Imaging Resource have published a review of Qurio, photosharing software that allows you to instantly share thousands of full resolution photos over the Internet, directly from your own PC.

What if you could just email your friends and family to let them know you’ve just copied some new pictures to your hard drive. To enjoy them, they’d just have to click on some link in your email. Their browser would launch and in a second or two they’d be watching a nice slide show of your images.

Qurio (http://www.Qurio.com) turns that imaginary scenario into reality. And to their credit, they do it in a safe, secure way.

Website: Imaging Resource - Qurio Reinvents Photosharing

Corel Press Release 19/10/04

Painter IX Offers Creative Professionals Unmatched Speed and Incredible Possibilities

Ottawa, Canada - October 18, 2004 Corel today announced that Corel Painter IX, the world’s most powerful Natural-Media painting and illustration software, is now available across North America and the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Corel Painter IX enables commercial designers, photographers, and professional artists to use their natural talents and techniques to create breathtaking works of art. This highly sophisticated painting and illustration application captures the intricate nuances of traditional art tools while taking advantage of the incredible power of digital media. It is the must-have software for creative professionals, whether they’re in film making, game development, commercial design, illustration, photography, or fine arts.

“Corel Painter IX takes creativity to new heights by empowering creative professionals to use the skills and techniques they’ve developed in the traditional world, while enjoying the incredible benefits of digital media. Whether they are designing commercial illustrations, painting portraits, or developing concept art for feature films and video games, professional artists turn to Painter to create stunning masterpieces,” said Nick Davies, General Manager Graphics for Corel.

Digital Outback Photo have reviewed a plugin for Photoshop CS and PhotoShop Elements 3(Windows-only I’m afraid) that aims to brighten up the shadows in your images without causing too many unwanted side-effects.

“Improving the tonality of images is one of the most difficult tasks. Especially the shows are either to flat or even more often to dark. There are quite a few tools on the market that address this issue. The most well known is “Shadow Highlight” in Photoshop CS. In our opinion, “Shadow Highlight” has two major shortcomings:

- It can produce halos
- With its many sliders the use is not really easy

Here we think the Shadow Illuminator plugin offers a great alternative.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Shadow Illuminator Plugin Review

Breeze Systems Press Release 18/10/04

Breeze Systems’ Downloader Pro 1.5 simplifies workflow for Canon EOS 20D and 1D Mk II Users

18 October 2004: Breeze Systems today released Downloader Pro 1.5, the company’s powerful yet simple tool to transfer digital photos from camera to PC.

Canon EOS 20D and Canon EOS-1D Mark II users can now use Downloader Pro to download directly from the camera while automatically renaming and organizing images, losslessly rotating JPEGs and storing copyright and other IPTC data in each image.

Further time saving features include dpi adjustment and color profile tagging of JPEGs and the automatic creation of sets of related directories for each download directory.

Downloader Pro 1.5 also adds support for the downloading of Panasonic DMC-LC1 and Leica Digilux 2 raw images.

Corel/Jasc Press Release 14/10/04

Corel Corporation Acquires Jasc to Extend Graphics Software Portfolio

OTTAWA—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Oct. 14, 2004—Recognized, Trusted Provider Of Graphics, Office and Personal Productivity Software Acquires Leading Imaging Software Vendor  

Corel Corporation today acquired Jasc Software, Inc., the award-winning developer of the Paint Shop(TM) family of digital-photography and image- editing software. A critical milestone in Corel’s ongoing growth strategy, this acquisition follows four consecutive quarters of profitability and a successfully completed turnaround since Corel was taken private in August 2003. The acquisition further extends Corel’s position as a powerful force in the packaged software industry, providing exceptional office and personal productivity and graphics products. Corel will now serve a combined base of more than 60 million customers worldwide with an extended software portfolio that combines innovative photo-editing and graphics-creation, vector-illustration and technical-graphics applications along with Corel’s popular WordPerfect line of products. The acquisition is expected to officially close by the end of October 2004.

