Software Reviews

The moon was full last week, and two lunatic things happened to friends of mine. One got a bad case of ransomware on her Mac (yes, that’s Mac as in MacBook Air). The other had a microSD card self-destruct in his Android cell phone. Bad things happen in threes and, oh yes, I hit a curb and blew out a tire.

The difference was this: I had a spare in my trunk. I didn’t wait until the curb bit me to prepare for the disaster. My two friends? Well…

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a budget-friendly image editing package that’s designed for casual users and amateurs. Under the hood, however, there are dozens of advanced features and hidden capabilities that are accessible via plug-ins. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could unlock, say, 130 of those features with one add-on product that costs less than fifty bucks? Then here’s good news: you can. 

Digital Ice and similar dust and scratch cleanup tools for scanning color negative and non-Kodachrome slides was a boon for those looking to archive/digitize their film files. This software/hardware solution worked with numerous scanners by isolating the offending dust and scratches on a separate infrared channel that it then dumped when the final scan was made.

HDR, as most photographers know, stands for High Dynamic Range, allowing you to capture a wider range of highlight and shadow detail than you could in a single frame. You create an HDR image by shooting several identically framed shots of the same scene at different exposures, often with three brackets such as -2, 0, and +2 EV. The newest kid on the HDR block is Aurora HDR Pro from Macphun, currently for Mac only, but with a Windows version in the works.

Just in time to add some nostalgic film effects to our holiday photos, Alien Skin has released Exposure X, a greatly enhanced refinement of its popular imaging software package. In its latest incarnation, Exposure X is designed to deliver image organization and editing—and it does an elegant job of both. But its greatest strength, as I see it, still lies in accurately emulating the look of film of all types, vintage and modern. Here is a close up view of how that works.

Adobe has released version 14 of Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements. Both are exciting and easy-to-use, and offer enough editing horsepower for most photo and video enthusiasts. Although Premier 14 is chock full of improvements, including some cool new things you can do with 4K video, I found the enhancements in Photoshop Elements to be more groundbreaking and fun. So that’s what we’ll focus on today. 

The Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) member magazines recently convened for their General Assembly to vote for the best photo and imaging products launched by the industry in the last 12 months. The voting took place during the General Assembly that was held in spring 2015 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.