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Plugin Newsletter - November/December 2011
CONTENTS
PHOTOWIZ STANDALONE/LIGHTROOM 1.06b WINDOWS UPDATES: Support for ACDSee and new camera raw files RUNNING THE PHOTOWIZ STANDALONES UNDER MACOS X
NEW POLLS: In what format(s)
do you usually shoot digital photos? In which new commercial plugin(s)
from The Plugin Site are you most interested? THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Panorama
Correction Plugin, Color Temperature Correction, Plugin Support in PSP
X4, EyeCandy in PSP XII
GRAPHICS NEWS: Adobe Upgrade Policy Change, Corel PaintShop Pro X4, PSP X3 Service Pack 5, ThumbsPlus 8, Dynamic Autopainter Pro 64
Dear Reader, If you have not yet heard about Adobe changing its upgrade policy, please read the Graphics News section below. Basically it looks as if Adobe tries to force its customers to buy every new upgrade if they want to continue using future versions of their software. The only alternative will be to pay a monthly fee, which is only financially attractive for people who need more than just one, two or three Adobe applications. These are certainly bad news for many Adobe customers.
If they are not already fed up, they should let Adobe know what they think
of this step. On the other hand these are good news for smaller companies,
which offer competing products at lower prices. They will see many new
customers in the coming months and years.
COLORSTYLER PREVIEW Have a look at our up-coming product
We are planing to release a second new product this year (which we have never sone since 2003) called ColorStyler. You could say that it is the color version of our already existing B/W Styler product, but it will offer much more. ColorStyler will enable you to enhance your photos in numerous ways to make them look their best and add your own personal style. The most remarkable features, which are not available in our other products so far, are image thumbnails of presets, a curve tool, a masking brush tool and a more flexible UI. ColorStyler will include hundreds of presets for simulating color films, color filters and various other traditional photography effects as well as special effects. Any suggestion about what you would like to see in ColorStyler are welcome. For more information and for
subscribing for the release news go to
PHOTOWIZ STANDALONE/LIGHTROOM 1.06b WINDOWS UPDATES Support for ACDSee and new camera raw files We have just released updates of all PhotoWiz Standalone/Lightroom versions: ColorWasher, FocalBlade, LightMachine, B/W Styler and ContrastMaster. Apart from smaller bug fixes they now offer support for camera raw files of the latest cameras. Additionally you can now use them as external editors in ACDSee and ACDSee Pro, which works similar to Lightroom. The installer adds them to ACDSee's External Editors menu, from where you can conveniently apply them to selected images. Registered users will receive the update by email within 24 hours. For more information and a demo download visit
RUNNING THE PHOTOWIZ STANDALONES UNDER MACOS X
There is a new tutorial available that shows how you can run the Windows standalone versions of our PhotoWiz products on a Mac with an Intel CPU. You do not need a copy of Microsoft Windows for that. You only need the free Wineskin tool. The 19-step tutorial explains in detail how to setup Wineskin, install the standalone and run it. It takes a few minutes to do that, but it is definitely feasible. Of course, you can also make other Windows programs run on your Mac with the same procedure. Doing that for Windows plugins is also possible, but more complex. You would need to install a Windows host tool, e.g. IrfanView, XNView or Photo Designer 7 (see below), and afterwards copy or install the plugin(s) into the same wrapper. Read the tutorial at the
POLL RESULTS
Poll 1: What digital camera brand do you use? 673 people voted in the last poll about their camera brand preference. Here are the results: 1. Canon 36.6% 3. Sony 8.3% As we can see, there are two favorites in this list. Canon is preferred by far, almost 37% would choose this brand, followed by Nikon which is the first selection for almost 25% of all voters. Other brand names reach much lower percentages among our poll participants. In a poll about DSLRs five years ago the results were similar, but Sony and Panasonic managed to get more popular in the meantime.
150 people cast their vote in this poll about acceptable prices for products from The Plugin Site. Here are the results and its analysis:
The poll suggests that at $50 our plugin products produce the most profit. $40 seems to be the second best price. According to the poll any price between $20 to $100 would still be at least 75% as effective as $50, so this seems to be the best price spectrum for our products. It is good to see that we seem to have priced our products on the spot. Although we also offer products at $70, the sales figures do not really indicate that these sell worse, although this poll may suggest it. We try to keep our prices as reasonable as possible while at the same time maintaining the highest quality. Pricing our products too low or high, would mean less profits which in turn would mean lower product quality, because we would be forced to spend less time on each product.