Corel corporate headquarters will remain in Ottawa, Canada. Corel will maintain the former Jasc facility in Minneapolis for the Paint Shop family operations. Amish Mehta will continue to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of Corel Corporation. Several members of the Jasc senior management team will join Corel.

Corel will sell Paint Shop(TM) Pro(R), Paint Shop(TM) Pro(R) Studio, and Paint Shop(TM) Photo Album(TM) as stand-alone products, and will continue to provide worldwide service and support to customers under the Corel brand. In addition, Corel will actively support new R&D initiatives for the Paint Shop family, ensuring that the next generation of Jasc products will continue to flourish.

Bibble Labs have just released Bibble 4.0, professional image-manipulation software that provides the fastest, highest quality Raw workflow possible. Well, according to the makers anyway. There are 2 versions available, Pro ($129) and Lite($69), and support for Windows, OS X, and Linux. There’s also a trial version available if you want to “try before you buy”.

Website: Bibble Labs

Bob Atkins has published his review of the new photo editing software, Paint Shop Pro 9 from Jasc Software.

“For those who like to read the last page of a book first, my conclusion is that I like Paint Shop Pro a lot. I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for a very capable image editor and who only has $110 or so to spend. It’s now the image editor I use most myself. I know that’s heresy to Adobe PhotoShop priests, but that’s the way it is!”

Website: Bob Atkins - Paint Shop Pro 9 Review

Breeze Systems have just released a new version of BreezeBrowser. Version 2.11 beta 2 supports Canon EOS 20D, PowerShot G6 and PowerShot S70 raw conversion. It also includes 20D focus point overlay display and the ability to display Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) files.

BreezeBrowser 2.11 beta 2 can be downloaded from:

http://www.breezesys.com/BreezeBrowser/support.htm#20D

Bibble is one of the oldest RAW file convertors on the market, but it hasn’t updated for quite a while. Now it’s back with a brand new look and feel, and Digital Outback Photo have managed to get their hands on a preview Beta version.

“Really forget all about the old version of Bibble as Bibble 4.0 is all new! Especially users of Canon cameras should have a look as Canon is now as well supported as Nikon, Olympus and the new Kodak DSLRs. Even the new Canon 20D works with this version and the new 1Ds Mark II will be soon.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Bibble 4.0 Preview

Cerious Software Press Release

ThumbsPlus 7.0 offers more features than any other digital content management software!

CHARLOTTE, NC, October 6, 2004 - Cerious Software, Inc. has released its full-featured ThumbsPlus v7.0 for Windows, one of the leading software solutions for digital content management for over 10 years, and well known on the Internet for the best customer support in the business! Unlike most competing products, ThumbsPlus is completely database-driven which allows sophisticated features such as: extensive search capabilities, search by similarity, user defined fields, image galleries, and management of offline disks, even across a local network.

ThumbsPlus 7.0 offers more features than ANY other digital image management software! Please read all about the new look and feel of ThumbsPlus as well as a list of the new features including 16-bit image processing as well as options for creating, handling and viewing alpha channels in 24-bit and 48-bit images. ThumbsPlus v7.0 has also added support for many other database programs such as Oracle, DBase, MYSQL and others.

Acronis Press Release 11/10/04

Phoenix Global Software launches Acronis True Image 8.0 into UK retail.

Acronis True Image 8.0 delivers comprehensive workstation protection - the complete disk imaging, system disk backup, and bare metal restore for workstations and home PCs.

London - October 11, 2004 - Acronis, Inc., the technological leader in storage management solutions, has launched Acronis True Image 8.0, the latest upgrade to its expanding family of award-winning workstation and server disk imaging, backup, and bare-metal restore software. Acronis True Image 8.0 is the easiest, most convenient and intuitive disk imaging, backup and system restore software you’ve ever seen. It’s automated, wizard-driven operations make the backup and restore functions extremely to complete.

Acronis True Image 8.0 allows users to create the exact disk image of live workstations for a complete file and system backup, providing a comprehensive and cost-effective protection solution.  The disk image file includes amongst others, the computer data including the operating system, programs, software updates and patches, data files, configurations, preference settings, e-mails, pictures and MP3 files. After a fatal system failure, you can restore the entire drive contents to a known, working state or simply replace the lost or corrupted files and folders.

