LATEST ADDITIONS

Internationally acclaimed photographer, Harry Benson, will be the featured speaker at the May meeting of PAI (Photography and Imaging) at the landmark National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, in Manhattan.  The luncheon meeting will be held on Thursday, May 21st from 12 noon to 2:00 PM and is open to PAI members and their guests.

...

I have been preoccupied now and for some time by the challenge of defining an affordable platform for inputting digital photographs and then printing them with matched color and density to an LCD display image. There are quite a few LCD display choices at $1,500 and up which support both color and density print matching with a color managed workflow. But an affordable consumer LCD display ($300) has been the elusive goal of a lot of searching. And from what I have heard from industry insiders is that the major display manufacturers in the immediate future are cutting back on their support for high-end, niche pro-graphics market displays.

ACD Systems International Inc. has developed a new, convenient way for consumers to work with their digital picture frames, as well as other portable image devices, with the release of ACDSee Picture Frame Manager, a user-friendly software program that provides a better overall experience for digital picture frame owners. Compatible with both PC and Mac computers, Picture Frame Manager allows effortless management of digital frame images in just a few simple steps:

Picture Frame Manager connects the computer with any removable memory device such as a picture frame, SD card, USB drive or other portable display that mounts as a mass storage device. Once connected, drag-and-drop features make loading, moving, changing or deleting images a snap.To increase memory capacity, the software optimizes images for frames of any size or resolution, even for today's high-definition television screens. Because each image is set to the correct resolution for each frame, up to 10 times the amount of images can be stored and displayed.

Picture Frame Manager makes waiting for photos to display a thing of the past. All types of decodable image files, including TIF, GIF, PNG and RAW-format files from today's DSLR cameras, are converted automatically to JPEG format, ensuring smooth, professional transitions every time. Users can manage multiple

...

Imagenomic announced today the commercial release of Portraiture 2 for Aperture.  This new product edition brings the power, productivity and creative flexibility that Portraiture has delivered for the Photoshop community to users of Apple's Aperture digital imaging workflow environment.

Portraiture 2 for Aperture is a newly-engineered version that fits seamlessly into Aperture digital image management, editing and output.   Special features include:
· Automatic Skin Tones Mask generation and “One-click” skin retouching through a new Preset Manager, which includes image thumbnail previews, bracketing controls, custom preset creation and file sharing, notations, and visual history states;
· Advanced Skin Masking controls for selecting, feathering and refining the retouching area, edges and tonal ranges of the selected mask, including real-time previews;
· Enhancement sliders and settings for sharpness, softness, warmth, tint, brightness and contrast control, with the ability to apply these selectively to the mask area only or to the entire image, e.g. for adjusting lighting effects in software;
· Industry-leading non-destructive editing and data integrity preservation for image repurposing and superior print quality;
· Extended output options, including dynamic retouching settings optimized for the intended size of the print output;
· New User Interface selection options, multiple image batch processing capabilities, and multi-threaded/multi-processor support for maximum retouching speed and performance.

...