Specialized Software Put these programs to work to make your digital photography more effective and fun  Software plug-ins and specialty software can make your life easier as a digital photographer. Sure, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Aperture and other programs are very powerful and let you do a lot with your digital photos. |
Portrait Professional Studio 9 Flatter your subjects with this powerful suite of enhancements  Nobody’s perfect. Hollywood makeup artists earn their livings on this fact—but most of us don’t have a stylist with us every time we shoot a portrait. |
Manage Your Photo Library Use the sophisticated organization features of your photo software to simplify storing, sorting and finding your photos  Make image management the first step in your workflow, and you’ll free yourself to spend more time doing the more interesting digital darkroom tasks. |
Auto FX Mystical Tint Tone And Color 2.0 Quickly transform good photos into great ones with this collection of high-style digital effects  Ever wonder how the pros create the cool photo effects you see on billboards and advertisements? |
Classic Black & White Tips and software for making beautiful monochrome images digitally  In an over saturated world, the elegant, timeless appeal of black-and-white is in its simplicity. To get frame-worthy results, with a beautiful range of tones, you don’t have to be a student of the Zone System—but you do need to start with a proper exposure and then use software tools to perfect the final image.
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First Look: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Photoshop elements offers an excellent blend of user-friendly features with pro-quality processing under the hood  There’s plenty to like about the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, including some new tools that make image editing even easier. Elements 7 borrows a few of these from Photoshop CS, including the Smart Brush tool that lets you edit lighting, color and textures, and add more than 50 filter effects with simple layer adjustments, plus the Photomerge Scene Cleaner that helps you remove subjects or backgrounds from two or more images by combining them together to create one photo without the unwanted objects. |
Video-Editing Software With HD video now available in D-SLRs, we take a look at the best affordable programs for producing video portfolios of images, movies and multimedia projects  Now that professional still cameras are evolving to provide high-quality, high-definition video capture, the line between photography and video is blurring even further. Movies are called motion pictures, after all, and thanks to the ease and popularity of posting video online with sites like YouTube, photographers now have an extra outlet for showcasing and sharing their images and portfolios. With that in mind, here’s a selection of easily approachable, cost-effective and yet very capable editing programs to get you started in the world of video. |
Touching Up Four specialty apps that will make your portraits impress  Retouching a portrait usually takes several steps in Photoshop to make a well-exposed image effectively stand out. Pros use techniques like cloning, burning and dodging; various filters; and localized color enhancements with layer masks to get a stunning portrait. It’s a fine art that takes a lot of practice. Luckily for those who want great results without the learning curve, these applications will give your portraits a professional look quickly and easily. And when you need to do some elaborate masking, we’ve got a plug-in for that, too. |
Image Browsers Speed through organization and image review with some of our favorite imaging apps  Aimed at keeping the work flow for photographers fast and fun, image browsers are designed to offer organization functionality at affordable prices. Most browsers are centered around simple interfaces to help you sort through images quickly, make the best selections and output them as prints, use them on the web or send them to family and friends. The best browsers also include essential image-enhancement tools and are the primary work flow tool for many photographers today. |
Framed! Add impact to an image by placing it in a virtual frame  One way to add interest and importance to a photo is to frame it. This is as true in the digital world of web-based photo galleries as it is in a brick-and-mortar gallery. Adding a decorative virtual frame to an image may also enhance its presentation when viewing it in a digital photo frame, on your computer desktop or on your HDTV. Creating a simulated frame effect in Photoshop is relatively fast and easy. |
Silver Efex Pro Nik software brings control point technology to black-and-white conversion  For fans of Nik Software’s intuitive U Point-powered Control Point technology, creating black-and-white images is made easier with Silver Efex Pro. If you’re new to Nik Software, Control Points let you apply adjustments selectively to particular areas of an image without needing to create complicated, sometimes time-consuming layer masks. |
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