FableVision Learning and Toon Boom Animation are bringing their best-selling Animation-ish software to the iPad in early Summer 2012. At the same time, they’re also going to reveal Animation-ish 2.0 for Mac and PC, which will provide key enhancements based on input from Animation-ish fans around the world.

Animation-ish is designed to be used for students from K-12, with three levels depending on the student’s level: Wiggledoodle-ish provides simple tools and three frames, FlipBook-ish gives infinite frames, and Advanced-ish has the mover tool which allows for more complex animations. It also provides a number of tools which will help educators use the software, such as animation lessons and over 50 “Inspire Me” video clips featuring Peter H. Reynolds, creativity champ and NY Times best-selling author/illustrator.

For more information on what Animation-ish can do for your, go to their website.

GraphicConverter 7.6 features the following updates:

• Added shadow and highlights
• Added color balance
• Added histogram equalization
• Added metadata tab to slideshow preferences; fontsize, color and metadata can now be chosen
• Added search feature to preferences dialog
• Russian translation added
• Customized options to set rating and label with the keyboard in the browser and slideshow
• Cursor up/down in image does recognize user selection for natural scrolling on 10.7 or later
• Support for scanning from network scanners with image capture added
• Create alpha channel from embedded path command added
• Sepia batch added
• Create alpha channel from embedded path batch added
• Added menu entry to show preferences file
• Added Xe847 (automatic) batch function
• Added BLP import option to mirror vertically
• Option to disable reopen of last windows upon launch on Lion added

GraphicConverter requires Mac OS X v10.5 or later, and is localized for German, English, French, Danish, Sweden, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Dutch, Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian use.

Version 7.6 is a free update for registered users of GraphicConverter 7.0-7.5, and costs $39.95 (USD) for new users and those with older versions. It can be purchased from the Lemke Software website or the Mac App Store, and a free trial version is available.

Product [Graphic Converter]

New Features:

While not all of these features are new to photo management apps, they are new to Lightroom as of version 4.  Many represent a migration of features from Photoshop to simplify the photo import/edit workflow, while others are catch-ups to features already found in Apple’s Aperture (which is long overdue for an upgrade.  Where’s the love, Apple?!).

Edit

• The Develop module (the equivalent of an analog darkroom) features an updated Process Version 2012 engine (PV2012) that offers significant RAW processing algorithm improvements for better images from camera RAW files. The controls available for PV2012 images have also been streamlined and upgraded, offering fewer redundant choices (Exposure & Brightness have been merged) with more powerful control (the range of most tool sliders has increased, so dragging the highlights slider all the way right produces a much more noticeable change). Images processed with earlier PVs retain their settings and tools, but can be upgraded to PV2012 to take advantage of the new features.

• Localized Adjustments get some upgrades, including the ability to selectively apply white balance adjustments using the Graduated Filter tool, which allows for localized color correction to account for mixed lighting situations. The adjustments brush can also be used to brush in/away color temperature, exposure, sharpness, noise, and moiré. While Aperture has more brushable adjustments, Lightroom’s brush controls, including size/feather/flow, make its adjustments more useful.
  

• Highlights and Shadows is now an intelligent adjustment tool, offering targeted adjustment rather than image-wide effects.  This means that increasing the highlight/sshadows will not blow out already well-exposed areas of the image.  While the Adjustments brush can be used to brush in highlight/shadow adjustments, the basic H/S slider tool is usually enough to get the job done.  Adobe’s goal with the PV2012 engine was to simplify the image workflow, and by all appearances it worked quite well. 
• Soft Proofing in Lightroom 4 helps photogs ensure consistent color results across output media. For amateur/hobbyist photographers who share informally and occasionally print, this will not be a standout feature; for professional photogs the ability to proof  and tweak images using a destination color space is crucial to ensure the printed/web results match what you spent hours perfecting. A handy feature called virtual proofs allows for multiple (non-destructive) edited copies in target color spaces to be saved, so managing multiple outputs is dead simple.
• Extremely basic video editing and sorting has been added, though Lightroom is certainly no competitor to Adobe Premier. Given that many DSLRs can now shoot HD quality video, the rudimentary tools Lightroom 4 offers are certainly a harbinger of next gen camera-to-computer workflow apps.

Share
Once images are developed to your liking, Lightroom has added new sharing modules and refined existing ones. Most of these features are catch-ups to Aperture, but most go above and beyond what is offered in Aperture, at least until Apple updates it.

