Plugin Newsletter - October 2011

 

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

SPECIAL DEAL: Save 20% on all products of The Plugin Site within the next 7 days

PHOTOWIZ BUNDLE: Price reduced by 10 to 15%

POLL RESULTS: What kept you from buying commercial plugins of The Plugin Site? What convinced you to buy a commercial plugin of The Plugin Site?

NEW POLLS: What digital camera brand do you use? How much would you maximally pay for a plugin from The Plugin Site?

THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Make plugins compatible with GIMP, Paint Shop Pro Troubleshooting

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS: Red Paw Media Plugins, DC Filters 5, Extensis Web Font Plugin, Shape Collage, QuickFix

GRAPHICS NEWS: Photoshop Elements 10, PhotoPlus X5, Tiffen DFX 3, Perfect Photo Suite 6

 

Dear Reader,

I hope you had a nice summer this year and that you made a lot of photos. So it is about time to select the best shots and edit them. After using only DSLRs for several years, I got a compact camera again and took over 1000 photos with it during holiday. It is impressive how compact camera have developed during the last five years. Considering their large amount of gimmicks they seem to be even more complex devices than DSLRs. My new compact even records better video quality than my much more expensive two-year-old video camera. Anyway, in our new poll you can vote for your favorite camera brand. It will be interesting to see the results.

In the latest poll many voters considered our products too high priced. As a result we are offering a 20% discount on all our products for the next seven days. I hope this will make them more affordable for some people. Additionally one of the two new polls lets you vote for a general price for our products. See below for the details.

Sincerely Yours,
Harald Heim

The Plugin Site

 

 

SPECIAL DEAL

Save 20% on all products of The Plugin Site within the next 7 days

This is the biggest special offer campaign that The Plugin has ever done so far: 20% price reduction on all products. This special deal is only valid for the next seven days, by and including October 4, 2011.

To make use of the 20% discount you need to enter the coupon code

TPS-54RF-52E86D

on the order page.

Please Notice: We recommend paying via Paypal when ordering with the coupon. When ordering two or more products via Element5, the coupon is not applied to the first product. This is a technical limitation, on which we unfortunately have no influence. If you should nevertheless prefer Element5, we can only offer to discount the surplus amount from a future order.

Have a look at the
Products page

The coupon needs to be entered on the
Order page

 

PHOTOWIZ BUNDLE

Price reduced by 10 to 15%

The price of the PhotoWiz Bundle has been reduced by 10% respectively 15%. The PhotoWiz Plugin Bundle (for Win/Mac), which contains all six commercial PhotoWiz plugins, now costs $20 or 10% less. The Standalone Bundle (for Windows), which consists of five Standalone/Lightroom versions (without NoiseControl), was reduced in price by $30, which is 15%. The combined Plugin/Standalone Bundle (for Windows) was also reduced by $20. These price changes are permanent.

If you order the bundle instead of the separate products, you save up to 40%. So it already makes sense to order the bundle instead of three or four separate PhotoWiz products.

For more information on the PhotoWiz products see
PhotoWiz pages

 

POLL RESULTS

Thanks a lot for participating in the recent polls. Here are the results and some comments:

Poll 1: What kept you from buying commercial plugins of The Plugin Site?

1. Too high price 28 votes
2. I already own a similar product from another company 23 votes

3. Other 15 votes
4. I liked another company's product better 14 votes
5. No full version trial period 13 votes
6. Watermarks in the demo version 12 votes
7. Not satisfied with image processing results 11 votes

8. No tutorial videos 8 votes
9. Unattractive user interface 7 votes
10. Too complex user interface 6 votes
10. Insufficient manual and documentation 6 votes
11. Not versatile enough or too few effects 5 votes
11. No smart filter support 5 votes
12. Low rendering speed 4 votes
12. Installation problems 4 votes
12. Crashes, bugs or other technical problems 4 votes
12. No Support for Lightroom/Aperture on a Mac 4 votes
13. Missing feature(s) 3 votes
13. Problem downloading a demo version 3 votes
14. Unattractive product pages and presentation 2 votes

The most important problems touched by the poll are: high price, no trial version, missing tutorial videos and UI. As far as product prices are concerned it is hard to satisfy everyone. Still, we heard you and now temporarily reduced prices for all products (see the special deal above). How our prices develop in future will mainly depend on sales, product features and competition prices. Nevertheless we will do our utmost to keep prices as reasonable as possible for you. To get more feedback about prices from you a new poll is now conducted (see below).

We are considering offering trial version of our plugins in future, at least test-wise, so that we can see if it really has an impact on sales. Tutorial videos are something to provide too. Concerning the UI of our plugins there was already a brainstorming in our beta group, so there will be various UI improvements in future updates and new releases.

Poll 2: What convinced you to buy a commercial plugin of The Plugin Site?

1. Satisfying image processing results 23 votes
1. Good experiences with other Plugin Site products 23 votes
2. Easy to use 17 votes
2. Large amount of options and effects 17 votes
3. Testing the demo version 15 votes
3. I liked it better than other company's products 15 votes
4. 64-bit system support 14 votes
5. Low price 13 votes
5. Good product support 13 votes
5. Works in my image processing application 13 votes

6. Extensive documentation and manual 8 votes
7. Sophisticated user interface 7 votes
8. High rendering speed 5 votes
9. Batch processing and smart filter support 4 votes
9. Convincing product pages and presentation 4 votes
10. Standalone/Lightroom version availability 3 votes
10. Other 3 votes
11. MacOS X support 2 votes
11. I did not know an alternative product 2 votes

As expected the second poll slightly contradicts the first poll in some points. That is probably due to different types of users participating in each poll. The big plus points of our plugins seem to be image processing quality, user-friendliness, feature amount, 64-bit & host compatibility, low price and support.

