Plugin Newsletter - April 2003

Contents
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EDITORIAL

PLUGIN GALAXY 1.50 FOR MACINTOSH RELEASED:
30 new effects and MacOS X version

UPDATES OF THE PLUGIN SITE:
Step-by-Step instructions for Plugin Commander, GraphicsGalaxy Search Engine updated

THE DISCUSSION FORUMS:
Color Management, JPG 2000, Pixel People, FlamingPear problem, Woodcut Effect

POLL RESULTS:
How much would you maximally pay for a good plugin product?

NEW POLL:
Which of these image effects are your favorites?

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS:
Image Analyzer, Liquid Media, 3 Font Tools, ScreenRip32

GRAPHICS NEWS from www.Graphics.com:
Nik Multimedia, Resize Magic, Painter 8 and more

PRODUCTS FROM THE PLUGIN SITE
ABOUT THE PLUGIN SITE

Dear Reader,

According to the new biweekly schedule of the Plugin Newsletter, the latest version should have been published two weeks ago. But because of a serious lack of time, I had to drop it. I sincerely regret that you may have waited in vain for that issue. I needed some of the time to relax a bit, after the first three months of this year were so work-intensive.

The "Free Plugins and Tools" section of this newsletter contains no plugins this time, as I haven't come across new free ones yet. But nevertheless several free applications are described, which are quite interesting and useful. Some new free plugins will surely be included in the next issue. If anyone has come across some, please let me know.

Wishing you a Happy Easter,
Harald Heim

http://www.thepluginsite.com

PLUGIN GALAXY 1.50 FOR MACINTOSH RELEASED
------------------------------------------------
After a long time of waiting the MacOS 9 and MacOS X versions of Plugin Galaxy 1.50 are finally available. All registered users don't need to pay any upgrade fee and will get an email with the upgrade instruction soon.

Plugin Galaxy now includes more than 150 effects distributed among 21 plugins. Version 1.50 offers a new Page Curl plugin and 18 new filter effects. Among the new effects are Star Field, Diffuse, Rippled Glass, Cave Edge, Jungle Edge, Curved Edge, Cutline Edge, Quad Feedback, Tunnel Feedback, Space Worm, Dragon's Tail, Butterfly, Plate, Wall, RGB Saturation, Erode En/Decryption and Cross En/Decryption. Many of the old effects were improved, e.g. Bluuur and Feedback render faster, in Edge Tool the edge can be positioned anywhere on the image and new Overlay and Expose features in four plugins.

Just like in the Windows version the PopArt and Zoom plugins are now free in the Mac versions. For more details and downloading a demo version (including the free PopArt and Zoom plugins), please visit:

http://thepluginsite.com/products/plugingalaxy/

UPDATES OF THE PLUGIN SITE
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A "Step by Step Instructions" page has been added to Plugin Commander product page. It explains very detailed how to use Plugin Commander. This should be a great help for beginners who just started using Plugin Commander. Additonally the setup of Plugin Commander Light has been fixed to avoid problem when uninstalling it. For those who don't know it, Plugin Commander is an application for organizing, applying and previewing plugins.

http://thepluginsite.com/products/picopro/

The plugin database of the GraphicsGalaxy Search Engine has been updated with 100 new plugins. Additionally many invalid URLs have been replaced by working ones. The GraphicsGalaxy Search Engine lets you search for plugin with the help of keywords.

http://thepluginsite.com/search/graphicsgalaxy.htm

THE DISCUSSION FORUMS
------------------------------------------------

A lot of interesting topics have been posted on The Plugin Site Forums during the last few weeks. Here is a selection:

ColorConfused asked "I just bought Photoshop 7... I'm terribly frustrated and confused by all this technical stuff about color management. ... If it can be simple... I simply want to have good color matching on my monitor, from my digital camera to one of: my epson inkjet, the photo printer at WalMart, or posting them on a website. Is this supposed to be nearly impossible? and hiddeously expensive??"
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=430

himself0314 asked "I found a freeware plug that'll let me save to JP2. Internet Explorer is confused by the JP2 files. Am I wrong in assuming there's not native support for JPeG2000?"
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=433

Gina asked "Can anyone tell me how to create this little "pixel people". Is it done in P.S or something else ? Any help would be great "
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=421

Cam2 asked "Has anyone discovered how to unregister a corrupted flaming pear plugin?, this is required to remedy the issue mentioned in previous posts in this forum, especially the non working issue of updated plugins which appears to corrupt and render some of the plugins useless, rather like a non fuctioning demo."
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1232

LMgraphics said "For quite a long time I have been trying to convert grayscale images to black and white for a woodcut effect. I have tried numerous filters ... The results were most unsatisfactory. Does anyone know of a free filter which does a passable job of converting grayscale to black and white without losing all picture quality? And I would also like to have freeware filters for the vignette effect. "
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=387

For more discussions and comments visit
http://www.thepluginsite.com/forum/

POLL RESULTS
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The latest poll asked you "How much would you maximally pay for a good plugin product?". A total of 161 people voted in the poll, which is a relatively small number, compared to other polls that were already conducted. Anyway, the results are quite interesting.

45% of the poll participants only use freeware plugins, while 55% also buy commercial plugins. As the poll is about the prices of plugins that people are willing to pay, the 55% was stretched to 100% in the following table to make the results better readable. So the following results are based on the votes of 89 people.