• The Map module allows you to view your photos by their geotag (assuming you add this information or your camera captures it). Integration with Google Maps is standard, as is support for GPS track logs that can trace your photo walk activity. Adobe has added an innovative feature to the geotag metadata that allows photographers to mark a location Private, which means location data will not be embedded with that image when it is shared via export, Facebook, etc.
• A new Book module allows the creation, publication, and saving of books either via self-printing or through the Blurb printing service, including a live updating price estimate based on the number of pages and options. Photo book creations is a familiar feature to Aperture/iPhoto users, and Adobe has taken a page from Apple when it comes to the template-drive book layout. However, the Lightroom Book module offers a number of additional features not present in Aperture, including the ability to pad an image (leave blank space between the edge of the image and the placeholder) as well as full custom text layout options. Lightroom does not support new template creation like Aperture, but the greater editing capabilities in Lightroom make it possible to customize a template almost 100%.
• “Create Saved” is a new button featured on the Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web modules. This button gives you the ability to save an output item such as a book or a custom web gallery in the Collections drawer for future editing. This is especially useful for creating books, where there may be multiple drafts and lots of proofreading between the initial creation and final product.

• Publish Services, available on the left sidebar of the Library module, provides integration with a variety of online services such as Facebook and Flickr, while providing a plug-in architecture that allows other services to be added. Lightroom 4 also integrates in-app emailing of photos using the default Apple Mail account; other accounts can be set up but entering email server info is a manual process.

Adobe has made the beta of Lightroom 4 available as a free download here. The app is open to customer feedback/comments at the Photoshop community site, so be sure to share your thoughts, good or bad, with the Adobe team. Lightroom is available for Mac OS X v10.6.8+ and Windows Vista/7 in 32- and 64-bit flavors (another major product leaves Window XP out in the cold).

For an absolutely exhaustive review, be sure to check out the excellent review over at DP Review by Amadou Diallo.

• Canon PowerShot S100
• Nikon 1 J1
• Nikon 1 V1
• Nikon COOLPIX P7100
• Olympus PEN E-PL1s
• Olympus PEN E-PL3
• Olympus PEN E-PM1
• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ150
• Sony Alpha NEX-5N
• Sony Alpha SLT-A65
• Sony Alpha SLT-A77

Support for more RAW formats in OS X was added with Lion (as well as the more recently released OS X 10.7.2), with a full list of supported RAW formats detailed in Apple’s own support document on the topic. Whether you have any need for the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.9, it’s available now (for free, of course) in Software Update and in Apple’s Support Downloads section.

Via [MacStories]

Pixelmator has just released version 2.0 of their image editing software, bringing in a new look and feel. The new version is available now from the Mac App Store for $29.99, while those who have purchased a previous version can have their installation updated for free. Pixelmator 2.0 features new drawing and retouching tools, content-aware fill, healing tool, smudge tool, and more. It is also now fully compatible with OSX Lion with full screen, versions and auto save features.

Pixelmator 2.0′s new drawing tool lets you add, create, combine and edit vector shapes easily. You can also quickly add various shapes to your image, including triangles, lines, circles, or rectangles. Additionally, you can easily adjust fill and stroke settings for shapes and shadows using the new Shape Settings palette.

If you’re still looking for a nice image editing program for your Mac, I recommend checking out Pixelmator. The price you have to pay for the software is worth all the features you’ll enjoy while using it. I have both Aperture and Pixelmator on my iMac, but I tend to use Pixelmator for quick editing of images and screenshots.

Product [Pixelmator 2.0]

Back in the day, as a serious photography hobbyist, Kodak’s Kodachrome was my film of choice with its rich, deep saturated colors, long latitude (detail in shadows with a dynamic range of roughly 8 f-stops), and fine-grained image clarity. Kodachrome had a way of making shots look better than real life, in a good and believable way.

Kodachrome had a great run, but its time is past…perhaps not entirely for the better, but the old order changeth. However, the same rich image quality and color that characterized Kodachrome transparencies is still available digitally through a process called “High Dynamic Range Photography” or HDR—a technique that overcomes the light limitations of our contemporary digital cameras by combining multiple frames with different exposures, then combining the resulting range of tonal and color detail into a single image.

An example for, say, a conventional digital shot of a piece of black coral on a white sand beach, there’s simply no way standard digital cameras can hope to capture the range of light and detail in both the coral and the beach, and you will end up with a compromise at best. Kodachrome, with its wide dynamic range, would have done a much more satisfying job.

However, by combining multiple exposures of the same shot—preferably taken with a tripod ensuring constant camera position—HDR photography software can combine the detail from the entire range of available brightness and color in your multiple exposures, giving your final image stunning highlights and shadows, and showing all the detail in both the sand and the coral.

