Software News

Last week we explored seven great photo gifts under $100. If you missed that installment, you can find it here. This week we take it down a notch in price, but truth be told, this collection of goodies is just as cool—if not cooler—than the last one.

It appears our friends at Anthropics Technology are at it again! Not content with software that can practically take the face of Fido and turn it into Angelina Jolie using PortraitPro, the London-based company has introduced PortraitPro Body, an image editing program that can potentially transform that wimpy teenager down the block into Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, or add curves to any woman that would make a Kardashian green with envy.

A while back we reviewed the latest update of Affinity Photo for Mac users, a powerful $49 non-subscription Photoshop alternative. Now Serif Labs has released a free beta that gives Windows users access to the speed and versatility of this award-winning image editor.

Proving you can, in fact, change your tune; Paul Simon revised the lyrics to “Kodachrome” when performing the song in Central Park in 1991 to “everything looks better in black and white.” Picky photographers insist “monochrome” is more precise because it covers images made using sepia, blue, or other tones, while images using only shades of gray are black and white.

The folks at MacPhun are really excited about the launch of their new all-in-one desktop image-editing program for Mac users, calling Luminar, “The most fantastic piece of software we’ve ever created.” This robust program was designed to deliver both simplicity and creativity for photographers who desire a less-expensive alternative to Photoshop.

Creating a web page for your images these days is fairly easy, and there are numerous web apps available that offer a wide variety of colors and backgrounds. But organizing your images before you even consider the template (or “skin” as it is called in the trade) is perhaps the biggest challenge, given the proliferation of images we all have made with various cameras and mobile devices stored on flash drives, hard drives, and even memory cards.