PHOTOSHOP 2015 GUIDE

The long-awaited fourth version of Filter Forge is now available and loaded with new features that make it better than ever. For those who aren’t familiar with the product, Filter Forge is a plug-in for Photoshop that allows you to create your own filters without programming them. There’s also a free online library of more than 10,000 user-created filters. On top of that, Filter Forge is more robust with the flexible filter manager, support for component grouping and loop operations, fantastic filters, and much more.
Company: Filter Forge
Price: $399
Web: www.filterforge.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Tons of filters and effects; ability to create your own.

Aimed at professional photographers and graphic designers, PrinTao 8 from LaserSoft Imaging is a new, Mac-only tool that’s fine-tuned for optimized printing with a specific class of printers, and it can also save you paper and ink. The software exploits all the capabilities of the native printer driver, so when you use PrinTao 8, you don’t have to first learn about RIPs, CMYK-to-RGB conversions, and other tasks that typically belong to PostScript/PDF printing.
Company: LaserSoft Imaging AG
Price: From $99
Web: www.printao8.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: User-friendly; features; optimization algorithms
Not: Poor metadata support.

Picture Instruments recently released Look Converter to convert presets and looks from any image editor into 3D LUTs (lookup tables) so that you can use these looks in any application that supports 3D LUTs. You can use photos and footage to create your LUTs using a simple workflow that exports to the two file formats that Adobe Photoshop and most nonlinear editing systems can use.
Company: Picture Instruments UG
Price: $25
Web: www.picture-instruments.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Ease of use; creates two formats; inexpensive.

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The album design software space is heating up. That’s good news for photographers selling albums to clients and designers selling layouts to photographers. Whether you design your own albums or outsource your design work, tools that make the process easier and faster are always welcome. New kid on the block Pixellu is making waves with its currently Mac-only application SmartAlbums. If version 1 is any indication of this software, created for photographers by photographers, it’s off to a great start.
Company: Pixellu
Price: $299
Web: www.pixellu.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Easy, fast album design; 30-day free trial
Not: Currently unavailable for PC users.

Corel Painter 2015 adds new features to this already feature-crammed application. Included are such features as the Reference Image Panel; inspirational Mixer pads; more realistic brushes with jitter smoothing for more dramatic results; perspective guides; enhanced cloning; and above all, Particle Brushes.
Company: Corel Corporation
Price: $379 (Upgrade: $229)
Web: www.painterartist.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot:Perspective Guides; Particle Brushes; new content;photocloning
Not:Inspirational Mixer pads are marketing gimmick.

Professional retouching in Photoshop requires years of experience and hours of meticulous work, but with life moving a thousand miles per hour, it’s rare we have the luxury to devote that time to every image. Coming to our aid is PortraitPro 12 Studio, which improves upon an already rich collection of features and adds a couple of great new ones.
Company:Anthropics Technology Ltd.
Price: $159.90
Web: www.portraitprofessional.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Myriad features make retouching fast and enjoyable
Not: Hair Controls not natural looking yet.

If you squint when you take a picture of a sunlit white house, your print of that house should convey that original experience. Ansel Adams called the anticipation previsualization. George DeWolfe, developer of the PercepTool 3 Photoshop CS5–CC plug-in, says that PercepTool 3 “…performs perceptual effect and tone mapping operations…” and “…mimics the visual luminosity cortex of your brain and your original perception.” At first, this sounded a bit esoteric and impenetrable to me; however, some images I processed using the PercepTool filters resulted in a dimensionality and luminosity of the original scene that isn’t readily available in either Photoshop or Lightroom.
Company: George DeWolfe
Price: $89.95 (Upgrade: $49.95)
Web: http://georgedewolfe.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Results
Not: Slow processing times.

Sony’s Sound Forge Pro Mac 2 sound editor was released in February, and it has impressive sound codec support, including FLAC and MP4 video. Other improved features include an Auto Trim/Crop tool, a Volume plug-in, broadcast CALM loudness compliant metering, Event Mode improvements, and a new iZotope plug-in (Nectar Elements). Also brand new is the Convrt Batch Processing Automation Tool, which is a separate batch app.
Company: Sony Creative Software
Price: $299.95; Audio Master Suite: $499.95
Web: www.sonycreativesoftware.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Nondestructive editing; CALM metering; 192 kHz, 64-bit capability
Not: Can’t view video in app; no Final Cut Pro X XML support.

Thanks to Fundy Album Builder 6, photo album design will never be the same. After five iterations, Fundy has left the Photoshop panel nest and become a robust, stand-alone application with game-changing Drop Zone technology that takes 30 years of old-school album design practices and turns them on their head. Drop Zones are essentially free-floating image containers that can be dynamically resized, allowing endless custom designs in a matter of seconds. This flexibility and fluidity make the design process intuitive and rapid.
Company: Fundy Software
Price: $329
Web: www.fundysoftware.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Drop Zone technology takes album design to the next level.