tow.com has a vey useful article for all MAC users who own a Dual-Core G5 PowerMac with the Nvidia 6600 graphics card and who want to run Apple Aperture more quickly.

“Just purchased a reflashed Nvidia 7800GTX 512MB video card for my Quad. As you might know, the stock 6600 video card that many Dual- Core, Quad-Core PowerMac owners purchased last year is dog slow when running CoreImage intensive applications like Aperture. The 7800GTX makes the program sing compared to the 6600. I’ve posted some videos demonstrating the differences between the two cards on my website.”

Website: tow.com - Aperture and GeForce 7800GTX

Open letter from Yan Calotychos, founder of iView Multimedia

Tuesday June 27, 2006 - Today marks an exciting new chapter for iView and its relationship with our customers. We’re announcing that iView has been acquired and is now part of the Microsoft Corporation. With Microsoft’s purchase of iView, we are in a position to enhance our industry-leading product, whilst strengthening our customer service and support.As digital asset management has become an essential requirement for all creative professionals, many of you have told us that iView MediaPro is a critical component of your business. We take that responsibility very seriously. In my view, this Microsoft acquisition affords us an unprecedented opportunity to be even more responsive to a thriving market and ensure that iView MediaPro continues to perform to its full potential. Our engineering and marketing team here at iView are energized and excited to be joining the Microsoft team, and I personally will continue to be involved in the evolution of the product for years to come.

Adobe UK Press Release

Adobe Further Extends Leadership in Digital Photography Raw File Workflows - Adobe Acquires Technology Assets of Pixmantec ApS

LONDON — June 26, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced it has acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec ApS, makers of digital imaging software that provides advanced workflow management and processing capabilities for digital camera raw files. The acquisition strengthens Adobe’s leadership position in raw processing.Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. “With high quality digital cameras now within reach of every photographer, customers are gravitating to raw file formats that allow them to get more control over final results,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe®. “By combining Pixmantec’s raw processing technology and expertise with our own, we’re continuing to deliver on the promise that even your existing raw files can be processed with increasing quality as our software technology evolves.”

Apple have just released Aperture 1.1.2, a free update for current owners of Aperture. This update “addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance.”

Website: Apple Aperture 1.1.2 Update

Bibble Labs Press Release

Bibble Labs Releases 4.8 version with Advanced Lens Correction and B&W / Spot Color Plugin - Other improvements include Fujifilm S3 Pro support and a Mac Universal Binary

AUSTIN TX, (June 23, 2006) - Bibble Labs, Inc. today announces the general availability of Bibble Pro and Bibble Lite Upgrade 4.8. This free upgrade is available to existing Bibble 4 license holders, and represents the third such major upgrade of 2006. New features in this release include a redesigned and more powerful Lens Correction tool enabling correction of barrel and pin-cushion distortion, as well as chromatic aberration and vignetting. A new plugin is also distributed with the application to allow robust Black and White conversion, including an innovative Spot Color feature. “With this plugin, users can create Black and White images quickly, controlling which color channels affect the B&W value, with much more granularity than simple desaturation. This plugin also works in conjunction with our powerful color manipulation tools, providing complete control over the B&W conversion process,” says Eric Hyman, president and CEO of Bibble Labs. “Further, our novel Spot Color feature within the plugin allows for creative effects not available in any other RAW Workflow tool.”

Adobe UK Press Release

Adobe and Google Team to Distribute the Google Toolbar with Adobe’s Macromedia Shockwave Player, Additional Adobe Products in the Future

LONDON. — June 22, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the signing of a multi-year agreement with Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) to distribute the Google Toolbar with various Adobe products over the life of the deal. As a part of the agreement, Adobe and Google today will launch availability of the Google Toolbar with downloads of Adobe’s Macromedia Shockwave® Player. The Google Toolbar will now be offered as part of the Shockwave Player installation process for Internet Explorer on Windows. Under the terms of the agreement, the Google Toolbar will also be offered as part of other Adobe product installations in the future.

