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Plugin Newsletter - October / November 2010
CONTENTS
PHOTOWIZ BUNDLE OFFERS: 30% discount THE PLUGIN SITE UPDATE: New pages about free and commercial Lightroom plugins
POLL RESULTS: Do you use Lightroom as well as Photoshop for processing your photos? NEW POLL: Which is your favorite RAW Converter? THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: With Windows 7 to Oblivion, Redfield Fractalius, Plugin Lockup Solution
GRAPHICS NEWS: Photoshop
Elements 9, Elements+, nik HDR Efex Pro, DxO Optics Pro 6.5, CorelDRAW
Premium Suite X5
Dear Reader, Please excuse an error in the last newsletter issue. The link for the CollageIt software was wrong. The correct one is www.collageitfree.com. Additionally the CollageIt link led to the Pola software and the Pola link to something else. The reason for the confusion were internet connection problems, so I was forced to send out the newsletter too quickly to avoid a delay. I hope you enjoy the new issue of this - hopefully error
free - newsletter!
PHOTOWIZ STANDALONE/LIGHTROOM UPDATE Support for color management
The Windows Standalone/Lightroom versions of our PhotoWiz products that were released in September still needed some fine-tuning and still missed an important feature. So we released updates for all Standalone/Lightroom versions. All PhotoWiz Standalone/Lightroom versions now offer support for color management. As a result you do not need to convert your photos to sRGB anymore in order to get a correct image preview in the PhotoWiz tools. Embedded profiles are automatically used for displaying the image and you can choose a profile for opening/saving RAW files. Additionally they preserve metadata when saving the images in the same file format, which e.g. makes sure that Lightroom displays metadata for the processed images. A new "Use Source Folder(s)" check box allows saving images in the original folders, which makes batch processing to multiple folders possible. Other improvements consist of a new Minimize button in the title bar and an improved Lightroom Installer. For more details visit
PHOTOWIZ BUNDLE OFFERS 30% discount For more information about the PhotoWiz products see For ordering visit
THE PLUGIN SITE UPDATE New pages about free and commercial
Lightroom plugins Presets, templates and similar data items were not included. Only items that consist of scripts and program code. 2/3 of the free Lightroom plugins consist of export plugins, which are only useful for a limited number of people. Luckily the situation is better for commercial plugins. Still, most Lightroom plugins are rather boring and less useful compared to Photoshop plugins due to the limited SDK support. According to our research these two new pages offer
the most complete overview of Lightroom plugins. Free
Lightroom Plugins
POLL RESULTS Do you use Lightroom as well as
Photoshop for processing your photos? I only use Photoshop. 51% Here is the old 2008 poll: I only use Photoshop. 51% Actually the results of both polls are very similar. Photoshop is exclusively used by half of all users and only 3% use Lightroom exclusively. When having a look at the results two days after the newsletter was sent out, there were 14% fewer Photoshop-only users than now. This means that the readers of this newsletter tend more towards Lightroom than all of the visitors of The Plugin Site. For more poll results please visit the
NEW POLL Which is your favorite RAW Converter? This time you can vote for your favorite RAW Converter
software. There are 19 choices and one "Other" item. Such a
poll was already done three years ago, so different results are expectable.
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS With Windows 7 to Oblivion, Redfield Fractalius, Plugin Lockup Solution Here are the latest interesting posts on the forum: With Windows 7 to Oblivion Redfield Fractalius Plugin Lockup Solution
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS AQuaDenoise/vsrcmdSDK, PhotoME,
Easy Thumbnails, Seashore, Splashup Digital Multimedia Design (DMMD)
offers the AQuaDenoise filter plugin (for Windows). It offers noise
reduction options, which are meant for medical and forensic imaging. That
is why it only works with grayscale images. So to use it, you either need
to convert your image to grayscale or only select one image channel before
applying it. Additionally the company also offers a free ViserePlugInSDK
(VPISDK), which can be used by developers to support Photoshop plugins
with their application. Other information on the ViserePlugInSDK is available
here. PhotoME (for Windows) is a freeware tool for
viewing and editing the metadata of image files. It also displays information
about embedded profiles. Easy Thumbnails (for Windows) offers various
options for producing thumbnails of image files. You can scale images
up or down in batches, choose from eleven resampling filters and adjust
the brightness, contrast and sharpness at the same time. Seashore is an open source image editor (for
Mac OS X). It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both
text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel
editing. It is based around the GIMP technology and uses the same native
file format. Unlike GIMP it is meant to only serve basic image editing
needs. Splashup and Splashup Light are two
Flash-based image editing applications. Splashup needs to be run with
the Adobe Flash Player, e.g. in Internet Explorer, and looks like a mini-Photoshop.
Splashup Light is an AIR application, which can be run directly from the
desktop, and features a more simple UI. For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
GRAPHICS NEWS Photoshop Elements 9, Elements+, nik HDR Efex Pro, DxO
Optics Pro 6.5, CorelDRAW Premium Suite X5 Version 9 of Adobe Photoshop Elements became
available. It offers an enhanced spot-healing brush, expanded panoramas
and content-aware fill technology. Layer masks have also made it on the
feature list. The new Photomerge Style Match lets you transfer image qualities
like contrast or color tone from one photo to another. Several new Guided
Edit options walk users step-by-step through the process of achieving
certain effects. The Elements Organizer now also became available for
the Mac. Elements+ 3 was released. Elements+ taps the
hidden abilities of Photoshop Elements, such as paths and color channels.
Whereas previous versions of Elements+ consisted mostly of Photoshop Action,
Version 3 uses Javascript and offers eight dedicated dialog boxes: Color
and Tone, Selections, Layers, Masks, Smart Filters, Paths, Text and Scripts.
Scripts includes more than 100 additional functions for performing a wide
range of tasks, many of which replicate the capabilities of Photoshop's
Actions. Nik Software now ships HDR Efex Pro, which
claims to achieve a full spectrum of HDR enhancements and offer all-in-one
approach and multiple tone mapping algorithms. It also features the ability
to create a HDR look from a single exposure. HDR Efex Pro can be used
in Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture. DxO Optics Pro 6.5 will be released in early November.
It is a photo processing software that tries to correct images according
to the hardware that was used to capture it. It includes improved shadow
noise reduction, integration into Lightroom 3, OpenCL support and additional
camera support. Version 6.5 also wants to bring the power of HDR rendering
to photographers working with single RAW images. Corel announced the CorelDRAW Premium Suite X5, a
new and more complete suite of applications based on the CorelDRAW Graphics
Suite. Apart from the CorelDraw and Photo-Paint applications, the suite
consists of the following applications: Website Creator, VideoStudio,
SWiSH Max3, PowerTrace, Capture, PhotoZoom Pro and Winzip.
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Copyright (c) 2000 - 2009 by Harald Heim |
