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. 

App City: Can’t Whistle? Try One of These to Hail a Taxi

But if it’s raining, if it’s a weekend night, or if you’re outside Manhattan, catching a cab can seem like a fantasy. It’s unlikely that you’ll get the O.T.E., at least not in the usual fashion. For those armed with one of two smartphone apps, there might be another way.

 
Last year, App City discussed the taxi-hailing apps available to New Yorkers. There was Taxi Magic, convenient but exorbitantly expensive, and the crowd-favorite Uber, which for all its popularity was also high-priced. And then, out on the horizon, there was Hailo, an app from London that would allow a user to hail a yellow cab and pay yellow-cab rates.

 
Services like Hailo were stalled for months as operators filed suit against the city, saying the apps were equivalent to prearranged rides, which are banned by city rules. But in April, a State Supreme Court justice dismissed the lawsuit, opening the way for passengers and drivers to use the apps.

 
That can be more of a struggle than you might think. Hailo’s interface is easy to use, but actually getting a cab with your phone is often difficult. The experience feels especially ludicrous when you are standing on the street on a sunny day being told by the app that no taxis are available while dozens of empty cabs zip by.

 
The app is more convenient when cabs are less readily available. I was grateful for it when I was leaving my Midtown office after working a late night, dead tired and unwilling to spend the 45 minutes or more that my subway trip home frequently takes. The streets were empty of cabs, but I was able to get a ride within two or three minutes after requesting one using Hailo.

 
The driver who picked me up, Heshan Nouh, had been using the app ever since it became available and was a fan. He told me that he likes to turn the app on during slow nights, or when he’s driving into Manhattan from Brooklyn or Queens. “There’s really no need to use it in Manhattan on a Saturday night,” he said. “But if it’s slow, I can get an e-hail and I get the fare for taking a guy to J.F.K.”

 
Uber Taxi, which allows users to hail yellow cabs through the standard Uber app, has similar pros and cons to Hailo. The battle between the services mainly comes down to design, and can be compared to the dominant tech brand war of our time. Hailo is like Microsoft: chunky and devoid of flash. Uber has the minimalism and sexiness of a Mac, but it lacks a certain New York grit.

 
Neither app will replace the old-fashioned street hail, but both provide a complementary service, a digital two-fingered whistle to summon a ride when the prospects seem hopeless. 

Power up your PDFs with these five free tools

There's no point to drowning in PDF features you don't want (and really, really don't want to pay for) when you can stock your toolbox with exactly what you require. These five freebies push the boundaries of what you can do with a PDF file.

Whether you long to edit, watermark, or otherwise tweak your PDF; add a Creative Commons license, or just cut your PDF down to size, one of these can make your PDFs what you want them to be...for free.

This portable app's website says "Bright Snippet Sire," but everybody calls it Briss. An open-source favorite, Briss crops a section of a PDF file and creates another PDF file of the cropped area. It's easy to use, and it's awfully handy.

Snipping out unwanted areas of a PDF—then saving to a new PDF—is Briss's specialty.
E-bookworms with e-readers have a particular need for Briss. To read a PDF on an e-reader, you normally have to format and convert it, and traditional ebook converters (such as ePub converters) frequently make a hash of PDF conversion. Briss converts two-column pages into single-column pages, cuts out the unnecessary margins, and automatically removes unwanted fluff, such as page numbers and chapter headings. You can successfully pass the resulting clean PDF through an ePub converter.

With Creative Commons licenses, you can distribute your creative work for free and specify the conditions under which it can be used. For example, you can offer your work free for use, provided you receive attribution. Or you can say that it's fine for personal or nonprofit projects to use your work, but that commercial ventures have to pay you. Attaching one of these licenses to the work removes any ambiguity or doubt as to the terms and conditions under which you share your work.

CC PDF Converter helps you find the best Creative Commons license for your creative work (in this case, "you" means Randall Munroe nd "your work" is the webcomic XKCD).
CC PDF Converter converts your Word document, Excel file, or Internet Explorer HTML file into a PDF doc...but it's no ordinary PDF. This free, open-source beta program asks you a series of questions about the type of license you want, then stamps a small but legible Creative Commons license on the pages.

Open-source developer Michael Schierl describes his jPDF Tweak as the "Swiss Army Knife for PDF Files," and it certainly lives up to that promise. With it, you can add watermarks, change the metadata, combine PDF files, encrypt files, make printable booklets, rotate pages, and more. I love this program so much that it has a permanent place on my PC (and there are Linux editions, too).

jPDF Tweak gives you a great deal of control over your images, and it's free and open source.
This Java-based portable app makes a nice addition to the road warrior's USB drive or Dropbox folder. Simply double-click the BAT file to run it. Then load the PDF file from your PC in the "input tab" and choose the next tab you need. When you've made changes, go to the "output" tab to generate your tweaked PDF.

Bear in mind, though, that if a PDF has existing restrictions protected by a password, that password will hold. jPDF Tweak does not allow you to remove or break the password.

