
Another supposed failure is the crowdsourcing on the social network Reddit of the manhunt for the Boston Bomber terrorist suspects. While actual events were unfolding, many on Reddit falsely identified a young man as a suspect. The man had been missing before the Boston bombing and was later found dead.

In general, crowdsourcing that tracks actual behavior is more useful and accurate than crowdsourcing that tracks opinions and attitudes.

Crowdsourcing is great for surfacing options to choose from (as I did with my crowdsourcing for this article). It's great for brainstorming and getting ideas. And it's great for gathering large numbers of data points and applying algorithms to that data.

Crowdsourcing isn't so great when you assume a weak correlation between measured attitudes and something else. It's important to remember that all you're really crowdsourcing is the attitudes, which can be manipulated, either by the media or by the crowd itself.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with crowdsourcing as an idea. In fact, it's one of the most powerful and useful and even life-saving concepts in technology today.

As we enter the era of Big Data, we'll increasingly benefit from data harvested from the actions or input from big crowds. These benefits will range from finding cures for diseases to finding your lost TV remote.

Let's hope the crowdsourcing space gets even more crowded.

Review: OmniPage 18 Standard has great OCR and page reconstruction

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) equals Acrobat XI at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. OmniPage, like Acrobat, also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

By default, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a bang-up job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

OmniPage 19 Ultimate is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. 

Review: Logic Pro X loses none of its power, gains great new features

Apple’s music division has been anything but idle the past several years, but it has focused largely on the GarageBand products for consumers and mobile users. The professional crowd has seen some updates (and a reduced price) to 2009’s Logic Pro 9, but very little else. Today that changes with the release of Logic Pro X, Logic Remote (a companion app for iPad), and MainStage 3 (Apple's live-performance tool, sold separately).

Those who’ve seen the Roman numeral X slapped onto Final Cut Pro may approach this release with some initial trepidation. Has Logic Pro been stripped of vital features to make it more accessible to GarageBand users? Is Apple abandoning professional audio engineers and musicians to cater to the prosumer user?

No and no. While Logic Pro has indeed adopted some of the look of Final Cut Pro X—with its dark visage and panes that can be invoked or dismissed as the mood strikes—Apple’s digital audio workstation (DAW) has lost none of its power and gained valuable features on just about every front.

Logic Pro X is available only through the Mac App Store and costs $200. This is for both new and existing users of Logic—no upgrade pricing applies. Your Mac must be running OS X 10.8.4 or later, and you’ll want at least 35GB of storage if you plan to install all of the optional content (you can get by with 5GB for the default Logic Pro X installation). You should also make sure that any plug-ins you wish to use are 64-bit: With this version of Logic Pro, Apple has bid farewell to 32-bit plug-ins. There’s no bridging utility to allow those older plug-ins to work, so they are entirely incompatible with the application. But the new version hasn’t entirely abandoned the past. Projects created as far back as Logic 5 can be opened with Logic Pro X.

Logic has long had the reputation of being one of the deepest, but most challenging DAWs to use. Since Apple acquired Emagic (the German company that developed it), it’s set about making Logic easier to use. Logic Pro X takes a major leap in that direction.

Apple has rethought the placement of elements you routinely use. For instance, the transport controls have moved to the top of the window to join the buttons that represent common commands, whereas in the past these controls and buttons were split between the top and bottom of the interface. The Library pane is now on the left, as many of us tend to work from left to right, and can quickly be exposed or hidden with the click of a button. As in GarageBand, each track now has volume and pan controls within the track list, thus allowing you to make changes there rather than moving to the Channel Strip or Mixer. Overall, elements are slightly bigger than they were in Logic Pro 9, so that finding just the tool you want is easier.

Logic Pro X's interface (click to enlarge)
This doesn’t mean that Logic Pro has lost its command-rich menus within the application’s various panes. When you need to dig deep, they and the menu bar menus are still your avenue for doing so. But when you want to do something quickly—sketch out a new tune or perform a quick edit—the new layout makes it easier to get to the task at hand.

It also presents GarageBand users with a more familiar environment. Musicians who’ve grown beyond GarageBand’s capabilities often come to Logic and sit, stupefied, wondering where to begin. I have little doubt that part of the purpose behind Logic Pro’s redesign was to make these users feel more welcome. Close enough panes, and you find a Logic Pro that performs a darned fine imitation of the GarageBand interface. As those users become more confident with the application, it’s a simple matter to expand the interface to place more advanced tools before them.

