Corel today released CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X7 – Small Business Edition. “Marketing is key to the success of any small business, but it doesn’t have to break the bank,” said Gérard Métrailler, Vice President, Product Management, CorelDRAW. “CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X7 – Small Business Edition gives business owners an easy and affordable way to create their own professional marketing collateral and grow their business while minimising costs.” The suite provides access to three full licences of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X7 with a single purchase. It is priced at £699 (excl. VAT) and is available in both a box and download version at the website below.

Macphun Software have launched the Macphun Marketplace, and with it, a selection of creative preset and texture packs from some of the world’s leading photographers. Designed to work within Macphun Intensify Pro and Macphun Tonality Pro, these packs promise to give photographers the chance to achieve a similar look and feel in their images as some of finest photographers in the world. “The great photographers often become synonymous with a specific genre or style of photography,” said Paul Muzok, CEO of Macphun. While we can’t teach everyone to recreate those images overnight, implementing a preset or texture from one of your favourite or inspirational photographers can give you that look and feel straight away. “The features in Tonality Pro and Intensify Pro are designed to give the user more creative enhancements than ever before, and these preset packs enhance that capability, all in a simple click.” Preset packs are priced at $5 for 5 and $10 for 10. New sets of presets and textures will be available each month on the Macphun Marketplace along with helpful training materials.

The Pixelmator Team has released Pixelmator for iPad, an image editor featuring advanced editing tools such as layers, non-destructive layer styles and a collection of professional-grade selection tools. "We are super excited to introduce a powerful, fast, yet very easy-to-use image editor that has everything you need to create, edit, and enhance images on iPad. It looks amazing, and it's a real iOS 8 app," said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. "We think everyone, creators at home and professional image editors, will find Pixelmator for iPad incredibly useful, capable and fun." Pixelmator is $4.99 and available worldwide exclusively through the iTunes App Store in the Photo & Video category.

Pinnacle have released Pinnacle Studio 18, Pinnacle Studio 18 Plus and Pinnacle Studio 18 Ultimate. Now offering native 64-bit performance and enhanced productivity, the Pinnacle Studio 18 product family offers a faster, more responsive movie-making experience. With Pinacle Studio 18 Plus, you can record directly from your screen — including system audio and microphone sound — to add dynamic content to movies and demo videos with Live Screen Capture. For users looking for maximum video editing power, Pinnacle Studio 18 Ultimate also offers new 4K Ultra HD Smart Encoding, support for XAVC S (HD and 4K HD), enhanced Live Screen Capture and valuable extras from NewBlue. Suggested retail pricing of Pinnacle Studio 18 is $59.95 / €59.95/ £49.95, Pinnacle Studio 18 Plus is $99.95 / €99.95/ £79.95 and Pinnacle Studio 18 Ultimate is $129.95 / €129.95/ £99.95.

BitTorrent have published the results of their own speed test in which they pitted their Sync file hosting/sharing/synchronisation tool against rivals such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. "Sync is fast and it gets its speed from the BitTorrent protocol on which it is built, taking the shortest and fastest path when getting file pieces from one device to another," the company says. "We knew we were fast, but we thought it would be interesting to see just how fast Sync is in head-to-head competition. So we ran a test comparing Sync against cloud-based services in the market... The results impressed even us." In BitTorrent's own testing, Sync proved to be 8x faster than Google Drive, 11x faster than OneDrive and 16x faster than Dropbox. To find out more about the test methodology and results, head to the website below.

Website: BitTorrent Blog

DeliX Software has released a new iOS app called Creatic, which gives users the ability to adorn their photos with unique effects and textures, save the workspace as a Creation or upload it to the Creatic website. The program includes more than 120+ textures and filters created by photographers, including light leak, lens flares, gradients and ten different blending modes. Creatic is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Macphun today announced an update to its most popular photographic app, Intensify. Compatible with the latest public betas of Yosemite, the latest release offers enhanced raw image file processing as well as a number of performance improvements. Also, Intensify is now available in Italian, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguese. Existing Intensify and intensify Pro users can upgrade immediately at the website below.

Red Giant has  released Offload, a brand new standalone application for reliable backup of footage in the field. Unlike a typical footage “copy and paste” backup operation, Offload gives users clear visual assurances that their footage has been safely copied. The user interface features progress indicators as well as footage thumbnails, and offers file verification notices so that users are assured that their work has been safely transferred to disk. Users can also opt to make an additional, automated backup of their footage. "When your work sits on a tiny, plastic camera card, anything can happen, on location or in transit," said Shooter Suite Product Manager Randon Morford. "Too often, shooters discover that their footage has been lost through a corrupted offload process or through damaged hardware. Red Giant Offload eliminates the stress that every filmmaker goes through between shooting and delivery - it gives you the peace of mind that your footage was safely copied with the added benefit of automating an additional backup." Red Giant Offload is now available for $49. For current Shooter Suite owners (v.12.5), Offload now comes as a free addition.

