The three Adobe Photoshop Touch iPad apps announced a few weeks ago – Adobe Colour Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav – are now available on iTunes. These apps enable users to create custom colour swatches, paint directly onscreen and drive popular Photoshop tools from tablet devices. Pricing for the applications is £2.99 for Adobe Eazel, £1.79 for Adobe Colour Lava and £1.19 for Adobe Nav.

Five UK politicians have been announced as winners of the ninth annual Jessops All-Party Parliamentary Photographic Competition. Over 450 entries were received from MPs and Lords from across the country who were invited to submit up to ten images each. This year’s winning MPs are Peter Luff MP with “Cretan Sea”, Tim Loughton MP with “Isfahan Market” and Nick Raynesford with “Leather Seller”. Winners from the House of Lords are Lord Allenby with “Foraging” and Lord Crathorne with “Bridesmaids Bus”. The winning entries will be available for public viewing from 16th May to 20th May at the Jessops All-Party Parliamentary Photographic Exhibition in The Robing Room.

Foto8 and Host Gallery have announced that the deadline for entries to the 4th Foto8 Summershow, a photographic award, exhibition and print fair, has been pushed to 31st May. The organisers have also unveiled the names of the judges - the panel comprises Charlotte Cotton, Creative Director National Media Museum Bradford, Emma Morris, Director of Photoworks, James Reid, Director of Photography: Wallpaper, and photographer Richard Billingham. Additionally, Foto8 have confirmed that the winner of the ‘Best in Show’ prize will be awarded £2000 rather than the £1500 mentioned in their original call for entries. Note that there is an administration fee of £20 for entries submitted before 5pm on 15 May 2011, while entries submitted after that date will incur a higher fee of £30. As always, we suggest that you read the rules before entering your work.

Website: 4th Foto8 Summershow

Travelshooters is a new UK-based travel photography holiday company offering photo holidays and workshops in India. Ladakh Monks & Mountains (September 2011) is a two-week photo tour which will take shooters to remote Himalayan high places in the Jammu & Kashmir region of India, combining landscapes, social documentary, wildlife and more. Pushkar Camel Fair, Diwali in Rajasthan and the Golden Triangle (October-November 2011, 15 days) centres on the annual Pushkar Camel Fair, and includes shooting from a hot-air balloon. More tours are under preparation right now, in India and in other countries, the company says.

Website Travelshooters

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery 4.0 is a program that helps recover your lost photos from memory cards & hard drives. Sunil Chandna, CEO of Stellar Data Recovery, comments, “Our brand new version of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is specially designed for home users and brings back lost picture memories in 3-simple steps. The new version is vastly improved to support all consumer & professional cameras and recovers over 50 different image, video & music file formats.” The software is available in English, German, Spanish, French & Italian language editions and works on Windows and Mac computers. The price is €31/$39, and the company is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee on the product.

GigaPan Time Machine is a system that enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution time-lapse videos. Created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, GigaPan Time Machine allows you to pan or zoom in and out of high-resolution panoramas while simultaneously “moving back and forth through time”. Viewers, for instance, can use the system to focus in on the details of a booth within a panorama of a carnival midway, but also reverse time to see how the booth was constructed. Or they can watch a group of plants sprout, grow and flower, shifting perspective to watch some plants move wildly as they grow while others get eaten by caterpillars. And so forth. You can view a few examples created with this system at the website below. Do note that you need Google Chrome or Apple Safari to take advantage of this technology.

The Toshiba Camileo BW10, recently launched in the USA, is a water- and dustproof pocket camcorder that records 1080p Full HD video. The BW10 comes in silver and yellow and features a rubberised coating for waterproofing down to a depth of six and a half feet. Featuring a 2” monitor, electronic image stabilisation and easy YouTube uploading, the Camileo BW10 weighs in at 3.5 ounces, and is available at an MSRP of $149.99 in the USA. (In the UK, the camcorder sells for around £100-110.)

Gigapan has issued a firmware update for its Epic Pro robotic camera mount. The latest update adds support for exposure bracketing for HDR capture, a dedicated mirror lock-up setting, additional aspect ratios and a new time display that shows the time it will take the Epic Pro to capture a panorama, based on your settings. It also allows you to capture a sequence of panoramas over a set period of time with a new timer, for time-lapse panoramic photography.You can learn more about the update bv visiting the website below.