Other adjustments make Logic more logical. Elements in a channel strip and mixer—a group of effects, for example—reflect their position in the signal path. To change their position in that path, just drag them up or down to a new position. And you can now engage a Quick Help feature that, in a small window, provides tidbits of information about any item your cursor hovers over. You can easily move arrangement markers to change the order of sections in your song. The Score editor now behaves more like a notation application. And the arpeggiator, plucked from its obscure location, is now within the software instrument tracks’ Edit pane.

Logic Pro’s interface changes are about more than accommodating GarageBand users—in the past, pros could be overwhelmed as well. For example, suppose you’re working on a project that contains half-a-hundred tracks. Regardless of how large your monitor is, you’re going to perform a fair measure of scrolling as you access your tracks. But suppose you could group some of those tracks—all the acoustic drum tracks, for example—into a folder-like arrangement in the track list and then show or hide the tracks it contains with the click of a triangle icon? That’s one of the ideas behind the new Track Stacks feature—specifically, the folder stack. In this view, you consolidate tracks you’ve selected into a single group (thus getting them out of the way). Once you’ve created the folder stack, you can mute and solo the stack as well as control its volume with a single fader.

You can play all the instruments in this summing stack as a single instrument (click to enlarge).
The other idea is the summing stack. Again, you consolidate the selected tracks, but in this case you’re submixing them into an auxiliary channel.

If this track contains software instruments, it can be used and saved as a patch so that it behaves like a single instrument rather than a group of instruments. For example, you’ve created seven tracks, all of which are analog synthesizer tracks, with Logic’s instruments. Not only can you group and hide them as well as control their mute, solo, and volume settings, but you can additionally use your MIDI keyboard to play all of them at once as a single instrument. And if you’ve configured the ranges for each track—so the Growly Synth plays only the first two octaves, the Crunch Synth plays every note thrown at it, and the Lead Synth plays just the top two octaves—different instruments play, depending on which key you press. Press a low key, and you hear the Growly Synth and Crunch Synth mixed. Play something in the top octaves, and you hear no Crunch Synth, as it’s not mapped to play in this range. You can then save this patch and call it up for any project you work with in the future. This is a powerful method for creating layered (and fat) instruments.

Another way Apple makes Logic more accessible is through new Smart Controls. If, in the past, you created a software instrument track or applied an effect to a track and wanted to change some of that track’s parameters—give a little more brightness to an instrument or adjust a compressor effect’s setting—you were thrown into what could be a complicated interface with scads of controls. Smart Controls allow you to avoid this by providing a subset of simple controls for accessing that instrument's or recording’s most common settings.

Smart Controls gives you access to settings you must want to adjust (click to enlarge).
For example, call up the Classic Electric Piano instrument, double-click on its icon in the track list, and its Smart Controls appear at the bottom of the Logic window. Here are eight simple knobs for exactly the kind of tweaks you’d want to perform on a Fender Rhodes electric piano—Bell, Drive, Treble, Bass, Tremolo, Ambience, Chorus, and Reverb. No sampler fiddling required.

You don't have to live with a track’s Smart Controls, however. Click an Info button, and a pane appears where you can choose what a particular control will do. For instance, on my Fender Rhodes I can assign a Phaser control to what is, by default, the Bell control knob. I can then store those settings as part of a patch so that they come up every time I use it. And like other Logic controls you can assign a hardware controller to them (a slider or wheel on your MIDI keyboard, for example) and manipulate them while you play. As you do that, you can record your manipulation so that it plays back with the track.

Logic Pro 9 was a boon for guitar players in that it included stompbox, amp, and speaker effects. With Logic Pro X, Apple turns to bass players and drummers. Bass players will be happy to know that they can now build their own rigs as well. Included are three amp models—Modern Amp, Classic Amp, and Flip-Top Amp—as well as a Direct Box setting. You can additionally choose from six cabinet settings—Modern Cabinet 15”, Modern Cabinet 10”, Modern Cabinet 6”, Modern Cabinet Distant, Classic Cabinet 8*10”, and Flip Top Cabinet 1*15”. There are two direct box-out settings as well. And, as with the guitar rig, you can choose a mic and its position—a Condenser 87, Dynamic 20, or Dynamic 421. While bass tracks are designed primarily for those jacking a real bass into an audio interface, as with guitar effects, you can apply your bass rig to software instruments and MIDI tracks too.

