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Plugin Newsletter - March 2010
CONTENTS
SPECIAL EASTER OFFERS: LightMachine and HyperTyle Reduced
NEW POLL: From which companies or developers do you regularly use freeware plugins? THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Grayed-out Plugins, Photoshop Path Problems, EyeCandy 3 & Windows 7, PSP & NoiseNinja, Windows Plugin on the Mac
GRAPHICS NEWS: Paint
Shop Pro X3, Photoshop CS5 Announcement, Magic Bullet PhotoLooks, CorelDRAW
X5
Dear Reader, I am proud to tell you that the photography book that I was working on last year was finally released. It was a lot of work but also a lot of fun writing the book. At the moment I still think that it was my first and last one, but who knows... See below for more details. After PSP X3 was released a few weeks ago Photoshop CS5 will be announced in two weeks. It promises to bring useful new features, which may save quite some time. I already prepared an update of the "Plugin Essentials" article, which will be released after Photoshop CS5 was officially launched. It mainly concern Mac plugins, for which some things have changed. So have a look at our web site on April 12 for it. You will see some exciting new software releases very soon from us. Unfortunately we did not manage to release one of them this month, although that was planned. But it should be ready by mid April on our web site if you cannot wait for the next newsletter.
NEW PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK "Nude & Portrait Photography"
by Harald Heim and Kay Michael Kuhnlein You can view the cover, contents and two full chapters here. You can order the book at Amazon.co.uk
who send the book all over the world for a relatively low postage fee.
If you are located in Germany, Austria or Switzerland it is better to
order the book with Amazon.de. It would be nice if you would post a review at Amazon if you like our book.
SPECIAL EASTER OFFERS LightMachine and HyperTyle Reduced In case you do not know: LightMachine
is a plugin (for Win/Mac) for performing all kinds of light adjustments
in photos. It combines shadow/highlight, virtual lighting and color-based
correction tools for sophisticated corrections without the need of time-consuming
selections and layer stacks. It lets you selectively correct photos taken
under bad light conditions or with inadequate camera settings and achieve
results that rival photos taken under the best circumstances. Additionally
LightMachine can achieve special effects like glows, sunsets, high key
and selective b/w effects, replace one color with another and simulate
polarizing filters. HyperTyle is a filter plugin (for Windows) for generating texture, surface, paint, erosion, transparency, edge, frame and shadoweffects. These main effects are based on seamless textures. Additionally there are also zoom, rotation, metal, chrome, pop-art, warp, mirror, blur, noise, blending and other secondary effects which can be simultaneously applied to the seamless texture which is used for the main effect. For more information visit the LightMachine
and HyperTyle
product pages. For ordering please go to the Order
page.
POLL RESULTS From which companies do you own
commercial plugins? 1. Nik Software 206 votes 5. Flaming Pear 155 votes 9. Imagenomic 99 votes 14. Digital Anarchy 64 votes It is no surprise to have nik, Alienskin and onOne among the top ranks. It is nice to see us on Nr. 3, but we had the bonus that the poll was done on our own web site, so our votes in the poll are not representative. It is interesting to see that Flaming Pear is still popular, even though no new product has been released for years. Additionally we would have expected Auto FX a bit higher ranked. Quite a lot of votes went into the "Other" category, which indicates that there are more plugin companies to consider. No surprises with the rest of the plugin companies. For more poll results, please visit the
NEW POLL From which companies or developers do you regularly use freeware plugins?
The next poll is similar to the old one but deals with freeware filter plugins. You can vote for up to 20 companies and developers of freeware plugins. If you cast as few votes as possible the results will be more distinctive. Thanks for participating!
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS Grayed-out Plugins, Photoshop
Path Problems, EyeCandy 3 & Windows 7, PSP & NoiseNinja, Windows
Plugin on the Mac Grayed-out Plugins Photoshop Path Problems EyeCandy 3 & Windows 7 PSP & NoiseNinja Windows Plugin on the Mac For more discussions and asking questions see
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS PhotoTools/PhotoFrame Free, Neat
Image plugins, Graham White filters, Unicontel, FilterForge Freepack 3,
DepthDither onOne Software offers free
versions of its PhotoTools 2.5 and PhotoFrame 4.5 plugins (for
Win/Mac). Both offer only approx. 20 effects whereas the full versions
contain several hundreds or more than one thousand effects. Neat Image is an effective noise reduction
software (for Win/Mac). Its free demo edition is available as a
standalone and 32-bit/64-bit Photoshop plugins. The limitations are that
the standalone only saves JPEG files with 91% quality and does not support
batch processing. The demo plugins are not enabled for smart filtering
and only process up to 1024x1024 pixels in an image and 8 bits/channel
images. To overcome these limitations you need to get one of the commercial
versions. Still, the demo plugins can be useful for editing images for
the web. The standalone is also nice for larger images if you do not mind
outputting to JPEG with good although not maximum quality. Graham White offers a few Filter Factory
plugins with various blur, threshold, grayscale conversion, gradient
and noise effects. They are called Bleach Bypass, Blur Threshold, Dual
Threshold, RGB to Grayscale, Blur Color, Blur Custom, Channel Noise, Channel
Shift and Plain Gradient. To run these filters on the Mac you need to
use Filter Foundry (www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/). Unicontel developed three free Photoshop filter
plugins (for Windows). "Hi ISO Noise Reduction" reduces color
noise in photo while respecting the contours of image objects. "EdgeCrement"
increases or decreases the white/black edges in the image, which creates
some kind of blur or sharpen effects. "Multiple Histogram Equalization"
increases the contrast, but also produces visible artifacts. All plugins
only have few options, so it is hard to properly adjust their effects. Filter Forge Freepack 3 Frames is now available
for Mac OS X. It offers seven filters for creating frame effects. Graphest DepthDither is a free filter plugin
(for Windows) that dithers images in order to display them accurately
on mobile phones which usually do not support standard 24 bit images.
DepthDither uses 3 dithering methods. You can choose a destination color
depth of 2 bit, 4 bit, 12 bit, 15 bit, 16 bit and 18 bit. As its home
page is not available anymore you need to download it from one of the
following sites: For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
GRAPHICS NEWS Paint Shop Pro X3, Photoshop CS5 Announcement, Magic
Bullet PhotoLooks, CorelDRAW X5 Corel Paint Shop Pro X3
(for Windows) was finally released. It includes an enhanced Photo Organizer,
a new RAW Lab tool, support for multi-core processors, an enhanced Express
Lab, Smart Carver and Object Extractor tools for seamlessly removing objects
from the background, a Vibrancy filter, on-image text editing (Wow, what
a revolution!), HD video slideshows and Windows 7 compatibility among
many other new features. Also contained in the package are Painter Photo
Essentials 4 and some KPT plugins. Adobe announced the launch of Photoshop CS5
and the rest of the Creative Suite 5 on April 12. Although several videos
about new features are already on the web, e.g. about content-aware fill,
Refine Edge enhancements and the new brush system, a complete list of
new features will not be announced before the mentioned date. For more
information see Magic Bullet PhotoLooks is a standalone and
Photoshop plugin (for Win/Mac) that makes it easy to control lighting
conditions and create stylized effects. It contains 36 tools for manipulating
exposure, lighting, color and lens effects as well as 100 presets that
range from simple exposure and film process emulation to radical color
changes. Corel Corporation introduced CorelDRAW Graphics
Suite X5 (for Windows). Among the more than fifty new and enhanced
features is Corel CONNECT, a new application that synchronizes with both
CorelDRAW and Photo-Paint.
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Copyright (c) 2000 - 2009 by Harald Heim |
Wishing you a Very Happy Easter,