NEW POLLS In what format(s) do you usually
shoot digital photos? Back in 2004 a poll asked in which format people shot their digital photos. JPEG, RAW and TIFF were common at that time. TIFF has vanished in the meantime and DNG appeared. Although DNG could be counted as RAW, we listed it as a separate item in the new poll. It will be interesting to see how much the RAW format made up ground. The second poll asks you to vote for our next
commercial plugin project. You can choose between four major upgrades
of existing plugins and six new types of plugins. Additionally there is
the choice of a plugin that combines all PhotoWiz effects
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS Panorama Correction Plugin, Color Temperature Correction, Plugin Support in PSP X4, EyeCandy in PSP XII Here are the latest posts on the forums: Panorama Correction Plugin Color Temperature Correction Plugin Support in PSP X4 EyeCandy in PSP XII Please feel free to post suggestions or start a discussion
topic at
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS Perfect365, MAGIX Photo Manager
10 & Photo Designer 7, dispcalGUI/Argyll, Wineskin ArcSoft Perfect365 is
a one-touch/click photo makeover tool (for Win/Mac/iOS). It lets you adjust
up to 21 facial features with the help of style makeup templates and the
ability to fine-tune them. Perfect365 performs an automatic facial recognition
and can detect up to 20 faces in one photo. It offers cleanup, makeup
and enhancement features as well as a before/after comparison, key points
for tilted and off-center profiles and lets you save your favorite looks.
An enhanced version of Perfect365 that allows users to save and print
their high-resolution pictures can be purchased.. MAGIX Photo Designer 7 is
a free image editor (for Windows). It has all the standard features of
an image processing application. It uses so-called objects, which work
similar to layers. It also supports Photoshop plugins, but you should
better not apply them to layers to avoid weird results. There is a task
wizard and a one-click photo correction. dispcalGUI is a graphical user interface for
the open-source Argyll display calibration tool. dispcalGUI lets you calibrate
your display devices and create or check their ICC profiles by using a
hardware sensor from Datacolor/ColorVision or X-Rite/GretagMacbeth. There
is also support for multi-display setups. According to our own experience
dispcalGUI is sometimes even more accurate and offers more features than
the original software delivered with calibration devices. Wineskin lets you run Windows programs under
MacOS X. Unlike other virtual machines you do not even have to buy and
install Windows. It emulates Windows itself, so it does not eat up a lot
of RAM and is installed quickly, but on the other hand does not provide
UI features like visual styles. It also lets developers make ports of
Windows software to Mac OS X. It creates Mac application bundle wrappers
which can be distributed. If you are unsure on how to use it, have a look
at our tutorial above. For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
GRAPHICS NEWS Adobe Upgrade Policy Change, Corel PaintShop Pro X4, PSP X3 Service Pack 5, ThumbsPlus 8, Dynamic Autopainter Pro 64 Adobe is planning to change
its upgrade policy for the Creative Suite 6, including Photoshop CS6.
Users of CS3 and CS4 will first need to upgrade to CS5 in order to qualify
for upgrade pricing for CS6. So that effectively means a double upgrade
fee or paying the full price again. Even the 20% discount that Adobe offers
for the CS5 upgrade until the end of this year does not really change
much. Corel released PaintShop Pro X4 (for Windows),
which delivers faster performance and 75 new and enhanced features. Among
these features are HDR Tools, Photo Blend (for creating compositions by
selecting people, objects or areas from a series of images), Fill Light
and Clarity (for enhancing underexposed areas and details), Selective
Focus (depth of field and miniature effects) as well as Vignette Tools
(for soft and faded borders). PaintShop Pro X4 launches 50% faster and
has various effects accelerated. It provides built-in social media sharing
option, e.g. for Facebook and Flicker. Service Pack 5 for PaintShop Photo Pro X3 has
been released. It fixes a lot of problems with plugins and some other
bugs. It is recommended to install all of the service packs sequentially
to alleviate problems. Cerious released ThumbsPlus 8 SP1 (for Windows),
an image management application with many database features. It offers
Windows 7 support, new UI features and customization, enhanced video file
support and a Metadata Batch Editor.
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Copyright (c) 2000 - 2009 by Harald Heim |
