Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugin Newsletter - November 2003
Contents
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EDITORIAL
PHOTOFREEBIES RELEASED: 10 new freeware plugins from The Plugin Site
PHOTO GALAXY 800 RELEASED: 4300+ royalty-free photos for web graphics
HYPERTYLE SPECIAL OFFER: 20% reduced price for two weeks
FOCALBLADE 1.01b UPDATE: Bug-fix update
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE: Perspective and Lens Correction Plugins
IMPORTANT WEB RESOURCES: Outback Photo, Luminous Landscapes, Canvangelist
LATEST PRODUCT REVIEWS: Melancholytron, Flood, Mr. Contrast, PhotoTools
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Printer Calibration, Graphics Tablet, Cross Stitch Plugin, Washed Out FX
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS: Xero 4 Plugins, Rosenman Plugins, Knot Maker, Image Stacker, PC Inspector
GRAPHICS NEWS: Wacom Contest, Digital Element, Human Soft, Plaid Lite, Andrew's Plugins, Right Hemisphere
PRODUCTS FROM THE PLUGIN SITE
ABOUT THE PLUGIN SITE
Dear Reader,
With a new product release, a new freeware package and a product update it was quite a busy month at The Plugin Site. I planned to carry out a new big Galaxy Contest this year around this time, but it turns out there isn't enough time left. And just before Christmas, I guess, you have plenty of other things to do. So it seems that the Galaxy Contest is bound to be held only every second year. The next one will surely be in 2004. There is plenty of stuff in this newsletter to keep you busy for some time, even without a thrilling contest.
Wishing you a nice Christmas Time,
Harald Heim
http://www.thepluginsite.com/
PHOTOFREEBIES RELEASED
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To celebrate the success of our PhotoWiz product series we decided to publish a third product - this time a freeware product called PhotoFreebies. PhotoFreebies is a collection of 10 Photoshop-compatible plugins for performing useful photo manipulations and effects, e.g. sepia effects, saturation gradients, b/w conversion, color space transformation and many more. Most of them can be used on 8bit and 16bit RGB images. Some of them have a dialog with adjustable controls whereas others are applied instantly without displaying a dialog. The PhotoFreebies collection will be expanded with even more useful plugins in future.
For more information and for downloading the PhotoFreebies, please visit:
http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/
PHOTO GALAXY 800 RELEASED
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We have extended our Photo Galaxy product series with the new Photo Galaxy 800 CD. The previous Photo Galaxy volumes were renamed to "Photo Galaxy 1600". Photo Galaxy 800 consists of almost 4400 photos located on a single CD-ROM. The photos are identical to those of the five Photo Galaxy 1600 volumes with the difference that only the best photos were chosen and that their size is smaller. The photos are provided at a resolution of 800 x 600 or 880 x 584 pixel as high quality JPG files. The photos were sampled down from 1600x1200 or 1760x1168 pixel, which means that they are of a very good image quality. The photos of Photo Galaxy 800 are sorted into 38 main categories.
Additionally the price of all five Photo Galaxy 1600 volumes has permanently been reduced from $114.95 to $99.95. As a special bonus we will give everyone, who orders all five Photo Galaxy 1600 volumes by the end of the year, a free copy of the Photo Galaxy 800 CD.
Last, but not least, Photo Galaxy is now also available on DVD. If you order two or more Photo Galaxy volumes you can get them on DVD instead of CD at the same price. You just have to indicate that you want a DVD instead of CDs when placing your order.
For more information and samples see
http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/photogalaxy/
HYPERTYLE SPECIAL OFFER
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You can now get our HyperTyle product for a 20% reduced price ($10 off) until December 14, 2003. If you don't know it yet, HyperTyle is a sophisticated filter plugin for generating texture, surface, paint, erosion, transparency, edge, frame and shadow effects. These main effects are based on seamless textures. Additionally you can also apply zoom, rotation, metal, chrome, pop-art, warp, mirror, blur, noise, blending and other secondary effects. Up to 20 different effects can be applied at the same time without leaving the plugin dialog. The CD Version of HyperTyle comes with more than 1000 seamless textures.
For more information, please visit
http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/hypertyle/
FOCALBLADE 1.01B UPDATE
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Version 1.01b of FocalBlade, our popular photo sharpening plugin, has been made available. It is a bug fix release that fixes the memory error messages that occurred in Version 1.01 when the Precise check box was activated and when you processed a grayscale image, e.g. in Paint Shop Pro. There are also a few minor fixes, too.
http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE
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Issue 6 of Digital Photography Techniques is available now. My Essential Plugins column in this issue reviews lens and perspective correction plugins. Each product now receives a rating of up to 5 stars. On the cover disk you can find a full version of PhotoImpact 6. The magazine also contains tutorials for Art Nouveau prints, 2004 calendars, landscape panoramas, Photoshop CS, perspective fixing, autumn landscapes, photo album covers and using masks. There is also a contest for winning a $800 digicam.
http://www.dcmag.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/308/
IMPORTANT WEB RESOURCES
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Digital Outback Photo is a web site with a lot of tutorials and reviews of photo correction and photo shooting products. You can also find many nice photos, a forum and booklets with a lot of tips for digital photographers. Check it out at
http://www.outbackphoto.com/
The Luminous Landscape is another photographer-orientated web site with many tutorials, essays, product reviews, tips for photo shooting locations, a forum and many more. Don't miss this great photo resource.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/
The Canvangelist is a popular and colorful e-zine for users of Canvas for Macintosh. Nevertheless it is also interesting for users of other graphics applications and for Windows users, because Mike Bedford also review a lot of Photoshop-compatible plugins in his e-zine. In the next issues he also plans to cover Windows products, so it will be even more interesting.
http://www.canvangelist.com/
LATEST PRODUCT REVIEWS
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This time we have four new reviews of three products from Flaming Pear and one from Extensis. They were written by Lori J.Davis, Maggie Lombardi and Kathy Becker. Here are the review summaries:
Flaming Pear Flood (2 stars): "Flood is fun to use and creates remarkably realistic water and water-like effects. For example, you can add a lake to the foreground of a landscape. And by using Flood on separate image layers, you can make a figure appear to be partially submerged in liquid or embedded in a mirror-like solid."