The first column displays the plugin price and the second the percentage of people which would be willing to pay that amount and not more. The third column is the total percentage of people who would buy a plugin at that price and the forth column shows a number that represents the revenue that a plugin company would achieve at a certain price.

Price Percentage Market Reach Revenue Index (=Price* Market)
------ ------- ------ ------
$5: 7.87% 100% 500
$10: 4.49% 92.35% 923
$15: 7.87% 87.86% 1318
$20: 10.12% 79.99% 1600

$25: 11.24% 69.87% 1747
$30: 14.61% 58.63% 1759
$40: 4.49% 44.02% 1761

$50: 14.61% 39.53% 1976

$60: 1.22% 24.92% 1495
$70: 1.22% 23.8% 1666
$80: 0% 22.58% 1806
$90: 0% 22.58% 2032
$100: 15.75% 22.58% 2258

$130: 1.22% 6.83% 888
$150: 0% 5.61% 841
$180: 0% 5.61% 1010
$200: 2.24% 5.61% 1122
> $200: 3.37% 3.37% 1011 (for $300)

As we can see good prices for a plugin product are $30, $50 and $100. According to the results it makes no sense for a plugin company to make a plugin product at a lower price than $25, to set a price between $50 and $100 or to make a plugin more expensive than $100. If they did so, they would lose money (see Revenue Index). In fact $100 seems to be the price with which a plugin company can achieve the most revenue. Anyway, if these figures are halfway correct, companies that charge $130 or more for their products would earn more than twice as much money if they reduced the price to $100.

For more poll results see
http://thepluginsite.com/knowhow/

NEW POLL
------------------------------------------------

The latest poll with the questions "Which of these image effects are your favorites?" offers you almost 50 categories of image effects to choose from. Much work has been invested in the compilation of this list, so hopefully we didn't overlook an effect type. You can select for more than one item, which gives you the possibility to vote for all your favorite effects. But please don't select all items, because this would have the same effect as if you didn't participate in the poll at all.

Please cast your vote at
http://www.thepluginsite.com/

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS
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Image Analyzer (for Windows) is a freeware image editing, enhancement and analysis software. It supports reading and writing of JPEG 2000 files among various other formats and also lets you scan and print images. It features built-in conventional and adaptive filters, e.g. for red-eye removal, noise reduction and brightness, contrast and saturation adjustment. Image Analyzer also lets you do distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformations, morphological operations, deconvolution and color model conversions. Other interesting features are a math expression module for creating and transforming images and an advanced pocket calculator with equation solver.

http://meesoft.logicnet.dk/Analyzer/

Liquid Media (for Windows) is a free-for-personal-use presentation software. It lets you create professional multimedia slide shows with sound, 3D Animation and special effects. It lets you import PowerPoint presentations, animate and rotate 3D objects, is timeline or action orientated and exports to a standalone EXE file, AVI video or CD menu.

http://www.liquidmedia.net/

X-Fonter (for Windows) is a free-for-personal-use tool for managing TrueType fonts. It lets you browse and preview installed fonts as well as not-installed fonts, install or uninstall any font and search for fonts on your hard drive. It offers a character map with all ASCII codes, unicode support, printing a font overview and much more. Another font management tool with fewer options, but easier to use, is The Font Thing (for Windows). It is totally freeware and also lets you browse installed and uninstalled fonts as well as install and uninstall them. Additionally it lets you group fonts into collections for easier management, use multiple font windows simultaneously for easy font comparison.

http://users.pandora.be/eclypse/xfonter.html
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

Macintosh users should have a look at the free Baytex FontShow!. It let's you preview any text with your installed fonts. You can choose the show speed, and you can pause, go back, forward or change the speed during the show. Clicking on the styled text (with your chosen font and your chosen color) copies it to the clipboard.

http://baytex.net/?prod=fontshow

ScreenRip32 (for Windows) is a freeware screen capture utility that let's you capture areas of the screen with a variety of methods. It supports different image formats such as ICO, BMP, JPG and GIF. ScreenRip32 also lets you view and create Animated GIFs from opened files or captured images.

http://www.progency.com/

GRAPHICS NEWS from www.Graphics.com
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The PIRC Easter Egg Contest 2003 is still open for entries until April 20th. You can submit up to three images of decorated Easter eggs that were created with PhotoImpact. Prizes include PhotoImpact 8, ColorWasher, HyperTyle, Ulead Animation Applet and Big Box of Art.
http://www.pircnet.com/~easter/

Resize Magic Resizing Plugin Released
From an Italian developer, here's a new plugin that's designed to let you quickly decrease or increase the size of your images, with no loss of quality (they say). Windows only, demo available.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1594

Corel Painter 8 Inspires Creative Artists
Say goodbye procreate Painter 7 and hello Corel Painter 8. The new version, due in early May, is Photoshop-friendly, sports a new interface and adds new functionality, as well as over 400 brushes.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1588

Nik Multimedia Dfine Photoshop Plugin
The latest Mac/Win Photoshop plugin from Nik is designed to clean up your photos in a number of ways, such as via noise and artifact reduction, color balance, contrast and color cast.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1596

Canopus Ships PhotoAlbum 2.0
This Windows 3D effects plugin for Adobe Premiere, Ulead MediaStudio Pro and Canopus Edit applications is designed to display a series of still images or create a video album montage. The target market is wedding, event and corporate videographers.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1586

For daily graphics news updates, visit
http://www.Graphics.com

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