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Beside a new version of Color Efex Pro for Capture NX, Nik announced a brand new plug-in for Photoshop and Aperture. Silver Efex Pro is a tool to create black & white images with the power and simplicity of the U-Point technology. You can easily fine tune portions of your black & white images. It’s also capable of emulating film grain and 18 different types of film while also providing 20 one-click preset styles. But Silver Efex Pro is also capable of color toning the image.

You can get a 15-day trial from Nik’s website. It can be purchased through Nik’s online store for US$199.95.

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Last week two new image editing plug-ins were announced for Aperture 2.1: The PTLens plug-in for correcting barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective and the Jade plug-in for automatic correction of color, levels and exposure.

The PTLens plug-in from ePaperPress was available as a Photoshop plug-in in the past and is well known for its lens pincushion, barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective correction abilities based on a lens model database similiar to Kekus’ LensFix CI plug-in.

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The All-in-one Aperture adjustment plugin bundle from Human Software is now called Edit for Aperture or just Edit. The new version 1.2 can now apply multiple layers of curves correction at once and the interface gets a new split image view. Also “different compatibility issues for PowerPC users” were fixed according to the release notes.

The ApertureEdit plug-in is a bundle of 12 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 and according to Human Software Edit offers more than 4000 professional effects. Just head over to the product page to see all effects and features this plugin bundle is capable of.

The whole bundle is priced at US$ 299.95 and it’s available from Human Software’s Online Shop. Or 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.

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Have you ever looked for a way to quickly add text to your images without photoshopping a watermark image first?

There’s a simple editing plug-in available for this task called Borders & Titles and as the name says you can add simple borders and text to your images within Aperture 2.1. It’s a sample plug-in provided by Apple and it’s fully functional. You can download it from Apple’s Developer Connection website without registration:

Aperture Edit Plugin - Borders & Titles

The downlaod package includes the source code too so you can adjust the plug-in if you’re able to code Cocoa. After downloading put the BordersAndTitles.ApertureEdit plug-in into /Library/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins and access the plug-in from Aperture.

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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.

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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

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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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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

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Just right after Tiffen and Digital Film Tools announced their new image editing plugins for Aperture 2.1 Apple has released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for coding Aperture 2.1 plugins. It’s available from Apple’s Developer Connection for registered members (registering is free). You can grab the Aperture 2.1 plugin-SDK (3D9) as a 595KB download from there and start coding. If you want to know what exactly you can do with it as a programmer you should read those lines from Apple.

So it should be just a matter of time before we see another bunch of plugins popping out.

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FlickrExport is a plugin for iPhoto or Aperture from Connected Flow which uploads photos directly from these application to your flickr profile.

Yesterday Connected Flow released the first public beta version of FlickrExport 3 (precisely it’s version 3.0.0b20). The new features includes:

Routing photos to multiple groups.
The ability to store a collection of group additions and recall them for later use (e.g. “Send to all my Black and White groups”)…

Via (Connected Flow Blog)

Available is a beta version for Aperture or iPhoto. They also made up a webpage for the FlickrExport 3 public beta where you’ll also find a nice screencast showing the new features.

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Using Dodge and Burn in Aperture v2.1 - Inside Aperture:

The first plugin for Aperture was released in the v2.1 update last week. Apple developed it to augment the regular adjustment tools. To access it go to Images > Edit With and choose Dodge and Burn.
IMHO, that’s not the best name for this plugin since it encompasses far more than just dodging and burning. In fact, it has tools to Dodge (Lighten), Burn (Darken), Saturate, Desaturate, Sharpen, Blur, Add Contrast, and Fade (decrease contrast.) What’s unique about these tools, at least in terms of what we’ve had available before in Aperture, is that you can apply them to specific parts of the image that you define with a brush. In other words, for those familiar with Photoshop and layer masks, you can apply an adjustment and limit where it is applied similar to what you can do with a layer mask. That’s huge!

(Via Inside Aperture.)

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