Flaming Pear Melancholytron (3 stars): "If you're a digital photographer who wants to simulate old-fashioned or damaged prints, Melancholytron is for you. This goes way beyond simple sepia tinting and vignetting. Highly recommended for tinting photos, simulating various types of distressed photographic effects, and adding moody effects to photos."
Flaming Pear Mr. Contrast (2 stars): "Mr. Contrast is a nice plugin if you're looking to take your images to the soft or extreme. Whether it be adding a bit of contrast to a washed out image or taking it to the limit, be prepared to play in here for quite a while."
Extensis Photo Tools (3 stars): "Extensis PhotoTools could be seen as an advanced version of Photoshop's Layer Styles. They offer much more control then these and can also be applies to selections. It is a pity that Extensis only supports Photoshop and no other graphics application."
For the full reviews please visit:
http://www.thepluginsite.com/reviews/
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS
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Alex P writes "I am trying to sync the print with the screen. I realize it will never be exactly the same but I don't think mine is even close. .... I really wanted to do it visually without using expensive devices. Surely every Photoshop user has been frustrated by prints that don't match the screen. What's the point in making fine adjustments in Photoshop only to have a result really unexpected? Any one has any comments??? Recommendations..."
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2252
Andicatz asks "Which is the best graphics tablet for use with Photoshop. £100 pound limit price! Have seen some cheap ones by Nisis G5 and G6. Like the look of Wacom graphic 3 Classic. What works best."
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=765
Margaret asks "Anyone know of software or photoshop plugin to make cross stitch or rughooking design/patterns (for Mac OS X or 9) using my own images? (photos & paintings)"
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=790
new user writes "I'm wondering if anyone has come across freeware photoshop filter that can mimic not so much a watercolor but a wash look..or even a marker rendering???"
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=777
For more discussions and comments please visit
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS
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Set 4 of the free Xero plugin collection (for Windows) has just become available. It consists of nine plugins with paint, mosaic, light, blur, posterization, vignette effects. You will certainly find the one or the other effect very useful for enhancing your images.
http://www.xero-graphics.co.uk/xero/index.htm?plugins.htm
The free Rosenman plugin collection (for Windows) has been expanded with two new plugins. The Portable PixMap Importer/Exporter filter imports and exports PPM, PGM and PBM images in binary and text format. The Superformula plugin draws a wide variety of geometric shapes.
http://www.richardrosenman.com/photoshop.htm
Knot Maker is a freeware tool (for Windows) for designing knot patterns. It generates the text for the knots to use with my Knot Maker font. The Knot Maker font is included in the package. Knot Maker is nice for producing material for antique designs.
http://www.aenigmafonts.com/misc.html
TawbaWare Image Stacker (for Windows) combines multiple photos into a single photo. It can also be used to reduce the appearance of "digital noise" in images created by digital cameras or scanners, and create "synthesized long-exposures" without overexposure. Although Image Stacker is distributed as shareware ($17), it operates without registration, but limited to 10 images with sizes up to 640x480 pixels. Of course similar results can be achieved by assembling images as layers in Photoshop or PSP and using various blend modes, but Image Stacker is doubtlessly a more convenient alternative.
http://www.tawbaware.com/imgstack.htm
PC INSPECTOR File Recovery 3 is a freeware data recovery program (for Windows) that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. It finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT was erased or damaged, and recovers files even if a header entry is no longer available. However, it does not fully support the NTFS file system. On the same web site you will also find
the Smart Recovery tool, which seems to be sponsored freeware. It is aimed at recovering files from various memory cards. During recovery it can also display thumbnails of the found photos. If these tools can't help you, type "Restorer 2000" into Google for a sophisticated and reliable commercial recovery tool.
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm
http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm
GRAPHICS NEWS
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Wacom Go Pro Photography Contest
Wacom are running the Go Pro photography contest until January 31, 2004. The main prize is a 40 GB Apple iPod and $1000 as payment for the commercial rights of the winning photo. The contest is limited to residents of the US and Canada only.
http://www.wacom.com/promo/pro.cfm
Digital Element and Digimation Team Up on Modelshop
This plugin lets you rotate, scale, and place 3D models in such formats as .obj, .3ds, .lwo, and .dxf within Photoshop pictures and comes with fifty 3D models from Digimation's Model Bank Collection. Mac/Win demo available.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2058
Human Software Releases Calendar Templates for Photoshop/Elements
Too slack to create your own calendar? This package gives you more than 30 different templates in .psd format, both for individual months or the full 2004 year. For Mac and Windows.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2057
Plaid Lite - Create Seamless Plaid Patterns Easily
This PC plugin for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and PhotoImpact generates seamless plaid and tartan-like patterns, providing control over pattern style, zoom, angle of rotation and color effects. Demo available.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2056
Andrew's Plugins - "GX Motion" (Volume 14) Released
This modestly priced set of nine plugins for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Painter and other compatible applications have motion as their theme. They run in RGB, CMYK, grayscale and Lab color modes. Demo available.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2046
Right Hemisphere Launches Deep Publish for Microsoft Office Users
Now you can embed files from a wide range of 3D applications directly in such Microsoft Office Windows applications as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Zoom, pan and rotate right in the distributed document using the viewer. Demo available.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2043
For daily graphics news updates, visit
http://www.Graphics.com
