At the CeBIT trade fair in March, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology will present a prototype dubbed aceMedia that independently and intelligently organizes photos when they are saved on a hard disk. aceMedia can recognize, for instance, whether a picture was taken indoors or outdoors, and whether it depicts a landscape or a man-made environment. Researchers have also developed Pocket-PC Photobrowser, a program designed for archiving large volumes of photographs on mobile hand-held devices. It creates a thumbnail of each photograph and analyzes its metadata, searching through thousands of photos in seconds.

Corel Painter X, the world’s most powerful painting and illustration software, is now available for pre-order from www.corel.co.uk/painterx (shipping in English version late February 2007). Corel Painter X includes the RealBristle Painting System that provides an organic painting and illustration experience – right down to the individual bristles on the brush. Corel Painter X is £229 / €349 for full, £119 / €179 for upgrade. The Limited Edition Painter Can is available for £259 / €379.

Kodak have announced a range of new Image Enhancement Plugins for Adobe Photoshop and compatible software. Available in professional and standard versions, the Kodak plugins cover noise reduction, airbrush effect, colour casts and exposure problems. You can download a free trial of the Image Enhancement Plug-Ins software by visiting http://www.asf.com/

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will ship in mid-February and is now available for pre-order in the United States and Canada at www.adobe.com/store for a special introductory price of £125 (ex VAT) / $199. Photoshop Lightroom will later sell for an estimated street price of £175 (ex VAT) / $299. Users of Lightroom beta will have access to the program until its expiration on February 28, 2007. More than 500,000 photographers participed in the public beta program during the last 12 months.

ProShow MediaSource from Photodex is a new collection of royalty-free content, including audio, images, templates and more, which is aimed specifically at photographers. The Wedding Essentials title is an all-in-one solution that contains everything a photographer needs to create a compelling wedding themed slide show for a client. There are also six music compilations which provide photographers with professionally produced, royalty-free music for their presentations. All seven ProShow MediaSource titles are available immediately from www.photodex.com for $129.95.

Adobe have released an update, 5.0.2, for Photoshop Elements which provides compatibility with Microsoft Windows Vista (32-bit versions only).

Website: Download the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0.2 Update

DxO Optics Pro v4.1 now supports the popular Nikon D40 digital SLR camera, as well as adding 11 new lens correction modules, with over 450 modules now available. DxO Optics Pro is a digital image enhancement tool incorporating optics, noise and exposure corrections. DxO Optics Pro v4.1 is available immediately on the DxO Labs Web site (http://www.dxo.com).

Genuine Fractals 5 public beta is now available as a feww upgrade. Users interested in becoming beta testers can register at http://labs.ononesoftware.com . In addition to being compatible with Photoshop CS3, Genuine Fractals 5 has been rewritten as a Universal Binary The full version of Genuine Fractals 5.0 will be available shortly after Photoshop CS3 is commercially available in 2007, priced at $159.95 for new users and $69.95 for an upgrade.

Microsoft Photo Info is a new software add-in which enables easy editing of “metadata” for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer, supporting most of the common IPTC properties. It also provides enhanced hover tips for digital photographs in Explorer. Photo Info runs on 32-bit versions of Windows XP (with Service Pack 2 or later) and the Windows Vista operating systems. JPEG, TIFF, WDP, HDP (HD Photo), NEF, CR2, and CRW files are currently supported.

Website: Download Microsoft Photo Info

The YouSendIt Export Plug-In for Apple Aperture allows photographers to send photos directly from within the application. You can send multiple photos to multiple recipients, add comments, and select resolution, file size and file type before sending from within the plug-in. The YouSendIt plug-in will be available as a free download from www.yousendit.com by January 22, 2007.

PowerSnap 2.0 is a free, downloadable application that lets users automate photo sharing and enables digital photo organization so users can find all their pictures within a single easy-to-use application. For the first time users can manage all their photographs, automatically sending and receiving pictures in near real-time, and synchronize their uploaded albums with their desktop instead of struggling with multiple sites and applications.