FrameFree Technologies Press Release

FrameFree Studio™ Creates Premium Quality Motion Imagery from Still Photographs, Enabling Entirely New Style of Visual Expression

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – June 19, 2006 – FrameFree Technologies, developers of a family of products that provide easy and efficient authoring and compression of motion imagery, today announced the launch of FrameFree Studio, the first digital imaging software that allows for the creation of compelling movies from still photographs without a steep learning curve or compromising quality at any bandwidth. FrameFree Studio is available in four different versions: FrameFree Studio HD, FrameFree Studio SD, FrameFree Studio Pro, and FrameFree Studio Express, all of which are available now at http://www.framefree.com.

Picturecode Press Release

June 16, 2006—Noise Ninja release candidates for Mac Intel, Mac PowerPC, Windows, and Linux

New release candidates for the Noise Ninja standalone and Photoshop plug-in versions are available.The plug-in release candidate fixes a bug in the Noise Brush that sometimes resulted in corruption of the brush mask. The standalone release candidate introduces Linux x86 support and Mac Intel support. It also adds profile annotation auto-fill support for image quality and adds jpe as a valid jpeg extension on all platforms. The release candidates will be promoted to official release status as soon as we receive feedback from users indicating that they are functioning as intended.

Adobe have just released Lightroom Beta 3, which has the following new features:

  * Support for new raw camera file formats (complete list of supported formats)
  * Before and After views in Develop
  * History of Develop edits provided
  * Live preview of HTML/Flash web output in new Web Module
  * Auto Import or Hot Folder support
  * Better handling of PSD and TIFF files
  * Resolution control in Export
  * Additional straighten tool
  * Saving module settings with collections and shoots
  * Keyword import/export

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

STOIK Imaging Press Release

STOIK Imaging (http://www.stoik.com) today released STOIK Noise Autofix v.1.0. - the fully automatic software for correction of noise in digital photos. The program automatically cleans noise in photos obtained from digital cameras, cameraphones, and scanners. The noise removal filter processes the image to reduce noise level providing best possible balance between noise suppression and the preservation of image details and sharpness. In photographic terms the noise reduction is equivalent to 2 - 3 stops, so that the noise level of the photo shot at ISO 1600 is effectively reduced to ISO 200 - 400 levels. STOIK Noise Autofix is the latest addition to STOIK’s line of automatic photo enhancement and manipulation products which inlcude STOIK RedEye Autofix, STOIK Smart Resizer, STOIK Cameraphone Enhancer, and STOIK Imagic.

The website Google Blogoscoped are reporting that the search giant may be about to challenge Flickr, the hugely successful photo-sharing site, by introducing a web album service to its Picasa software. Picasa is currently a desktop-based photo editing software application, but the screenshot on Blogoscoped hints that Google may be trying to grab a slice of the Web 2.0 pie, although the “Picasa Web Albums” link has magically disappeared…

Website: Google Blogoscoped - Google Picasa Web Albums Coming?

Thanks to Sanj for the link.

Nikon UK Press Release

Nikon UK is pleased to announce its new Camera Control Pro remote control software which allows users to control many digital SLR functions remotely from a PC. The new software succeeds Nikon’s Capture 4 Camera Control, released in 2003, and includes advanced features such as “Viewer”, providing substantial operational improvement. Nikon Camera Control Pro is compatible with Nikon’s latest software, including Capture NX (to be released in summer 2006), allowing for smoother image processing from shooting to transfer and storage. Release date is July 2006, price is £29.99 / €44.00.

Nikon UK Press Release

Nikon UK is pleased to announce a new Image Authentication Software application which is designed exclusively for use with the Nikon D2Xs digital SLR. The software enables users to determine whether an image has been altered since capture. Image data can be used for verifying image authenticity by law enforcement and other government agencies, the media, insurance companies and has a variety of other business applications. Verification results are displayed as a list on a PC screen with selected images displayed as thumbnails within the same screen. Release date is July 2006, price £399.99 / €589.

