Software News

There’s no question that do-it-yourself photo books have captured the imagination of photographers, from pros to those who simply want to create a remembrance of a journey or to gather family photos. While just about every imaging software and online picture service, from iPhoto to Shutterfly, offers quick and easy bookmaking, there are some companies dedicated to serving the higher-end market, generally pros but also including every photographer who wants a stylish, custom-designed book. Software to help design the book is a key ingredient, as are options for book materials and binding. And in the end, the quality of the images reproduced, and the facility of ordering and making images ready, is what makes the bookmaking process a creative, fun project that will result in a book that will be cherished for many years.

No human being is created perfect, and photographers probably know that firsthand. Still, everyone wants to look best in their portraits. That desire usually translates into hours of tedious retouching with Photoshop or the likes of it. Whether you are a fashion, an event, or a wedding photographer, you probably wish to make portrait enhancing a breeze. Well, there is software that can grant you that wish.

The question is—does anybody really know what a given image would look like if they shot it on Kodachrome 25, or Fuji Acros, or some obscure color negative film that even in film’s heyday was little used or appreciated? Perhaps the more pertinent question is—how many people have made photographs using film? But film references are what a number of so-called film emulation software programs use for describing presets that can be applied to a digital image. Half academic and half nostalgic, the programs use film brand names to describe saturation, contrast, color nuance, and grain structure variations that are then applied to an image. Perhaps using film names is better than poetic fantasy terms, like “misty blue dawn,” but then again entirely subjective descriptors, rather than supposedly clinical ones used in these software programs, might be just as handy for today’s photography crowd. In any case, I recently tested one such program, DxO’s FilmPack 3.1, to see if it offered up creative variations that could be used as is or as foundation images when interpreting subjects and scenes.

The Paris, France-based imaging company DxO just announced the release of DxO PhotoLab 2, which is the latest iteration of its Raw image processing and editing software that had once been called DxO OpticsPro. 

DxO Optics Pro Version 7 is a Raw converter for Mac and Microsoft Windows with some nifty tricks up its sleeve. It offers its own brand of nondestructive image editing, with tonal, exposure, geometric, and optical corrections that make it stand apart from the crowd. As was true of Version 6.6, Optics Pro 7 supports the company’s new FilmPack 3 film emulator plug-in (see sidebar below). We will have a more complete review of the film emulator in a future issue.

Optics Pro Version 7 is a dramatic departure from earlier releases. The Select pane is gone, so you no longer have to deal with tedious Projects (unless you want to). Now you go straight to work after opening a folder. Double-click on an image and that takes you right to the nondestructive editing phase, in Customize. Beyond this point the Mac and Windows versions part ways in one key respect: the Windows version runs faster than the Mac version, which continues to be laborious.

Ever since DxO acquired the popular Nik Collection of image-editing software from Google last October, photographers have eagerly awaited an update to the powerful free suite of Photoshop and Lightroom plugins. The good news is that Nik Collection 2018 is now available on the DxO website, although the download is no longer free.

Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 13 and Premiere Elements 13. Both have cool new features. If you’re a user of version 12, should you upgrade? The answer is: it all depends. Here’s the advice I give my friends.