500px’s new app lets pros edit RAW photos, license their work and find jobs

500px, the photo-sharing service aimed at professional photographers, is today launching a new mobile app aimed at serving the needs of this audience by offering editing tools along with a way to license their images through the company’s custom photography service.

The company last year rolled out its global photography on-demand service to select clients, and now the new app, called RAW, will make it more accessible to the company’s wider user base.

The app includes tools that allow photographers to capture and edit files in the RAW format and arrives only days after Adobe announced a similar enhancement in its own Lightroom Mobile for iOS application. The new Adobe app, however, offers the ability to capture and edit raw photos using Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) file format.

Both releases point to the advances mobile phones have made in terms of becoming tools capable of being used by pro photographers.

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In addition to editing RAW photos, the new 500px app also offers a variety of editing tools, like hue, saturation, luminance controls and the ability to create and use custom filters, including those created by the 500px community.

When the editing process is complete, users can upload and license their photos to the 500px community along with social networks. They can also create, export and attach model releases to their photos.

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The company also plans to use the app to help photographers find jobs, it says. An “Assignments” section will soon begin alerting photographers who opt in about photo jobs nearby. The company is already working with partners, including Airbnb, Google and Lonely Planet, it notes, and plans to use assignments to connect its 8 million users to on-demand jobs.

The app is a free download on iTunes.