Based on the Exclusive Acronis Drive Snapshot disk imaging technology, Acronis True Image allows you to create an online system backup without the reboot to keep the system productive. The product provides the fastest bare metal restore dramatically reducing and, therefore your IT costs.

Serif Press Release 11/10/04

PAGEPLUS REACHES ANOTHER LANDMARK!

Serif celebrates the tenth release of its award-winning flagship package

Serif (Europe) Ltd - the UK’s leading independent desktop publishing, design and graphics software developer - today announced the launch of PagePlus 10, the landmark version of their hugely popular desktop publishing package.

PagePlus 10 (List Price £99.99; Upgrade Price £49.99*) is the exciting new version of Serif’s flagship desktop publishing package, extensively enhanced to offer everyone powerful desktop publishing features at an exceptionally affordable price. More professional than ever before, PagePlus 10 combines excellent support for multipage document publishing with Serif’s trademark ease-of-use, to offer a DTP package that’s perfect for every publishing task.

A much-requested feature, new BookPlus introduces capabilities for long document handling that no other package in this price range offers. Separate PagePlus publications are treated as individual chapters that can be assigned common attributes (such as text styles and colour palettes) from specified master publications. Plus, the advanced Page Numbering System applies differing or continuous numbering across publications, without needing to open them separately. A Table of Contents or Index can be generated automatically across multiple publications and inserted before or after any selected chapter, removing the laborious task of manual cross-referencing. BookPlus also outputs collections of publications to both print and PDF for highly flexible and efficient multipage desktop publishing.

Thanks to Sanj for sending me the press release.

BetterJPEG Team Press Release 07/10/04

Retouch Your JPEG Photos without Recompression Loss with BetterJPEG 1.3

BetterJPEG Team announced today the release of version 1.3 (1.3.1.0) of BetterJPEG application, a graphics utility specifically designed to avoid recompression loss when editing and resaving JPEG images.

Unlike most other image editing tools that recompress JPEG images when resaving, introducing more and more JPEG artifacts and degrading the image quality with each iteration, BetterJPEG takes advantage of the fact that JPEG images consist of a number of small independently encoded blocks and does not recompress blocks that didn’t change.

BetterJPEG authors decided to go beyond such traditional lossless JPEG operations as rotation and flip, found in many contemporary image manipulation tools, and extended the number of lossless operations with crop, text insertion, red eye reduction and copy/paste to external
editor.

Digital Railroad Inc. Press Release

Technology simplifies workflow, marketing and unlocks revenue opportunities

Digital Railroad Inc. today announced the first online workflow and archive system that gives the power of a large photo agency to individual photographers.

Digital Railroad, www.digitalrailroad.net, automates repetitive workflow, and streamlines image delivery and communications. Searchable online archives unlock image revenue.

Photography legends and previous White House photographers Dirck Halstead and David Hume Kennerly believe it will change the professional photography industry.

“Digital Railroad eliminates daily technology hurdles; finally photographers have access to efficient tools for editing, archiving and simultaneously distributing their work,” said Halstead, award-winning photojournalist and Digital Journalist publisher.

PCMagazine have published their review of the new photo editing software, Paint Shop Pro 9 from Jasc Software.

“Compared with the dramatic redesign Jasc Software introduced in Paint Shop Pro 8, the updates and enhancements in Paint Shop Pro 9 seem at first glance much subtler. But Jasc has packed a number of impressive new tools and capabilities into this professional-level image editor. In a couple cases, Jasc is playing catch up with Adobe Photoshop CS. But Paint Shop Pro 9 reaches beyond mere image editing with “painting” features that resemble Corel Painter’s.”

Website: PCMagazine - Paint Shop Pro 9 Review

PictureCode Software have released a public beta version of their Noise Ninja plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, which works with PhotoShop 6, 7, CS, and Elements on Windows, and PhotoShop CS on Mac OS X 10.3. “PictureCode’s Noise Ninja software solves the image noise problem using new, patent-pending technology. Not only does it do an impressive job of removing noise - often yielding up to a two-stop improvement in effective image quality - it does so quickly and easily.”

