Introducing the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers. Built from the ground up for professionals, Aperture offers an advanced RAW workflow, powerful compare and select tools, nondestructive image processing and versatile printing and publishing.

Apple has released a new program called Aperture created for professional photographers. Aperture includes advanced RAW workflow, a unique user interface and an interesting feature called Stacks which groups images together based on the time differential between shots.

Features:

1. Advanced RAW workflow
2. Professional project management
3. Powerful compare and select tools
4. Nondestructive image processing
5. Versatile printing and publishing

(Press release) The Chameleon plug-in allows inserting a copied object into a picture in such a way that it adapts to the new color range and blends with the background. Designers would especially appreciate this tool as it allows them to combine images with entirely different color ranges, to create the effect of drawing on a texture surface (crumpled paper, wood, etc), and all that with only a mouse-click.

The new version of AKVIS Chameleon supports 16 bits per channel and allows processing images in color modes RGB, CMYK, Lab and Grayscale. This gives you the opportunity to process images without quality loss. With 16 bit there is more in-between colors and tones and the result is smoother, which is especially important if you prepare photos for printing.

AKVIS offers a 10 day fully functional free trial. Users who tried the previous version of Chameleon and have their version expired, can now test the software again. Registered users of previous versions of AKVIS Chameleon can upgrade to V.3.0 for free. More information about Chameleon is available at the Akvis website.

Retails for $ 69

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thanks to PSN for bringing this story to my attention.

Source: Newsweek via MSNBC
Written By J. D. Jordan-Newsweek

Sept. 19, 2005 issue – “I could get an art student to do it for $35 and a six-pack.” I remember the first time a prospective client said that to try to intimidate me into accepting dramatically reduced fees for Website design services. I was newly self-employed and hungry for work, so I conceded. I delivered a great Web site, but I hated my client for making me work for so little—and myself for not knowing how to get what I deserved.

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Photoshop Elements 4 is here but so far it’s only for Windows.

dpreview.com writes:

Adobe Systems has today announced Photoshop Elements 4.0. The lite version of Adobe’s professional image editing program Photoshop, offers a new automatic red-eye removal function, which detects face shapes in images and removes red-eye as photos are downloaded from the camera. It also features a new Magic Selection brush for adjustments to specific parts of an image as well as Magic Extractor and new Skin Tone Adjustment. Adobe has developed the tagging feature found in Elements 3.0 with the new Face Tagging, which automatically detects faces in a photo so they can be easily tagged and quickly found later. Photoshop Elements 4.0 is currently only available for Windows, priced £69.99. A spokesman for Adobe said that the program will be supported on the Mac in the ‘near future’.

Click More to read the press release

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Lightcrafts demonstrated their new LightZone program that they say is much better than our beloved Photoshop. LightCrafts CEO Dean Tucker called LightZone the “biggest breakthrough in photo editing software since PhotoShop was first introduced.”

An actual video of the presentation they did at DemoFall can be viewed at this page (click here)

Everything that is demonstrated in that video is also easily doable in Photoshop. From the video it seemed like the guy was using a tool like the magetic lasso and then changing the brightness values. I will wait for the reviews (or free demo) before I will pass my judgement.

Currently, the impression that I got from the video is that they have a simple program comparable to Googles Picassa and they are desperately trying to attract attention by comparing it to Photoshop. Also the words at the end of the presentation that said how the great photographers of today will be using Lightzone to create great works of art seemed very offensive. That is like saying that the master chefs create good food because they use a specific companys pot to cook their food in.