by Howard Millard

PhotoFrame Pro 3 is a Photoshop plug-in that allows you to create a tremendous variety of unusual borders, edges, mattes, and frames for your photos. Since I reviewed Version 2.5 over two years ago, onOne Software acquired PhotoFrame from Extensis and has significantly souped it up. With the new Version 3, you can quickly create an array of effects...

This month I'm going to focus on optimizing your digital images for display on the web. The biggest challenge most photographers face is creating a good print, but web display can be just as challenging and has its own unique set of needs. Images shown on the web or in e-mail need to find a balance between the size and the quality of the file. Too much compression to reduce...

Would you like to transform your photos into digital artworks emulating oil paintings, watercolors, charcoal or pen and ink drawings at the click of your mouse? Or would you like to try your hand at digital drawing and painting? Whether you want to explore your creativity or expand the services you offer to clients, creating naturalistic art from your images has never been...

Phase One’s Capture One Pro 6 falls into this “best” category. In many ways, it even beats out Adobe Photoshop CS5 in that there seems to be a professional-grade feature under every drop-down menu and in every dialog box. The editing functions pale in comparison to Photoshop, but as we’ve all learned, if you set up the shot perfectly on location you might not need to do a lot of editing later.

Capture One 4 (CO4, if you will) is a raw file processor/organizer that shares many features, albeit with its own nomenclature and workflow, with products such as Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom. Competitively priced at $129 (for a two computer license), owners of Phase One's Capture One LE can upgrade to 4 free of charge, and Capture One PRO users can...

Exceptional photographic software reveals its true nature over time. In the case of Photo Mechanic—which is a pro-level image organizing tool from Camera Bits—there are seemingly insignificant features that provide a smooth workflow, especially for photo journalists working with IPTC data.