Bass players now get a configurable rig of their own (click to enlarge).
New drum features run deeper still. I’ll start with the new Drummer track. Drum loops can help you sketch out a tune, but because they’re loops, they tend to be pretty static. You can tweak them and insert fills but they still don’t sound like the real thing.

So Apple came up with the Drummer track. These are 15 virtual drummers—sampled from some of the world’s best studio cats—who live inside Logic. Create one of these tracks and choose from four styles—Rock, Alternative, Songwriter, or R&B (sorry, no Country, Jazz, or Latin). Then choose the drummer you’d like to use (and yes, they all have names). For example, Max is a punk drummer who bangs on a punchy kit. Logan is an older dude who prefers retro rock and plays a just-as-retro kit.

This may sound like just a cute way to add personality to loops, but it’s far more than that. Next to your drummer are some helpful controls. From a Presets menu you can choose a substyle in that drummer’s roundhouse. For example, with Logan I can choose AM Gold, Stonehenge, or Firebird (licensing issues may prevent Apple from calling it “Freebird”). Next, you can employ an X-Y pad and move a controller between Simple and Complex on one axis and Soft and Loud on the other. Drag the control around, and the pattern changes to match your desires. For example, if you place the control in the bottom left corner (Simple and Soft), you may hear a rudimentary kick drum on beats one and three and high-hat clicks on beats one through four. Drag the control to the top right corner (the Complex and Loud corner of the X-Y controller), and the pattern gets far more interesting.

'Pacific Rim' Director Guillermo del Toro: 'Post-Conversion 3D Can Be Great'

On the eve of his first movie release in five years, Guillermo del Toro was giddy during a Thursday night screening of Pacific Rim at LACMA.

The Mexican director, who has garnered acclaim for his work on Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy franchise, spoke to a sellout crowd about all things Pacific Rim and even delved into some personal anecdotes.

In an honest and hilarious moment, del Toro recounted his earliest memories of monsters, which inspired his latest film's ferocious Kaiju.

VIDEO: Guillermo del Toro on a Possible Sequel for 'Pacific Rim'

"When I was a child, I would wake up and dream that I was awake in the room I was in and I would see real creatures in my bedroom," he explained. "But for a child, that was really hard to process. I was afraid to step out of the crib because my parents had this green shaggy rug, so when I looked through the crib, I saw this sea of waving green fingers waiting for me to land and they would pull me down. So I peed."

Following the screening, when del Toro was introduced for a Q&A, he received a long standing ovation from the crowd, many of whom are subscribers to the Film Independent or LACMA communities.

"I wanted this to work as a summer movie and have the staple of characters that you'd expect but try to at least do something different, " he admitted. "Everything is a political aesthetic choice."

Pacific Rim, from Warner Bros. and Legendary, stars Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day and Ron Perlman. It follows a group of people who create giant robots to fight off the invading megamonsters from the sea.

"I didn't want to celebrate the machines as cold, polished surfaces or to live in this gorgeous neon world where everybody is a waspy crew-cut guy. I mean, there's a single country saving the world all the time, and the aliens get one single map -- they go to New York!"

PHOTOS: 'Pacific Rim' Premiere: Big Robots Bring Out the Big Stars

Though the film was subject to bad tracking early on and drew comparisons to Michael Bay's Transformers franchise, del Toro insists his film balances substance and style while evoking nostalgia.

"The toughest thing in this movie was to keep the simplicity amidst all its complexity," he says. "I wanted it to function on both levels to make it a throwback. I tried to pattern it after adventure films with rangers and marshals waiting at outposts, riding the Jaegers [robots] into battle."

Del Toro also made a selling point for 3D during his post-screening talk: "The scale is mythical, a disregard for human scale, and it's a huge change to see it in 3D. You have to see it on the most obscenely large screen. I wanted to make this movie as a case for post-conversion of 3D can be great."

Yet for all his serious and intellectual musings on his own craft, del Toro still found time to poke fun at himself and his decisions.

On the meaning of the Pacific Rim title, del Toro jokes, "We've heard all the jokes. We would give the porn industry a winner. Someone will get nominated for an AVN award."