ProFotoSoftware Press Release

London United Kingdom, 29th May 2006 - ProFotoSoftware Ltd have today released a major update to PFS Browser - their free image browser for Windows. This new version features a demo of the RAW Plugin for the Browser - using this plugin, PFS Browser is now a fully featured RAW Image Processor, rather than just an image browser. PFS Browser supports all the major image formats, including the RAW formats from most camera manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax and Olympus. A demo version of the RAW Plugin is included with PFS Browser and the full plugin can be purchased at the introductory price of just $9.99 USD.

For full details, visit http://www.profotosoftware.com

PUBPAT Press Release

Patent Asserted Against JPEG Standard Rejected by Patent Office as Result of PUBPAT Request: Public Interest Group’s Review Results in Broadest Claims of Forgent Networks Patent Being Ruled Invalid

NEW YORK—May 26, 2006—In the reexamination proceeding initiated late last year by the Public Patent Foundation (“PUBPAT”), the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected the broadest claims of the patent Forgent Networks (Nasdaq: FORG) is asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) international standard for the electronic sharing of photo-quality images. In its Office Action released yesterday, the Patent Office found that the prior art submitted by PUBPAT completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (the ‘672 Patent).

Photo-i have just reviewed Fluid Mask, a Photoshop plugin for cutting out objects.

“The single thing that I like most about digital photography is being able to cut out an object or person and place them in a new photograph. Depending on your software, cutting out and masking skills, you can produce a very accurate cut out and still retain the finest of hair detail. An item of software that recently came to my attention was Vertus Fluid Mask 2.0, a Photoshop plug in that allows you to quickly create very complex masks. The software is available for both Mac OSX and Windows XP. Let’s put this software through some tough tests and see how it compares to some other offerings.”

Website: Photo-i - Fluid Mask Review

Microsoft have unveiled a completely new image file format, called Windows Media Photo (.wmp files), at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which will apparently be of better quality at half the size of a comparable JPEG image.

“WMP captures more of the raw information of photos to enable better presentation, editing and compression. Crow said WMP will easily enable 25:1 compression ratios for most uses of digital photography. That compares to a maximum of about 12:1 for consumer JPEG images before images visibly degrade.”

Do we need another file format for photography, or is the JPEG format good enough already? Will the .wmp format be supported by the camera manufacturers, or will it become a forgotten part of Windows Vista?

Website: EETimes - Microsoft beats JPEG with new photo format for Vista

Pictographics Press Release

BullZeye™ 3 is a high speed color correction, sharpening, and noise reduction batch processing tool based on Pictographics’ CandelaColor EditLab technology.

May 23, 2006—Burnsville, MN, USA, Pictographics International Corporation has partnered with the world renowned professional photographer Gary Fong to create the BullZeye 3 High-Speed Image Corrector.  BullZeye 3 is a stand-alone color correction, sharpening and noise reduction application that inspects, selects, and corrects digital pictures in one batchable step. With just one simple utility, professional photographers can produce lab-accurate color images with remarkable precision.  BullZeye is available for both Windows and Macintosh computers, including OSX, and includes Gary Fong’s BullZeye 3 Tutorial.  BullZeye 3 is available at Gary Fong’s web site, www.garyfong.com , http://store.garyfonginc.com/newbullzeye3.html.

Breeze Systems Press Release

New in DSLR Remote Pro v1.2: Canon EOS 30D Support

19th May, 2006: Breeze Systems today released DSLR Remote Pro v1.2. Photographers can now use Breeze Systems’ highly regarded software to control Canon’s new EOS 30D as well as Canon EOS 5D, 350D/Rebel XT, 20D, EOS-1D Mark II and EOS-1Ds Mark II, 10D, 300D/Rebel, EOS-1D and EOS-1Ds models.

Zorpia Press Release

Zorpia photo editor can enhance your photo sharing and blogging experience with your own creativity.

(PRWEB) May 18, 2006—Bring photo editing online with an effortless process, a pleasing result and no software installed. The solution is the Zorpia photo editor where photographers can enhance photo sharing and blogging experience with their own creativity. Zorpia developed a flash-based photo editor which integrates the most popular photo editing functions into a simple, self-explanatory platform. The web-based editor includes features like crop, rotate, brightness, saturation, hue, tint, unlimited undo or redo, save a copy, and also supports non-destructive editing.