PortraitProfessional 4 software allows you to dramatically improve a portrait photo in less than ten minutes. Improvements include individual control over all the separate facial features, and natural enhancements to skin just by moving a few sliders. PortraitProfessional 4 has just been released and is currently on offer at $39.95.

DIWA member LetsGoDigital have just reviewed the latest release of Apple Aperture software.

“One of Aperture’s main advantages is that the original files remain unaffected. You notice this if correcting pictures. You can go back a step easily and without loss of quality. The fact that changes are saved in small files and not via a copy of the photograph frees up a lot of disk space and enables you to work very quickly. Aperture asks a lot of the processor and memory. No problem with the latest Intel Macs. The program runs extremely quickly on the new Apple MacBook Pro and you won’t have to wait long, especially if you have the new Mac Pro desktop computer!”

Website: LetsGoDigital - Apple Aperture Review

The DxO Lighting Flickr Toy automatically brings more pop to any digital photo stored on Flickr.com or on any computer connected to the web. The DxO Lighting Flickr Toy incorporates automatic local exposure and dynamic range optimization technology from DxO Labs and is free of charge. It’s available now from FD’s Flickr Toys website, http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ .

Just Resize My Photos is a software tool for resizing digital images in batches. It takes six quick and easy steps to resize an unlimited number of digital images. The purchase price for one user licence is $19.99, and there’s also a trial version available.

Bibble 4.9.5 now supports the Nikon D40, Pentax K10D, Olympus E-400, Leica M8 , Mamiya ZD and 97 other cameras. Bibble is available in both Pro ($129.95) and Lite ($69.95) versions for Windows, Macintosh (PPC/Intel as a Universal Binary) and Linux. There’s also a fully functional 14 day trial version.

PictoColor has released CorrectPhoto 2.0 Digital Photo Editor for Windows.  The new CorrectPhoto features PictoColor’s OneClick Color Correction Technology, which takes the guess work out of making the color right. CorrectPhoto includes all the basic editing tools needed to fix digital photos including rotation, cropping, scaling, oneclick color correction, redeye removal, and sharpening. Plus, with its integrated Windows Exploere, it is like having advanced one-click color and editing built into the operating system.

SeeFile Software Press Release

SAN FRANCISCO—January 4, 2007—At the annual Macworld event in San Francisco, SeeFile Software LLC is introducing the third generation of its web-based creative collaboration tool, which allows instant web sharing and messaging around large media files. This new, Universal software which runs natively on either Intel-based or PowerPC-based Macs, turns any Macintosh computer into an interactive webserver for those media files, with support for remote access from anywhere on the Internet via standard browsers like Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

AKVIS Press Release

Paint the World Yourself! AKVIS Decorator Changes Texture/Color on an Image.

December, 2006 - AKVIS LLC announces the release of AKVIS Decorator V.1.2 for Windows and Macintosh. The plug-in allows applying a new texture/color to an object preserving its volume.  The new color or texture looks absolutely natural. New to version: support of Photoshop CS3 beta on Windows and and PowerPC Mac, new interface languages: German, French, Spanish, Japanese, minor bugs fixed. Have you ever seen a car made of brick? A statue dressed in fine clothes? With AKVIS Decorator you can create things that were unimaginable even to Mother Nature. The Decorator plug-in allows you to change the surface of an object in a realistic manner.

REALVIZ Press Release

REALVIZ Announces Availability of Latest Patch Up-date for Stitcher Unlimited, including Flash Panoramas & Improved Fish-eye Stitching

Sophia Antipolis, France (December 20, 2006) – REALVIZ®, a leader in image processing software development, is pleased to announce the availability of a new patch up-date to their acclaimed software, Stitcher® Unlimited. Stitcher Unlimited, which released in July 2006, is targeted at professional panorama creators looking to produce multiple panoramas of the highest quality and with maximum productivity. This latest up-date (version 5.5.2) is available free of charge to existing Stitcher Unlimited owners on both Macintosh® and Windows®, and includes export of projects in Flash 9 and Java, using ImmerVision’s PURE Player, as well as improved stitching of fisheye images (including the Nikkor 10.5 mm lens), for astonishing high-quality results.