The film opens in theaters July 12.

Review: Canon Pixma MX922 has great small-office features and pricey ink

Canon Pixma MX922 $129.00(Lowest Price) For a moderate-volume small or home office the Pixma MX922 has good features and performance, but inks are a little pricier than average.

 

 

A moderately busy small or home office is the target audience for the Canon Pixma MX922, a $200 (as of 06/28/2013) color inkjet multifunction that can handle every office chore from automatic two-sided scanning and printing, to faxing and printing optical media. Output quality and speed are good, too. But the party ends with the ink costs: The MX922 ships with low-capacity starter cartridges, and the regular and larger cartridges are no great bargain.

 

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a well-rounded multifunction inkjet printer, literally as well as feature-wise. It has Canon's signature rounded corners, a beveled top and bottom, and the same wrap-around front panel and small flip-open ink access lid as its Pixma MG6320 cousin. However, it retains Canon's dodgy, last-generation controls, with the three action buttons and separate four-way cursor. The issue with these is that some functions are available only via the action buttons, and some only via the contextually lit cursor/okay buttons. It's confusing, inefficient, and—if you use the panel often enough—aggravating. On the plus side, the button grid transforms into a keypad when you need to use the unit's fax capabilities.

 

Installing is MX922 is easy, if a wee bit tedious. There are quite a few dialogs to click through, but the install routine found the printer on the network quickly and there were no other glitches. We used Wi-Fi, but you may also connect directly to a PC via the unit's USB 2.0 port, or wire it to your network via ethernet. The software is the usual efficient Canon bundle, with its veteran scanning utility, Image Garden for organizing and editing photos, and a solid driver. There are also the usual remote and email printing features.

 

As mentioned, the MX922 automatically prints and scans in duplex. Paper capacity is good for a small office multifunction: 250 sheets, which reside in a bottom-mounted cassette that extends to handle legal-sized paper. Directly above the cassette and revealed when the front panel drops are a 20-sheet tray for 4-by-6-inch photo media and a feed for printable optical media. As with most Canon printers, the front panel drops automatically, so you can keep it closed for appearances yet not have to worry about a paper catastrophe if you print without checking the machine first.

 

The pages emerging from the MX922 have the typical Canon look. That means sharp text, decent plain-paper graphics, and very nice photos. By default, the latter tend to look a tad light compared to the competition, but the color palette is essentially accurate, gradients are smooth, and details in dark areas are nicely defined. They photos are not quite up to what you'll see from high-end photo printers, but for a $200 MFP they're excellent.

 

Speed-wise, the MX922 fell in the middle of the pack, but it's certainly fast enough for a small or home office. Text and monochrome newsletters with mixed graphics print at 8.6 pages per minute on the PC and 8.1 ppm on the Mac. Full color photos print about one every two minutes to glossy stock, but nearly 3 a minute to plain paper. Copies arrived at about 6.1 per minute, a very good pace.

 

When we reviewed this printer’s predecessor, the Pixma MX892, we complained about the lack of high-yield inks to cut printing costs. Canon apparently listened—this new model has them—but the costs didn’t improve much. Color isn't bad, but black is high. With the standard size cartridges (the PGI-250 black and CLI-250 colors including a photo black), black pages cost around 5 cents and four-color pages, 16.6 cent per sheet. Using the XL cartridges drops a black page only to 4.6 cents, and four-color pages, 12.8 cents. There's an XXL black, but it only drops the price of pages another 0.2 cents. We also noticed that while the new inks have lower prices compared to the MX892's they also have lower page lives.

 

Canon's warranty for the Pixma MX922 lasts a single year—better than the 90 days you get with entry-level MFPs, but not as nice as the three years you'll get with business-class inkjet MFPs such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 276dw. Canon did not provide a recommended or real-world monthly duty cycles, but judging from the quality of the construction, 250 to 500 pages might not be out of line. If you're printing or copying any more than that, you should be looking for something with cheaper inks.

 

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a good MFP for the small office with moderate-volume copying and printing needs. The duplexing and output are sweet, and the fax is a bonus for those that need it. But we're not fans of the control panel. At the time of this writing, the MX922 was available for considerably less than the retail price we list here. It's a lot more appealing at around $150 than at $200, where it has to compete with the likes of the faster, more economical HP Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One and the Epson WorkForce 845.