HDR photo software is available at prices ranging from free to moderately-priced.

HDRtist

Free and Easy

Ohanaware’s HDRtist is freeware, and probably the easiest-to-use HDR software program for the Mac. To get your exposures or photos into HDRtist, drag them into the HDRtist window or use the “Add Photos” button and multi-select the photos (On Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can select photos directly from your iPhoto or Aperture library). Next, use the single “Strength” slider to get a result you’re happy with, allowing you to achieve great-looking HDR photos in seconds.

The Strength slider lets you choose which HDR tone mapping method to use, or even a combined technique with it’s nearest neighbor. There are four different Tone Mapping methods, ranging from compression, light, realistic to extreme.

Sometimes circumstances don’t allow you to take multiple exposures, you don’t have time to set-up the tripod, or the wind’s too strong, or there’s too much movement. In such instances, simply take a single JPEG or RAW and let HDRtist work its magic on your photo. This is sometimes known as simply tone mapping a photo or creating a fake HDR, or just FHDR.

Whatever it’s called, HDRtist does it well, making HDR-esque images from regular photos. Additionally, HDRtist can be used to recover dark, dull and lifeless photos.

Consider Going Pro

HDRtist Pro is next step up from basic HDRtist, featuring far more control and options, a different interface, ability to save your HDRs (for editing later), a 128-bit floating point engine and tone mapping system, two generators (HDR and Exposure Blending), the ability to save directly into iPhoto/Aperture and add special effects, watermarks, frames and captions to your HDR Photos, and the ability to print and share your HDR Photos online .

HDR photographs are generally created by capturing multiple standard photographs, preferably on a tripod, using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into a single HDR image. However, one of HDRtist Pro’s excellent abilities is that it can create HDR effects using a single photograph, thereby rendering what is referred to as pseudo HDR or faux HDR effects, and also merge and align multiple shots of the same image taken handheld without a tripod before HDR processing.

HDRtist Pro can create and edit HDR or Exposure Blended images, and being a Mac-only application, utilizes the Apple ImageIO Kit to read RAW images. The OS X Core Engine processes HDR images using 128-bit floating point data (16,843,009 times more precise than a JPEG, or so they say) into artistic special effects or super-realistic enhanced photos.

HDR Pro reads: JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, BMP, PICT, SGI, JPEG-2000, Photoshop, PDF, ICO, TGA, ICNS, MacPaint, FlashPix, xBitmap, EXR, Radiance and various flavors of Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus & Panasonic RAW file formats, and writes JPEG. It also integrates with Funtastic Photos.

HDRtist Pro sells for $29.99 (19.99 GBP).

Products [HDRtist and HDRtist Pro]

HDR Darkroom Pro

Another inexpensive HDR software solution is HDR Darkroom Pro By Everimaging Ltd. For a limited time, HDR Darkroom Pro is available on the Mac App Store for a friendly $7.99.

HDR Darkroom Pro includes a range of advanced patented HDR technologies, such as feature-matching alignment technology, noise reduction, local/global tone mapping technologies, etc. to help you easily produce spectacular images at what are claimed to be the fastest rendering speeds available today..

User-friendly And Intuitive Interface With Preview Feature

HDR Darkroom Pro is designed to minimize the work in producing professional HDR photos, and provides a preview of the images in your working folder, making your workflow more convenient. The application also tags color Flags and Suffixes on each preview image to indicate clearly on which one you are working.

Right Now Real Time Processing

Nearly all of the processing controls in HDR Darkroom Pro are real time,, and the application is claimed to be the fastest processing HDR software in the market.

Light and Color, Control At Your Fingertips

HDR Darkroom Pro has more than 30 parameters for you to completely fine tune and control your final images. Curve adjustment, color balance, color temperature and tint adjustment, lens correction, highlight/shadow adjustment, white/black point adjustment, noise reduction, just to name a few, many levels of fine tuning are available. Most digital photography processing tasks can be easily done within HDR Darkroom Pro, with results so good you will never need to use another application.

Camera Raw File Converter

HDR Darkroom Pro includes a sophisticated RAW converter and supports RAW files captured by most major companies: more than 150 camera models from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and others, as well as those using Adobe (DNG). Newly released RAW formats are included in updates as they become available. Check The website for a list of all currently supported Cameras.

HDR Darkroom Pro is equipped with technologies that enhance the detail, color and contrast of single 8-bit images with one click.