It is interesting to see that 64-bit and host compatibility are regarded that high by our customers. 64-bit compatibility sets our plugins apart from many other low cost 32-bit-only plugins and wide host compatibility is something that is ignored by most high-priced plugins.

For more poll results please visit the
Resources section

 

NEW POLLS

What digital camera brand do you use?
How much would you maximally pay for a plugin from The Plugin Site?

There was a poll about DSLR camera brands back in 2006, which exhibited a dominance of Canon and Nikon in this market. It would be interesting to see how the preference for certain camera brands has changed. This time the poll is not specifically about DSLRs but about all types of digital cameras.

The second poll is about plugin prices. In the past there were two polls about plugin prices in general. This poll particularity asks about prices for plugins that were developed by The Plugin Site. So have a look at our plugins - in case you do not know them yet - and let us know how much you would maximally pay for them. Please be as honest as possible. We will certainly not lower our prices to $5 if 99% of all voters vote for that :-)

Click here to vote...

 

THE DISCUSSION FORUMS

Make plugins compatible with GIMP, Paint Shop Pro Troubleshooting

The forums were not very active during summer. Nevertheless here are two interesting posts:

How software developers can make their Photoshop plugins work with GIMP

Troubleshooting Corel PaintShop Photo Pro

Please feel free to post suggestions or start a discussion topic at
The Plugin Site Forum

 

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS

Red Paw Media Plugins, DC Filters 5, Extensis Web Font Plugin, Shape Collage, QuickFix

Red Paw Media offers all of its commercial plugins (for Windows) for free. The Process FX plugin simulate traditional film cross-processing techniques and produces skewed color effects. The Fog plugin creates fog effects similar to a graduated fog lens filter. Finally, the Beautifier plugin adds soft focus effects, which are nice for portrait photos.
Visit website...

The DC Filters (for Windows) have been updated to Version 5. Several new Filters were added and they now work under Windows 7. Unfortunately the new version now displays two messages at start-up asking for a $10 registration, which should give you popup-free versions. All in all, the filters have a too small preview, which does not always update after scrolling, they render slowly and the sliders react clumsy. Still, you may find one or the other effect useful.
Visit website...

Extensis offers a so-called "Web Font Plugin" (for Win/Mac), which is actually a free Photoshop panel and not a plugin, and it only works in Photoshop CS5. To use this panel you need to install the Extensis Suitcase trial version and open up a WebInk account. The panel lets you preview and use thousands of WebInk fonts in Photoshop. You only need to pay for the fonts if you use them on your web site. Extensis advices against using the fonts for private purposes, but that is technically possible.
Visit website...

Shape Collage (for Win/Mac) is a tool for quickly creating picture collages. The photos are automatically positioned and fitted into various predefined shapes or even your own shapes. Additionally you can adjust various parameters of the photo placement. A "shapecollage.com" watermark is rendered at the bottom center, which can later be retouched away if you make sure that no photo occupies that space. Alternatively you can get the commercial Pro version without the watermark.
Visit website...

QuickFix (for Windows) is a free tool that rapidly strips metadata - including sensitive GPS information - from thousand of JPEG files with one click. If the "Save original file" option under Settings is activated, it automatically makes a backup copy of each scrubbed file.
Visit website...

For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
Resources section

 

GRAPHICS NEWS

Photoshop Elements 10, PhotoPlus X5, Tiffen DFX 3, Perfect Photo Suite 6

Adobe released Photoshop Elements 10 (for Win/Mac). New features include Guided Edits, which guide you through various steps for achieving certain photo effects, new text functionality, e.g. making text automatically follow the outline of a photo subject, custom path or shape, new crop guides and a Smart Brush with 30 effects. The Elements Organizer automatically finds objects within photos, e.g. a landmark, flower or pet, automatically detects (near-)duplicate photos and uploads videos to Facebook or YouTube. Photoshop Elements 10 also enables developers to create tablet and mobile applications that interact with it.
Visit website...

Serif launched PhotoPlus X5, a digital photo editing software (for Windows). It contains a new PhotoPlus Organiser, which lets you group similar pictures and automatically updates to add new images. Other new features include a Vibrance Adjustment effect, a new Clarity filter, a Clip to Layer feature and new blend modes called Crossfade and Darker Colour. Additionally speed improvements were made to the core engine of PhotoPlus X5. The Photo Projects feature lets you easily design photobooks, cards, montages etc. PhotoPlus 5 includes a PhotoFix Studio as well as Raw Studio for importing and editing Raw images.
Visit website...

Tiffen’s Dfx 3 (for Win/Mac) is a photo effects suite, which was initially developed by Digital Film Tools. Version 3 includes more than 10 new filters, enhanced multiprocessor acceleration and an updated user interface. It is available as a Photoshop plugin (also for Lightroom/Aperture), video plugin and standalone.
Visit website...

onOne Software announced Perfect Photo Suite 6 (for Win/Mac) to be released in October. The suite contains the updated Perfect Layers, Perfect Resize, FocalPoint and PhotoFrame products plus the new Perfect Portrait, Perfect Effects and Perfect Mask products. Actually only Perfect Portrait, a portrait retouching product with face detection, is really new. The other two are renamed existing products. All work as standalone programs, as Photoshop plugins and external editors in Lightroom and Aperture.
Visit website...

 

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