Luminar is a new app from Macphun that combines technologies the company developed in stand-alone apps into one photo editing environment. Is it good enough to stand up to Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or Apple’s Photos?

SoundSource 3 is Rogue Amoeba’s replacement for the macOS volume menu bar icon, and if you already own one of the company’s other apps, you can get it for free.

Please welcome our latest TidBITS sponsor, Squarespace. Josh Centers explains how Squarespace makes Web site creation and hosting fast and easy.

Cookbooks often feature elaborately staged food photography designed to make the recipes seem as compelling as possible, which is why it’s notable that the photos in Alton Brown’s latest cookbook were shot with an iPhone 6s Plus. The “Good Eats” host’s latest project is EveryDayCook, a cookbook featuring recipes he regularly prepares for himself. In the preface, Brown explained that all the photography for the book was shot with an iPhone because he’s “a bit of a control freak.” Aren’t we all?

The photo-sharing service Instagram isn’t just for millennials and selfie-snapping celebs. Anyone who is serious about iPhone photography should take a look. Instagram also can be used to a large extent on the Mac, giving it surprisingly broad Apple appeal.

If you didn’t know the term “bokeh” before the announcement of the iPhone 7 Plus, you’ll learn it soon enough. A developer release of iOS 10 adds Apple’s new depth-based image mode to the iPhone 7 Plus.

The Google Photos app for iOS can now apply effects to Apple’s proprietary Harry Potter-like Live Photos and export them as videos or animated GIFs that others can play on any platform. You can also use Google Photos to smooth out shaky video in Live Photos or to create cinematic pans. Other tweaks in the Google Photos app include better album sorting options and the capability to choose a new thumbnail for faces in the People album. Live Photos can be taken only with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the iPhone SE, 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and with the soon-to-be-released iPhone 7 models.

Eye-Fi has issued X2 Utility, a Mac app that enables users of the company’s X2 and older wireless-enabled storage cards to continue using them even after cloud support for those products ends next month.

The Soulmen recently won an Apple Design Award for Ulysses, a writing app for the Mac. This got Julio Ojeda-Zapata curious about it and its iOS sibling. He liked the product’s blend of minimalism and raw power.

Lightroom for iOS 2.4 adds two significant features to the mobile photo editing app for iPad and iPhone: support for raw format images and local selections for adjusting specific areas of a photo. This means photographers who shoot in raw can import, edit, and sync their photos between mobile and desktop Lightroom libraries without annoying workarounds.

Our latest book started as a series of TidBITS articles but more than doubled in size once we discovered and thoroughly explained all of Preview’s image editing and PDF manipulation features.

One of the premiere tools for creative writers, Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, is breaking away from the desktop with a powerful mobile version.

Advanced Computer Vision, a technology coming to the Photos app in macOS Sierra and iOS 10, scans your photos for searchable keywords and to assemble themed collections, called Memories. Kay Yin has analyzed what currently exists of Advanced Computer Vision, compiling a list of 7 facial expressions, 33 Memories categories, and 4432 different scenes and objects that Photos can recognize. Despite not being trained to recognize specific landmarks, like St. Martin’s Maho Beach, it can still identify them, first determining that Maho is a beach and then paring down the results.

For aspiring app developers, Apple is bringing the new Swift Playgrounds app to iPads later this year, complete with interactive Swift coding lessons.

Apple has launched a major focus on Asia, with CEO Tim Cook touring China and India and the company announcing several notable initiatives in those countries along with an update to GarageBand that includes traditional Chinese instruments and musical loops.