Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugin Newsletter - March 2010
CONTENTS
NEW PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK: "Nude & Portrait
Photography" by Harald Heim and Kay Michael Kuhnlein
SPECIAL EASTER OFFERS: LightMachine and HyperTyle Reduced
POLL RESULTS: From which companies do
you own commercial plugins?
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
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS: PhotoTools &
PhotoFrame Lite, Neat Image plugins, Photoshop Filters, Unicontel, Freepack
3 Frames, DepthDither
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.
Wishing you a Very Happy Easter,
Harald Heim
NEW PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK
"Nude & Portrait Photography"
by Harald Heim and Kay Michael Kuhnlein
My book about portrait and nude photography has
finally been released. It deals with various photographical topics and
also demonstrates various Photoshop techniques and plugins. It is only
available in German language so far and was released by a German publisher.
Well, even if you do not understand the German text, you still get more
than 200 exquisite photos and 30 light diagrams on high quality paper
:-). The photos are from 16 photographers, including 40 photos of my own.
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
After not having offered any official special
prices for quite a long time, we thought it was time to do it again, especially
as Easter is near. So we are offering a 30% discount for LightMachine
and a 40% discount for HyperTyle until April 15, 2010.
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?
2126 votes were collected in this poll. As it
was possible to cast more than one vote, we estimate that several hundred
people took part. Here are the results.
1. Nik Software 206 votes
2. Alienskin 199 votes
3. The Plugin Site 178 votes
4. OnOne Software 167 votes
5. Flaming Pear 155 votes
6. Auto FX 150 votes
7. Other 142 votes
8. Topaz Labs 140 votes
9. Imagenomic 99 votes
10. Andromeda 85 votes
11. Kodak/AFS 83 votes
12. Tiffen / Digital Film Tools 72 votes
13. Fred Miranda 70 votes
14. Digital Anarchy 64 votes
15. Pixel Genius 58 votes
16. PowerRetouche 54 votes
17. Human Software 53 votes
18. Fixer Labs 52 votes
19. BenVista 50 votes
20. PictoColor 49 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
Resources section
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
Here are the latest interesting posts on forum:
Grayed-out Plugins
jaytea wrote: "I have PSP 9 and quite a few plugins/filters. Sometimes
the Plugins option under the Effects menu is greyed-out and sometimes
it is not. Why is this?"
Read
More...
Photoshop Path Problems
patience wrote: "I have just tried this (selected the Path icon),
then drew a rectangle with Path, it doesn't seem that I need to paint
over it for some reason. Then I pasted the picture onto the page and the
rectangle frame that I have created actually sits on top of the picture
that I've pasted eventhough I pasted the picture at a later stage..."
Read
More...
EyeCandy 3 & Windows 7
pspbrita wrote: "How do I get this one to work together ?? I have
tried to install, but install stops by Windows. I know EyeCandy 3.1 is
old, but when other Windows 7 users get it work without problems.. Then
I should do that too."
Read
More...
PSP & NoiseNinja
okiebirdnerd wrote: "I am using PSPX2 ultimate. I have spent hours
trying to figure out why my Noise Ninja camera profile info won’t
show under the annotation tabs within Noise Ninja. ... I will be terribly
disappointed if the Noise Ninja program won’t work ... Any help would
be appreciated."
Read
More...
Windows Plugin on the Mac
jones wrote: "Alas, I must give up my trusty old (emphasis on "old")
PC for a new Mac. I will really miss a couple of the utilities that are
available only to PC, most notably some of the Xero filters for Photoshop.
There must be a way to duplicate some of the effects, if I say which ones
can anyone help me figure it out?"
Read
More...
For more discussions and asking questions see
The Plugin
Site Forum
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.
Visit website...
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.
Visit website...
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/).
Visit website...
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.
Visit website...
Filter Forge Freepack 3 Frames is now available
for Mac OS X. It offers seven filters for creating frame effects.
Visit website...
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:
Visit website...
Visit website...
For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
Resources section
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.
Visit
website...
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
Visit website...
Visit website...
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.
Visit
website...
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.
Visit website...