Fully Realized Color Space Management

HDR Darkroom Pro is the first HDR software with comprehensive Color Space Management. Exceeding the range viewable on most monitors, the developers say you may need to buy a professional monitor to fully see the full color depth and intensity HDR Darkroom Pro provides. HDR Darkroom Pro’s developers have achieved two goals: create color space management tools with a short learning curve and provide professional level functions in the same product.

Export to Social Media

HDR Darkroom Pro makes it easy for you to share your HDR images with popular social media and photo sharing websites like Flickr, and you can upload your photos with a single click.

HDR Darkroom Pro is compatible with Mac OS 10.6.6 or later, and is fully optimized for Mac OS X Lion. It’s currently on sale at the Mac App Store for $7.99.

Product [HDR Darkroom Pro]

Adobe has announced new versions of its widely popular photo and video editing applications, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, respectively. Photoshop Elements 10 brings new features such as paint and effect patterns, the ability to search for photos containing specific tangible objects, and depth of field simulation. Premiere Elements 10, on the other hand, introduces sharing features similar to those from Apple’s iPhoto ’11, such as instant uploading to Facebook and Flickr and the ability to tag Facebook friends from within the app. Premiere Elements 10 also takes some features from Apple’s iMovie ’11 such as still photo panning and zooming (aka the Ken Burns Effect), movie themes, and automatic color enhancement and correction. The software also adds some new unique features of its own, such as the ability to export to AVCHD in order to burn HD-quality movies to DVD.

Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10 are both available now for $99.99 USD each or $149 USD as a bundle. Previous customers of the two software titles are able to upgrade their older versions for a discounted $79 each or $119 as a bundle. Neither title is available on the Mac App Store, though, and are only available for purchase in stores or online.

Via [TUAW]

Both Skitch and Evernote are undoubtedly high-quality (although very different) pieces of software, offering a ton of features for users. While Evernote offers note-taking and archiving, Skitch is a screen capture and editing tool. The developers behind Evernote apparently saw the amazing things Skitch has to offer, and decided to buy out the company as announced earlier this morning at a conference in San Francisco, California.

Skitch was a free, OS X only (although it was recently released as an Android app) application until its developers took it out of beta and slapped a $20 price tag on it. Evernote, however, has removed Skitch’s price tag and made it a free download again, available now in the Mac App Store.

Evernote is also planning to bring Skitch to many other desktop and mobile platforms, with an iOS app confirmed to be in the works. The company is planning to keep Skitch and Evernote as separate apps for now, although they will integrate Skitch’s features into Evernote over time. You can learn more about Skitch by watching the promotional introduction video:

Product [Skitch] Via [9to5 Mac]

Have you ever wanted to make stunning pictures of smoke? A quick search on Flickr for “smoke” returns well over 1 million results, while a trip over to Google will yield hundreds of guides to smoke photography, including what materials produce great smoke trails, what backgrounds are best, and how to configure your camera to capture the whole thing. Luckily, Smoke, a mere $9.99 in the Mac App Store, puts such creative endeavors within reach of the unartistic (your reviewer included) without the need for any actual smoke or fiddly camera settings.

“Free from complexities”

Smoke’s developer, Helsing Global, describes smoke as “…pure creativity, free from complexities.” This could not be more true; although it is possible to create simulated smoke photographs in Adobe Photoshop, the process requires a high level of skill and more than a few years working in the program. Smoke, by contrast, is easy enough to begin using right away and simple enough to master within an hour. A simple line of controls across the top give control over the size of the canvas (in pixels), the color of the brush and the canvas, tiling (whether the brush wraps around to the other side of the canvas when you hit an edge), brush mode, and blend mode (which controls the mixture of light paint on dark backgrounds and vice versa):

More advanced options for the brush behavior are found in the Parameters Heads-Up Display (HUD).

From this window it is possible to control how broad the color palette will be and how fast the colors cycle, the opacity of the paint laid down by the brush, and also the physical behavior of the brush such as the gravity (how closely paint dots are clumped) and the smoothness of the brush strokes. All controls are self-explanatory, and it is easy to see the resulting changes when a parameter is altered.

Go On and Touch It

Right from the start, Smoke provides the ability to create ethereal works of art with minimal effort. All it takes is a click and a drag. For Magic Trackpad/multitouch MacBook owners, the experience is even better. This app turns the touchpad into a canvas, making good on the simple-but-artistic promise.

Graphic designers or power users will appreciate the use of a pen tablet, though it should be noted the app is not pressure-aware; control of brush parameters is limited to the Parameters HUD. Everyday users will appreciate the app’s ability to translate simple gestures into airy and insubstantial works of art, while graphic pros will appreciate the understated but powerful control over fine elements of the painting are configured via the Parameters sliders.