PDFill is similar to jPDF Tweak, but with a nicer user interface. As well as the usual features, PDFill includes other goodies, such as file conversion and adding headers and footers. The only downside is that it costs $20 to work watermark-free.
If you don't mind a watermark on your saved files, then don't worry about this nag screen.
In a default installation, a PDF button appears inside Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to start PDFill directly. You can also insert the same button into the Internet Explorer browser, and into the Quick Launch and SendTo functions of Windows.These integration options are voluntary and easy to de-select at installation.

PDFill consists of Editor, Writer, and Tools. Editor, whose interface resembles Microsoft Word 2003, is the paid $20 version of PDFill. If you decide not to pay, Editor remains fully functional, but it pops up a nag screen upon saving and stamps a watermark on files. PDFill Editor provides a variety of pro-level functions such as creating form fields; writing, drawing, or highlighting pages in a PDF; and exporting and importing form data; as well as the usual PDF file management tools, such as converting, cropping, and rotating.

PDFill Writer creates PDF files by attaching itself to your PC printer function. When you want to create a PDF, open your printer dialog box and choose the PDFill Writer as your printer.

The watermark an unregistered copy of PDFill Editor adds to saved files can be distracting.
PDFill Tools provides even more editing tools, some of which overlap with the paid Editor. This includes merging, splitting, watermarks, rotating, cropping and much more.

PDFill packs a punch when it comes to PDF editing functions, and the free version is fine for anyone who doesn't mind nag screens and watermarks. That said, the $20 full version is a really good deal, considering the features that you get.

For sheer handiness, it's hard to beat Debenu PDF Tools. It integrates into your Explorer right-click menu, so it's easy to go to town with the PDF editing.

Debenu PDF Tools puts an array of PDF functions in the right-click menu of File/Windows Explorer.
Right-clicking and scrolling down the Debenu menu reveals features such as converting a PDF to an image (and vice versa), combining multiple images into one PDF file instantly, converting a PDF to text, adding and removing passwords, removing all bookmarks or extracting them to a text file, adding or editing metadata, and much more. Any functions that won't work on the selected file are grayed out.

With the PDF Preview function, you can quickly open the file to get a sneak peek, which is nice if you don't have a PDF reader installed.

The Debenu PDF Tools menu has a good selection of features even in the free edition, but many more are available in the $59 Pro edition. Pro includes many more editing features such as adding, editing, extracting, splitting, and removing text and images; removing annotations; and applying digital signatures.

When you think of PDF, don't think of it as a restricted, locked-down file format manageable only with big-ticket Acrobat or still-pricey imitators. These five tools show you that whether you need a Creative Commons license, a PDF book converter, or a wide array of editing tools built into your Windows PC, you can have impressive PDF features for a fraction of the cost…or even for free.

Rick Ross Sued -- U.O.E.N.O. How Expensive These Rolexes Were

Rick Ross
Sued for $90K
U.O.E.N.O. How Expensive These Rolexes Were
Rick Ross has just been sued for being so sophisticated ... he forgot to pay a nearly $90,000 bill for three Rolexes he bought last year -- this according to a new lawsuit.

Johnny's Custom Jewelry in Texas filed the suit against Ross and his company Maybach Music, claiming the rapper agreed to purchase 3 diamond Rolexes last August for a total of $89,847.50.

According to Johnny's, the Rolexes include one 18K gold watch with 30CT of diamonds ($55,000), one 18K gold watch with 7CT of diamonds ($14,000), and one two-tone watch with 5CT of diamonds ($14,000).



Johnny's says it held up its end of the bargain -- delivering the watches as ordered -- but Rick still hasn't paid for the bling. Johnny's wants the rapper to cough up the owed money stat, plus interest.

Calls to Rick's people weren't returned.

 

These Crazy Guns Shoot Pewter, Plastic, and Paper Mache

A file cabinet, after an encounter with the paper mache flamethrower.

 

You can take pretty much any kid to an arcade, drop a few quarters into whatever Resident Evil knockoff you find there, put the fluorescent blue Uzi in their tiny little hands, and they’ll know what to do. It’s a sad truth, but it’s the truth nonetheless. Give that kid one of James Shaw’s homemade weapons, though, and instead of dead zombies and night terrors, you might wind up with an end table.

 

Shaw hacked together the trio of decidedly non-lethal firearms for his final project at the Royal College of Art, in London. One specializes in plastic, blasting out clumped spaghetti strands like the Play-Doh factory toys of yore. The resulting multicolor towers look a little bit like a mountain of soft serve trying to transform into a monster from a Guillermo Del Toro movie. Feed it a glass tabletop, and it’s ready for the living room. Shaw’s paper mache rifle is a two-handed affair, giving any object in its path a thick, bumpy coat of pulp. Rounding out the collection is a pewter-drizzling, submachine gun-style contraption, perfect if you’ve ever wanted to play as a “drip castle” in Monopoly.

The plastic-shooting rifle, in all its glory.

