Just the other day we released the 1.1 update to our hugely popular photo-processing app: Analog.

Along with some much requested new features, Analog 1.1 also includes a few brand new filters and borders. To say that we take our filters and borders seriously would be an understatement... we take them VERY seriously. There's no guess work or "what might look trendy" here. Instead, each has been painstakingly built to accurately recreate real film and camera techniques. Sometime we go to the other side of the world to get it right. Literally.

Last October I took a holiday to South Africa and took with me not only my digital camera, but an old film camera - loaded with a roll of Fuji Velvia 100.

Velvia 100 is a gorgeous film stock that looks fantastic cross-processed. The results are often super high contrast, with over-saturated washes of orange and purple. Here's a photo I snapped from the summit of Table Mountain looking down on parts of Cape Town through the mist below:

The combination of the Velvia film and my old toy camera had created an effect with buckets of soul. This just had to go in Analog! So after much tweaking and experimentation I created the 'Cape Town' filter for Analog. I could now apply this to the rest of my digital photos taken from the mountain. Roll over the following photo to see how it compares.

However, I was well aware that the cross-processed Velvia look, along with the distortions you get from a toy camera - can be a bit heavy for some photos. Well it just so happens that Analog version 1.1 also introduces an intensity slider to the app so that the effect can be toned down as and when you need it.

This isn't any old slider though. What's the point in including filters if you're just going to remove the end result sequentially? There's nothing dynamic about that. It's like saying that the original filter just isn't good enough.

So we decided to approach the intensity slider as if every point in the slider could be a filter in it's own right. Keith, Analog's code captain, designed a way for us to gracefully scale back different filter elements. In turn, we looked at hundreds of photos which we had based our filters on so that we could work out how a filter still retains it's 'feel' at lower levels.

The result is not only a new version of Analog with three beautiful new filters but a version in which there is the perfect vintage effect for almost any photo you throw at it. Enjoy!

Every so often we're going to feature a few of the awesome photographers that are using Analog in their day-to-day work.

Sweet Little Photographs bill themselves as "wedding photography that doesn't suck" and we agree! Photographer Tim approaches wedding photography with a fun and artistic approach and uses Analog for some of his post processing to add a 'vintage' spin.

His favourite filters are Kyoto and Xprocess and the way he shoots is complimented by Analog's filters: "I find often that when you shoot with a low depth of filed (which I pretty much only do) and then treat the images with Analog it does a really good replication of the film-look."

We think there's something really magical about the way that Tim photographs weddings and it's great to see Analog being used to make people's big day that little bit more special!

If you're a pro that's using Analog we'd love to hear from you.

We're all photography lovers at Realmac Software and occasionally a few of us like to dust off our Holgas, Polaroids and LC-As (my personal favourite is an old Olympus XA2), to shoot off a few rolls of analogue film.

The effects of using these vintage and toy cameras, along with techniques such as cross processing, are often unpredictable and fun. Light leaks and other imperfections are part of what gives analogue photography it's 'soul' and it's what we love about it.

The thing about shooting analogue though, is that it's actually quite a hassle (sorry die-hard fans - it's true). Getting good film stock, loading and unloading the camera, developing, printing, scanning, it's all stuff that gets in the way of the end result. So we wanted to produce an app that would take your high res, digital photos and give them the artistic qualities that our much-loved analogue cameras do.

The problem is: capturing the very spirit of a camera or film type and then making sure that it will apply to pretty much every photo you throw at it is tricky business. I spent a good many hours trawling over analogue film groups on Flickr and reading forum posts from camera fanatics to try and work out which were the most important qualities for each type of filter. Why is the Diana regarded a 'toy' camera? What are the exact colour shifts made by C-41 cross processing? How does ISO noise differ from digital noise? These are all important questions!

Once we had decided on the definitive qualities of our favourite analogue cameras and film types, we started mocking up filters in Photoshop that would take our ordinary digital photos and make them as close to the analogue examples as possible.

Keith, the lead developer on Analog, had built in a way for us to transpose the lessons we had learnt from building filters in Photoshop layers straight over to Analog. However, once a filter had been built in Analog using a particular photo as a starting point, it didn't guarantee that all photos would look great with the same effects applied. We quickly learnt that we needed to test each filter against an enormous number of photos with varying contrasts, colours and subject matter and then tweak the filters accordingly.

After a lot of fine tuning and continual research, we finally developed a set of filters that we feel are as close to real analogue cameras and film as possible. And with more filters and borders on the way in future updates we think it's only going to get easier to give your digital photos the analogue soul that they deserve.

Analog is available now on the Mac App Store.

In the lead up to releasing Courier, we decided that we wanted to get people excited about our new addition by creating a short teaser video. We didn't want give away too much about the app, but at the same time we wanted to reveal some of its features and make the video fun, engaging and well… a little bit Realmac.

Courier's main UI is based on the metaphor of envelopes, stamps and deliveries. So rather than the standard screen-cast-style video of an application going through its motions, we thought that it would be really cool to make Courier come alive using the magic of stop motion. This way we could use some of the real-life elements of Courier to allude to its features without giving too much away.

So we had an idea of what we wanted to show and how we could incorporate everyday elements; such as cotton wool and red jelly beans - to give the video the light-hearted, 'DIY' aesthetic we were after (although to this day, I'm still not quite sure how the plastic horse got involved). The only real hurdle seemed to be that we had never made a stop motion video before!

Thankfully, we had the awesome iStopMotion by Boinx Software to assist us. This is a great app, and it really helped make the whole process a lot easier. Using iStopMotion we could simply set up a static camera and capture each frame as we moved everything slowly around the workspace. Dan and I were on a tight schedule and although we had done a lot of planning, I feared that we may not finish the shoot in time as big changes in light would be a real problem. However, this turned out not to be the case and we managed to finish filming after 6 continuous hours.

Not only did we use iStopMotion to film the teaser video itself, but we also set up a Mac in the corner of the 'Studio' (otherwise known as our meeting room) to record the whole process through the iSight using iStopMotion.

The results of this are almost as fun as the teaser video itself: