Kremalicious

Today Human Software released an exciting image editing plug-in for Apple’s Aperture. It’s called ApertureEdit and according to Human Software it offers more than 4000 professional effects which you can achieve right within Aperture.

The ApertureEdit plug-in is a bundle of 11 different modules for denoising, lens fixing, framing, light effects and many more. All effects can be applied to one image at a time or to a whole set of images at once. Just head over to the product page to see all effects and features this plugin bundle is capable of.

The whole bundle will cost you US$ 299.95 and it’s available now from Human Software’s Online Shop. But you can buy just one single plug-in too which will cost you US$ 69.95 for each. There’s a trial version available too and if you don’t want to mail Human Software for the trial version you can download it from MacUpdate.

If you’re interested in all the other Aperture 2.1 image editing plug-ins, feel free to have a look at my article First overview: Aperture 2.1 adjustment plugins have arrived.

Been so in love with the parallax effect that I have to post another article about it. For the non-geeks: I don’t mean measuring distances between objects in space, the parallax error in photography, any StarTrek episode, the movie Parallax View and definitely not DC Comic’s Parallax monster.

I mean Parallax Scrolling which is a technique often used in good ol’ arcade and video games like Moon Patrol or Sonic the Hedgehog. In such 2D games parallax scrolling was used to create an illusion of three dimensional depth.

Since our operating systems are mainly 2D too we can use this pseudo 3D technique to create the same illusion in our web browsers. Of course this was first done by flash designers and it’s a popular effect used in flash based websites or parts of it.

But with the rise of CSS this technique can now be done without the use of flash as Alex Walker and Paul Annett discovered. You see we are now very close to the Atari with Web-Design.

So it’s time for a first showcase of websites using this effect. At the end of this article you’ll find some tutorials for making this effect too. And as you can see there’s a parallax effect in the header of this website too so I will not include myself in this showcase list

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As you may know there’s a nice parallax effect implemented on this website. Just resize your browser window and you can see the black polaroids in my header flying on different layers. As I stated in an earlier post there is already some usage for it around the web while this effect seems to be first used by the guys from Silverback. If you don’t know what this effect is about head over to thinkvitamin to get to know what it is and how you can achieve it.

But now Marco Kuiper from marcofolio.net adds another usage for it. He created a cool optical illusion with just plain css/html and some pictures. You can see a demo of this effect in action on Marco’s website. Head over to the demo and resize your browser window. You should articulate something like “whoooot!” now. Marco has written some words about it too and you can download the demo. He has also done a nice tutorial how to achieve this optical illusion. Very cool!

(Via CSS-Tricks)

Today Image Trends Inc. announced the final availability of the anti-distortion plugin Fisheye-Hemi as an editing plugin for Aperture 2.1. The plugin will remap your hemispheric images taken with a fisheye lens. So if you take pictures with a fisheye lens this plugin is a must have for you.

From the press release:

Photographers can now easily preserve a normal view of people by not distorting their faces and bodies, as the plug-in straightens vertical lines. Fisheye-Hemi Plug-In uses almost all of the pixel data in that view with no loss of image resolution while displaying the intended composition and framing better than other un-warping programs. 

If you’re interested in how the plugin works there’s a cool in-depth explanation from the guys at Image Trends on their website.

The Fisheye-Hemi plugin is the first plugin from Image Trends coming for Apple’s Aperture. Image Trends’ president and CEO Dan Sullivan says that the other plugins PearlyWhite and ShineOff are expected to be released within the next 60 days while some mysterious “other products” will follow them too. The plugin costs US$ 29.95 and if you want the plugin for Aperture and Photoshop you get a 50% discount. There’s also a free trial version of the plugin available.

• Plugin website
• First overview: Aperture 2.1 adjustment plugins have arrived

With the release of Aperture 2.1 Apple introduced a plugin architecture for adding third party image adjustment and export plugins. Now the first third party image adjustment plugins for Aperture 2.1 have arrived. And they can definitely make you stop roundtripping your pictures to Photoshop and back. For now a total of 14 plugins from 9 companys were announced which are waiting to help you with your Aperture 2 workflow.

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Canon has posted some updates for their photographic software on the Canon USA website:

EOS Utility 2.4
According to the release notes EOS Utility now fully supports Mac OS X 10.5 so every Canon user with Leopard should grab this download. It now supports the EOS Kiss X2/EOS DIGITAL REBEL XSi/EOS DIGITAL 450D and it fixes a Remote Shooting problem too.

Digital Photo Professional 3.4.1
Digital Photo Professional now fully supports Mac OS X 10.5 too. DPP now incorporates a new luminance noise reduction function for TIFF/JPEG image and it adds support for the aberration correction function on sixteen more lenses and also some extenders.

Picture Style Editor 1.3
Was updated for compatibility to Mac OS X 10.5 too and now supports the EOS Kiss X2/EOS DIGITAL REBEL XSi/EOS DIGITAL 450D

You can find some more improvements and fixes in the release notes on the download pages of every file. To download these updates you can follow this link which will bring you to the driver downloads page of the Digital Rebel XT. You can grab the files from there regardless if you have a different EOS DSLR. Just select your OS from the dropdown menu and click on the updates.

If you enjoyed the Indiana Jones movies than this first of four desktop icon sets is a must have for you. Icon Designer Anthony Piraino crafted some beautiful items from Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark movie.

The icons are available from the special Iconfactory site as an icontainer or mac and windows icon files. If you download the iContainer for use in Candybar you also get a new Mac OS X dock created by David Lanham. All icons are free for your personal use only and there are already some nice placeholders for more icon sets inspired by the other movies. All of them will be released during May.

There are already some lists like this available on the web and they are always very subjective so I thought I should add my subjective list too. While Aperture was released I was coding this website and had not much time for writing about it. So although a bit late here is my absolutely biased list of my favorite 15 new features included in Apple’s Aperture since version 2.0. It’s in a nice countdown order ending with the best new feature (to me) at the bottom. Just click on the little screenshots to smoothly zoom to the full version of them.
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Today Nik Software announced the availability of it’s U-point-technology based editing plugin for Apple’s Aperture 2.1 called Viveza.

With Viveza photographers are able to select areas from their images and adjust them separately from the rest of the picture by defining so called Color Control Points.

A 15 day trial is available from the website of the plugin. The whole plugin will cost you US$ 249.

Nik Software Viveza Website

Now it should be just a matter of days or weeks before the other recently announced plugins will be available too.

Finally here’s a first test of the plugin from photographer Jim Crotty:
Testing Viveza and Your Opinion

Since version 1.0 Aperture is able to render images on export with a graphic overlay on top of them called watermark. This feature of Apple’s Aperture can give you a chance to make stealing your web-published pictures a bit harder.

So let’s see how we can make Aperture automatically render watermarks on our images during export. In this article we will make a watermark with a transparent background and add some text on top of it. The steps for this magic involves 4 simple steps:

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Wouldn’t that be great? Hook up your scanner, fire up Aperture, click on Import and the images coming directly from your scanner plate? Although my scanner is shown as a source in the import dialogue you can’t import images with it directly from Aperture. But using Preview/Image Capture and Automator you can bypass this limitation.

In the Image Capture scan window you can define an automatic task which will follow the scan process. It defaults to Preview meaning that the scanned image will open as a new Preview document after the scan. But we can make the images import to Aperture after the scan just with tools which are build into Mac OS X and come with every Mac (besides Aperture). So here’s what you can do to scan directly into Aperture in 3 simple steps.

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A while ago I wrote about my problems finding a universal scanner driver from Canon for my CanoScan LiDE 500F to use it under Mac OS X. The solution was the Canon Asia website where a universal driver version was available.

But since then Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in october 2007 and the Canon driver with the version 11.2.4.0X stopped working on this new operating system.

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