Final Word

If lighting up a cigarette in front of a black velvet background with studio lighting and a shallow aperture with a fast shutter sounds like Greek to you, Smoke is a great app for creating easy smoke images. Whether for artistic pursuit or just the sheer enjoyment of sitting back and doodling, Smoke delivers. With the ability to save high quality TIFF or shareable JPEG files, you can get your smoke photos out of the app and into other programs, whether to incorporate your smoke picture into a greater work or just share some particularly noteworthy art with friends.

As entertainment for a young child, the young at heart, or as a serious tool for amateur or professional artists, Smoke really shines (smokes?). Use it to doodle, use it for work—just be ready to unleash your inner artist.

Appletell Rating:

Buy Smoke

Although Adobe’s Flash is arguably dying off slowly and its AIR platform isn’t very popular, the company has just released new betas of the two. The betas bump Flash up to version 11 and AIR to version 3, and introduce new features such as 64-bit support, HD surround sound, Stage3D APIs, and plenty more.

A full (and extensive) list of the new features and changes in the Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 betas is as follows:

Stage3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering — Stage3D (“Molehill”) is a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering developed by Adobe. Stage3D provides a set of lowlevel APIs that enable advanced 2D/3D rendering capabilities across screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV). It gives 2D and 3D app and framework developers access to high performance GPU hardware acceleration, enabling the creation of new classes of rich, interactive experiences. Note: These pre-release builds include Flash Player and AIR desktop support; AIR for Android and iOS support will be enabled in a future pre-release build.

Flash Access Content Protection Support for Mobile — Flash Access content protection support is now available on mobile devices.

H.264/AVC Software Encoding for Cameras (desktop) — Stream high quailty video from your computer’s camera with higher compression efficiency and industry-wide support, enabling both immersive real-time communications (e.g., video chat and video conferencing) and live video broadcasts.

Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support — Allows ActionScript developers to take advantage of high performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Developers can integrate existing data seamlessly into their projects.

G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony — Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.

Garbage Collection Advice — Provides smoother, more responsive user experiences by allowing developers to provide hints (through System.pauseForGCIfCollectionImminent) to optimize garbage collection scheduling.

Cubic Bezier Curves — The Graphics.cubicCurveTo drawing API allows developers can easily create complex cubic Beziers without requiring custom ActionScript code.

Secure Random Number Generator — Developers can now take advantage of cryptographically secure random number generation to build more secure algorithms and protocols.

Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access Enhancements — Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) provides protection for streaming video across screens while eliminating the deployment complexity of a license server. New Flash Access content protection features include key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support, and enhanced output protection and device filtering.

Socket Progress Events — Improve management of data transfer using the Socket class by providing a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer. The new APIs (Socket.bytesPending, Event.OutputProgressEvent) allow applications can easily track progress and provide responsive feedback.

Native Text Input UI (mobile) — Mobile apps can now take advantage of the native text input controls on mobile platforms, including platform-specific user interaction behaviors such as magnification and text selection. Native text controls are available on Android, BlackBerry Tablet, and iOS operating systems.

JPEG-XR support — Flash Player and AIR now include support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2). The computationally lightweight JPEG-XR format provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.

Enhanced high resolution bitmap support — BitmapData objects are no longer limited to a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels (16,777,215 pixels), and maximum bitmap width/height is no longer limited to 8,191 pixels, enabling the development of apps that utilize very large bitmaps.

High efficiency SWF compression support — Developers can now take advantage of LZMA compression for their SWF files. LZMA compression can reduce SWF size by up to 40%, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption. Use Tinic’s tool or a custom one to compress your SWF’s.

DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying — DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API allowing developers to quickly remove all of a container’s children using a single API.

The following applies only to Flash Player 11:

Native 64-bit Support (Flash Player desktop) — Take advantage of native support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.

Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding (new for Flash Player) — Improve app responsiveness and deliver smoother animation by decoding images on initial load instead of on demand. Images are cached as needed.

TLS Secure Sockets Support (new for Flash Player) — Enables secure communications for client/server applications.

The following applies only to AIR 3:

Stage Video Hardware Acceleration (new for AIR) — Leverage hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline to deliver efficient, best-in-class high-definition (HD) video playback experiences. Decrease processor usage and enable smoother video, reduced memory usage, and higher fidelity on mobile*, desktop, and TV devices (*supported on Android 3.1, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and iOS).

Below is a video demo of Stage3D, an exciting new feature in the Flash Player 11 beta:

Via [9to5 Mac]