Software News

Various software vendors have introduced new products and enhanced existing applications for everything from basic image processing to advanced plug-ins.

The power of Adobe's imaging software never ceases to amaze. In the below video, software guru Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE demonstrates how to use a time-saving tool in Photoshop, Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw that fixes the color of a photo instantly in a single click.

There’s a lot going on at Macphun these days: The company’s name is changing to Skylum, indicating they’re no longer a Mac-only software developer, and they just announced their first cross-platform product, in the form of Luminar 2018—a major update to their popular image-editing program for both Mac and Windows computers.

The art of portrait photography requires a lot of skill to both capture compelling images and process them effectively. In the forward-looking video below, Adobe takes a look at how emerging technologies could enable you to do just that on a mobile device in the not-too-distant future.

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.

Photographers, especially those dealing with large numbers of images, are always looking for ways to speed up the workflow and spend less time in front of a computer and more time behind a camera. Applications like Lightroom have improved the process tremendously, making cataloging and image adjustments easier and faster than before. If you have adjustments that you apply frequently, you can use presets to make it a single-click process, applying a number of adjustments in one operation.

Kevin Kubota has been providing presets and tools for both Photoshop and Lightroom users for quite a while now, and one of his products is a combination of a package of presets for Lightroom and a mini keyboard from RPG Keys that looks much like a numeric keypad on your keyboard. Available as a bundle for $349, or as a rental for $19.95 per month after a $49 setup fee, you get over 100 presets that do everything from black-and-white conversions to skin tone enhancements (and a number of interesting edge effects).