 

 

See 'The Great Gatsby's' Special Effects Transformation (Video)

A scene from "The Great Gatsby"

A new video reveals the extensive special effects used to create the world of The Great Gatsby.

VFX supervisor Chris Godfrey recently uploaded before-and-after scenes from the film, showing how blue and greenscreens were transformed into the film's detailed settings.

During the three-minute clip, soundtracked by Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful," which was used in the film, raw footage of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and the rest of the cast walking, talking and pretending to drive by green and bluescreens is interspersed with scenes from the film.

PHOTOS: 'The Great Gatsby' Premiere

It's revealed that DiCaprio and Maguire were filmed in Gatsby's yellow car surrounded by bluescreens for one of their trips into New York City in the film.

Another shot shows DiCaprio and Maguire walking down a pier, completely surrounded by bluescreens. In the film, you can see the water and Gatsby's estate behind them.

The Buchanans' lavish property also was largely created using special effects.

To see the rest of the movie magic unfold, check out the video below.

The Great Gatsby VFX from Chris Godfrey on Vimeo.

Twitter: @sajilpl

Your Ultrabook and the Cloud: A Great Partnership

Ultrabooks are engineered for portability—they’re thin, light, and have an extended battery life that lets you work or play anywhere the moment takes you. They contain fast, durable solid state drives (SSDs) that let you whip through huge files and shrug off bumps and vibrations.

 

But those SSDs tend to contain a lot less storage space than their bulkier laptop cousins. And that can be a problem when it comes to installing software and having access to your data while on the go. With a little help from the cloud, though, you’ll never miss that extra storage space.

Acer Aspire S7

Traditional hard drives don’t fit into the Ultrabook equation. They’re simply too big and too power hungry.  That’s why Ultrabooks like the Acer Aspire S7rely on flash-based solid state drives which have no moving parts to break and require less space and less power and are faster than a traditional hard drive.

 

However, those SSDs hold a lot less data than most standard hard drives. 128GB and 256GB are the norm, as opposed to the 500GB and 750GB behemoths found in many traditional laptops.

 

That means your Ultrabook has only about a quarter of the local storage space for installing the applications you use, and for saving your files. If you’re not careful about what data you choose to store locally, your drive will quickly be filled to capacity. That’s where the cloud comes in.

 

The cloud is an all-encompassing term used to refer to most anything on the Web or online. If you’re using Internet-based services or online data storage, you’re operating “in the cloud.” Ultrabooks are equipped with wireless networking that enables them to connect to the cloud anytime you’re in range of a network. Here’s how that will help you get the most out of your new Ultrabook.

 

Today’s advanced software offers many advantages, but it takes up a lot of space. The operating system alone and the basic tools that make the PC functional will fill up much of your SSD, leaving you little room for documents and spreadsheets—never mind your photos, videos and digital music.

 

No problem. There are a wide variety of online data storage and file sharing options to choose from. Many offer free storage in the cloud, but generally only 5GB or 10GB. If you need more space than that, it will cost you.

 

What you need is a strategy that combines the best of both worlds. You can complement your limited storage with services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Box, DropBox, SugarSync, or Google Drive, and add a roomy external hard drive for backup and even more storage.

 

Cloud storage does more than just save space. When you store data in the cloud, it’s accessible from other devices as well. If your Ultrabook is lost or stolen, or you’re visiting a friend and don’t have your Ultrabook with you, you can still log in from virtually any Web-enabled device and get your data. Most cloud storage platforms also offer mobile apps that make it easy to access data with a smartphone or tablet.

 

If you want to really minimize the amount of data stored locally on your Ultrabook, you can used cloud-based services instead of installing many types of software on your PC.

 

No need to install the many gigabytes of Microsoft Office on your PC; you can instead use Office Web Apps to access nearly all of the same tools in the cloud. Rather than storing gigabytes of photos on your Ultrabook, you can use a service like Flickr, or use Facebook or Google+. Instead of filling your drive with MP3s, you can use ITunes Match or a streaming music service like Pandora to play your music from the cloud.

 

If you follow these simple, space-saving tips, you’ll have the best of both worlds: A svelte, responsive Ultrabook and access to your stuff -- whenever and wherever you want it.

 

Follow me on Twitter: @sajilpl