Website: PictureCode - Noise Ninja Plug-In Beta Version

Pixory Press Release 05/10/04

Pixory now has full international language support.

With the 3.11 release, Pixory fully supports all languages/scripts in all areas of the application, including: file names, album names, captions, narrative, etc. All langugaes covered by the Unicode 3.0 specification are handled automatically by Pixory, and you can even mix different languages on the same page! The list of supported languages includes, among many others: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hmong, Thai, Punjabi, Urdu, Tagalog, Tibetan, Ukranian, and Vietnamese.

Pixory is the easiest and most powerful way to share photos online - it is freeware that will turn your own PC and broadband internet connection into a personal photo album server.

http://www.pixory.com

ACD Systems Press Release 04/10/04

ACD Systems Announces Fastest Version of Flagship Photo Management Software with the Launch of ACDSee 7

VICTORIA, British Columbia - October 4, 2004 - ACD Systems International Inc. (TSX: ASA), makers of ACDSee photo management software and Canvas technical illustration software, announced today the release of ACDSee 7, the newest version of its flagship photo management software for photography enthusiasts, professionals and corporate users.  Renowned for its speed, ACDSee is used the world over as the leading choice for image viewing and management. New features in ACDSee 7 include a Device Synchronization function, a Context Sensitive Toolbar, advanced search capabilities, RAW format support, MPV and HighMAT support and an Image Comparison tool. ACDSee 7 is available as a standalone product or as part of the ACDSee 7 PowerPack suite.

ACDSee 7 allows users to control their camera’s memory card storage space with a device synchronization function that quickly and efficiently automates the downloading process of images and media.  Through an easy-to-use wizard, users can select which folders their images should automatically be saved to, as well as determine the amount of space that should always be available on a specific memory card.

Plug-in to ACDSee?s Powerful New Performance Tools - ACDSee photoPro and ACDSee Share

VICTORIA, British Columbia - October 4, 2004 - ACD Systems International Inc. (TSX: ASA), makers of ACDSee photo management software and Canvas technical illustration software, today announced the release of ACDSee photoPro, which adds support for color management and RAW formats, and ACDSee Share, for peer-to-peer photo sharing. Based on the core ACDSee photo management technology, both products work as plug-ins that enhance ACDSee?s functionality.

ACDSee photoPro includes 16-bit per channel color support for preserving RAW images at their highest resolution. Users can safely maintain the color integrity of RAW images when converting them into TIFFs or JPEG 2000 formats for use in ACDSee or other image editing software programs. ACDSee photoPro also offers ICM 2.0 color management support that allows users to accurately select monitor and printer color profiles.

ACDSee Share enables users to turn their personal computers into web servers and publish their photos, music and videos in web pages without relying on third party service providers. ACDSee Share?s browser display can be customized with personal banners or corporate logos.
The program also allows users to control who has access to images and the length of time that images are displayed.

ImageRecall Press Release 28/09/04

ImageRecall Announces ImageRecall 3.0 Now Supports More Memory Cards And Image Formats Than Any Other Digital Photo Recovery Software Including Raw Image Formats

Release Date: 28/09/2004

The software gives users a backup plan to address the lack of safeguards in the storage and download process of digital cameras including new features to help keep photos safe after recovery.

Photokina -Cologne, Germany-September 28, 2004-Today’s digital cameras make it very convenient for users to take pictures without worrying about the cost of wasting film. However, most of these cameras make it just as easy to accidentally lose those pictures. There is no way to undo ?delete all? on most cameras. Downloading images to a PC is fraught with danger, as well. To help camera users combat these risks, ImageRecall announces ImageRecall 3.0 (IR3) can now recover all image types including all RAW formats. With its new file correction systems, ImageRecall also has the ability to recover and rebuild photographs when corruption occurs. IR3 supports all memory cards and is able to mount recoveries from cards that even Windows is unable to access.