Website: Gigapan Epic Pro Firmware Upgrade

There is a firmware update available for the Fujfilm FinePix HS20EXR (read review) digital superzoom camera. Version 1.02 fixes a bug related to temperature warning. You can download the firmware update from the website below.

Website: Fujifilm Finepix HS20EXR Firmware Upgrade

Adobe has released a document intended to help Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended users make the most of the program. The eleven-page PDF is divided into two sections, Essential Hardware and Key Steps to Optimise Photoshop CS5 Performance. The paper discusses topics like scratch disk allocation, hard disk defragmentation, setting the RAM percentage used by Photoshop, and more. The document can be downloaded from the Adobe website.

Website: Adobe

MyPhotoCreations today introduced an array of pre-paid wedding album kits that enable anyone to easily create high-quality professional albums using personal shots or digital photographs from professional photographers. Designed primarily as a resource for couples who only receive digital images from their photographers, these packages provide couples with access to the same premium products and superior materials and craftsmanship available to pro photographers, the company claims. All images in the album are individually manually color corrected. For more information and pricing visit the website below.

Quantum has released the a 26” octagonal softbox and a 10x24” strip softbox for the Quantum Qflash range. The lightweight and easily collapsible QF75 Octagon (£225+VAT) creates beautiful and even light, perfect for portraiture, fashion, children, glamour and product photography, while the QF76 Strip Softbox (£119+VAT) is a versatile light source for use as a main light or fill-in in commercial and product photography. Both products are available from Flaghead Photographic in the United Kingdom.

The new BenQ E1465 is a 14-megapixel digital compact camera featuring an easy-to-use panorama mode, 720p HD video recording and a super macro mode. Also on board is a 27-108mm equivalent wide zoom lens, a 2.7” LCD screen and an SD memory card slot that can handle today’s high-capacity SDHC and SDXC cards- Offering effects like Lomo, Fisheye and Colour Accent, the BenQ E1465 will be available in May. Pricing to be confirmed.

Impossible has launched the Impossible PX 680 Color Shade FF instant colour film. Compatible with all Polaroid 600 cameras - as well as all Polaroid SX 70 cameras equipped with a neutral density filter -, the Impossible PX680 “introduces a magical new colour palette within the classic white frame”, the company says. Available in packs of eight, the film retails for €18.00 / $21.99.

Topaz Labs have just released Topaz Lens Effects, a new Photoshop plug-in designed to help photographers quickly and easily achieve a wide range of lens, filter and specialty camera effects. With Lens Effects, users can create realistic enhancements for emphasising focal points, creating bokeh to blur distracting backgrounds, adding vignettes, and balancing color tone - in just a few clicks.“In addition to a novel approach of creating accurate depth maps for the most realistic depth-of-field simulation, Lens also uses brand new architecture that gives us the unparalleled agility to enhance our software’s capabilities and functionality with new ideas and suggestions that we constantly receive from the Topaz user community,” said Jawad Malik, project leader for the new Topaz Lens Effects. The application retails for $79.99, but is being offered at a special promotional price of $49.99 until 1st June.

XPro Software has released version 2.97 of GeniuX Photo EFX. The program is a standalone application for photo editing and digital painting, and offers both one-click operation and over 300 custom settings. Features include support for 20 different image formats, 15 advanced editing tools, 90 filters, 7 artistic brushes, and more. Version 2.97 incorporates a number of new features and a bug fix. GeniuX Photo EFX sells for $99. For more information, visit the website below.

Website: GeniuX Pro EFX

Independent developer Ken Tidwell has announced D200 DSLR v2.0 for iOS, another in his series of Min-U Guides to Nikon DSLRs. The opening screen of the Min-U (minimum menu) Guide consists of seven main chapter headings, each including a replica of the icon used on the D200 for that menu. The six Menu chapters include Playback, Shooting, Custom Settings, Setup, Recent and More, providing clear and comprehensive instructions for each important menu function. The app is a universal binary, and displays in the highest, native resolution on every iOS device. D200 DSLR v2.0 is available on iTunes for $4.99.

Kenro has re-announced the UK release of the Tokina AT-X 16.5-135mm f3.5-5.6 DX lens for cropped-sensor Canon and Nikon digital SLR cameras. This compact zoom lens uses an optical design that benefits from three aspherical elements, one all-glass precision-moulded element and two compound elements yielding high contrast. Additionally two Super-low Dispersion (SD) glass elements correct chromatic aberration. The recommended retail price of the Tokina AT-X 16.5-135mm f/3.5-5.6 superzoom lens has a recommended retail price of £816.