 

 

The unusual tools were born out of the designer’s interest in new means of making, specifically ones involving additive techniques, like those used in 3D printing, as opposed to traditional subtractive methods. Imagine Michelangelo in 1504, putting the final touches on his masterpiece David after having spent two years chiseling it down from a solid 10-ton block of marble. The process Shaw’s exploring here is pretty much the opposite. But the form the tools take isn’t as strange as it might seem. We have nail guns, spray guns, and handheld drills, Shaw points out, something he attributes to “our desire to dominate and master materials and our environment.”

The resulting multicolor towers look a little bit like a mountain of soft serve.

Shaw’s guns, however, go against that idea of mastery. The designer envisions a more “organic” future for the built environment, one that will require new types of tools. “Objects are always informed by what made them,” he says. “From wooden tables to laptop cases, the form of objects is totally dictated by the machines and processes that created them.”

 

And while multicolor fro-yo furniture may never take off, there is reason to be excited about technologies that give us new ways to create with real, physical stuff. For proof, look no further than the 3Doodler, the handheld 3D-printing pen that recently showed up on Kickstarter. What will it be useful for? Who knows, but it was compelling enough to raise about a billion dollars in crowdsourced funding.

 

That element of unknown potential, Shaw says, is much of the fun of projects like his homemade guns. “The exciting thing about making new types of tools is that they will necessarily allow new forms and types of objects.”

 

 

Anyone can master these top online security tips

Concerns about online privacy have reached new heights since reports revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency has been monitoring millions of phone logs and social media accounts as part of several top-secret programs. In light of the revelations, many people are wondering how they can protect themselves from snooping.
I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Santorelli, a security expert at research firm Team Cymru and a former Scotland Yard detective. I asked him to share his own measures for staying as safe as possible while using the Internet.
Several days later, he sent me his tips. First off, nothing will protect you from government surveillance if a service provider agrees to cooperate in the investigation, he said. Those providers could include your ISP or Google.
However, that doesn’t mean you should dismiss safety measures — cybercriminals are a real threat. He recommended a few simple measures to protect your privacy online.
Here are Santorelli’s top nine tips:
1. Software patches
Patch your OS and all your applications, especially your browser and plug-ins such as Java and Flash. “This one step will likely give you 90 percent protection, as infections, which lead to privacy compromise, often rely on exploiting known vulnerabilities in your operating system,” said Santorelli. Set up automatic updates whenever possible.
2. Two-factor authentication
Use two-factor authentication for as many accounts as you can. This means you must provide both a password and a second form of identification, such as a code that’s sent to your phone, to log in to an account. Most of the major free service providers, such as Twitter and Gmail, have enabled this capability.
3. Antivirus
Use antivirus software, and update it regularly. “While it’s only about 30 to 50 percent effective, it’s still well worth doing,” said Santorelli. Many ISPs will give you a license for free. And there are several free apps.
4. Web browsers
Santorelli said that you can stay safe using any of the modern browsers — Internet
Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox — as long as you update them “rigorously.” You should remove plug-ins that can execute code, such as Adobe Flash and Java. This may not be practical in all cases, however. “Most people don’t do this because they find the Internet very boring without these plug-ins,” said Santorelli. You won’t miss much with Java turned off — the only widely used online applications that really need Java these days are Web-conferencing things like GoToMeeting. But many websites still use Flash for displaying video.
5. Scripts
Use a script-blocker plug-in for your browsers, such as the free No Script for Firefox or NotScripts for Chrome. These plug-ins will block many ads and many types of active content, such as pop-ups that occur when you hover over highlighted text and other elements based on JavaScript. This is a popular way for attacks to enter your computer.
6. Firewall
Use a software firewall on your system. Most modern operating systems, such as Windows and Mac OSX, include a built-in firewall, but you may have to enable it.
7. Password control
Do not use the same password for everything. Santorelli recommends using a password-management tool, such as RoboForm Everywhere, to generate different passwords for each of your accounts. At the very least, he said, have separate sets of passwords for different types of accounts: one for banking accounts, one for free email accounts, etc.
8. Mobile-app permissions
“Beware of mobile apps that ask for massive control over your device, far in excess of what could be justified for what the app apparently does,” said Santorelli. For example: Why would a game need access to your photos and contacts? “Remember, if the app is free, that sometimes means that (your information is) the product being sold,” he said.
9. Linked accounts
Beware of online accounts that link to other accounts. Many Twitter apps do this. Once you stop using these apps, they represent a forgotten route into your Twitter account, said Santorelli. “Do a quick check, and you might be surprised how many forgotten apps have access to some of your accounts,” he said. “Delete them.” To see the apps that access your Twitter account, visit twitter.com/settings/applications — the length of the list may astound you.
According to Santorelli, if you protect yourself from the traditional acquisitive criminals, who are using the same tools as folks with less traditional motives, you are going to be as safe as you can be online.
Ogden-based TopTenREVIEWS.com guides consumers by comparing products in the world of technology, including electronics, software and Web services. Have a question for TopTenREVIEWS? Email Leslie Meredith lesliemeredith@technewsdaily.com.