Software News

There’s more to black-and-white photography than simply a lack of color. Maybe we wouldn’t feel this way if the first photographs were made in color but that didn’t happen and I grew up admiring the works of W. Eugene Smith and other photojournalists who photographed people at work, play, or being themselves in glorious black and white.

Digital black and white has probably never been more popular than it is today. All of the major editing programs like Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture support black-and-white conversions natively, and at a much higher quality than just a few years ago. While all of these programs can do black and white you can take your monochrome imagery to the next level with plug-ins, specific task programs that use the architecture of the main program to get the work done. These plug-ins (which may be available as “stand-alones” as well) produce some amazing work, letting you emulate various film types, grain patterns, and more, usually working with “presets” (image looks) that can be modified with ease to customize every image. Combined with the improved output from recent inkjet printers, there has never been a better time to explore digital black and white than today.

Mylio has announced a fast, easy, and robust solution to help Aperture users migrate their entire Apple Aperture library over to Mylio’s multi-device image management service. The Aperture migration tool will also let photographers carry over their most important actions such as Originals, Edits, Tags, and Organization into a system that protects and syncs their libraries across all devices.

Corel is clearly taking a shot at Adobe with the AfterShot Pro 3 photo editor/management suite, which offers a host of new features and claims to be four-times faster than the latest version of Lightroom. This powerful new version of AfterShot Pro comes at wallet-friendly price of $79.99.

A comprehensive new photo management system called Mylio that’s designed to help photographers organize and edit their images across several devices – i.e. desktop computer, tablet, smartphone etc.– launched this morning. Mylio, which is being spearheaded by former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer David Vaskevitch, has received lots of pre-release buzz based on intriguing demos of early versions of the software – Shutterbug has seen it in action and came away impressed – prior to this morning’s launch.

Color Efex Pro 4 is Nik Software’s (www.niksoftware.com) latest version of its digital photographic filter plug-ins for retouching and creative enhancements. It is Mac OS and Windows compatible and installs as a 32-bit and 64-bit plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS4 or later, Lightroom 2.6 or later, Photoshop Elements 8 or later, or Apple Aperture 2.1.4 or later. The installer searches for all of the hosts that are on your computer and if you already have Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture installed, as I do, it will install Color Efex Pro 4 for all of the host applications.

What’s New
One of the biggest improvements in Color Efex Pro 4 is the ability to use Filter Combinations that let you stack multiple filters, adjust each one’s opacity, and make selective adjustments to get the desired look. Each filter contains single-click starting points, making it possible to explore different options. Shades of Emeril Lagasse, there are Filter Recipes that let you customize and share filter combinations with others. Bam! Reminiscent of HDR Efex Pro, the 10 recipes that are part of the package are a quick way to get started using Color Efex Pro 4 and more are available for download on Nik Software’s website.