AutoBracket is a new app that brings AE bracketing to iPads and iPhones. Users can shoot 3 photos in rapid succession, each at a different exposure setting. On the Apple  iPhone 5, 5S, 6, 6 Plus and the newer iPads, you can precisely set the bracketing intervals via a bracket slider, view a colour-coded histogram, merge the three exposures to capture much higherluminosity range, and adjust exposure and focus independently of each other. AutoBravket is available for $1.99 on iTunes.

Adobe has released a new Lightroom add-on called Aperture Importer. As the name suggests, this plugin enables Aperture (and iPhoto) users to import their libraries - including data such as flags, geotags, ratings, keywords and more - to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Note that colour labels, stacks, and face tags will be imported as Lightroom keywords.

Website: Adobe

Corel has updated its AfterShot Pro software to Version 2.1. Available free to registered users, the 2.1 update introduces a number of new features and enhancements including new HDR tools for Mac and Linux, support for more than 17 new raw camera profiles, an improved Highlight Recovery Tool, as well as various performance and stability enhancements. Newly supported cameras include the Canon SX50 HS, the Fujifilm X-T1, X-E1, X-E2, X-Pro1, X-M1, X100S and X20, the Nikon D4s, D3300, 1 V3, 1 J4, Coolpix P330 and Coolpix A, and the Pentax Q, 645Z and K-500.

Magix have announced their first video editing app for Android-powered smartphones and tablets. Magix Movie Edit Touch allows you to instantly cut, optimize and share self-made videos anywhere. You can either make videos directly with your Android end-device or import them from an SD card. After importing, you can remove unwanted scenes, trim video clips and add background music in just a few clicks. The app is available now as a freedownload from the Google Play Store. The Premium edition adds automated brightness/contrast/saturation optimisation; filter eefects such as Lomo, Tilt-Shift, HDR, Pop Art and Black/White; a title editor and the ability to save and export videos in Full HD - all for $1.99.

Intelligent Imaging Solutions have released its piccure+ software, billed as "a revolution in computational photography." Designed to improve the quality of photos taken with both high-quality and consumer-grade lenses, piccure+ can apparently "determine the optical aberrations from the image itself," the company says. “The advances in computational photography will have a dramatic impact on image formation in general. Image formation will no longer be just an optical process, instead it will be a combination of both optical and computational processes. The boundaries between software and hardware will become blurred,” says Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder, CEO of IIS. “This development will allow cheaper, lighter, and smaller optical systems. We made the first radical step in this direction with piccure+." The software is now available as a standalone application with powerful batch processing and raw image file support, priced at €109.

At Adobe MAX 2014, Adobe hasy announced it is shipping a "milestone release" of Creative Cloud. This major release includes significant feature updates to 13 essential CC desktop tools that link to a new family of integrated mobile apps. Central to this release is an all-new Creative Profile and 9 new mobile apps that extend the capabilities of the Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere franchises onto mobile devices. In the Photoshop family, Photoshop Sketch lets creatives draw with new built-in expressive brushes and enables an integrated workflow with Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC. Updates to Photoshop Mix extend precise mobile compositing capabilities and now includes enhanced integration with Photoshop CC, as well as a new iPhone version. A new Lightroom Mobile app builds on integrated desktop and mobile workflows and includes features to allow clients, friends or family to select favourites and leave comments for photos shared online; and GPS information from iPhone photos now syncs with Lightroom desktop. In the Premiere family, the brand new Adobe Premiere Clip app easily transforms the video shot on iPhone or iPad into edited videos that are simple to share. Aspiring videographers can then send their compositions to Adobe Premiere Pro CC for advanced editing and finishing.

Promote Systems has announced two exclusive tethering solutions for the Panasonic GH4 compact system camera. USB Tether software, designed from the ground up in cooperation with Panasonic developers, allows users to easily control the GH4 from a PC or laptop. The company has also added support for Panasonic's flagship Micro Four Thirds model to its Promote Control, an advanced, pocket size remote controller for digital cameras. Click through / scroll down for more information.

Magix has released Movie Edit Pro 2015 (£59.99), Movie Edit Pro 2015 Plus (£79.99) and Movie Edit Pro 2015 Premium (£99.99). New features include native 64-bit support, a completely redesigned interface and a new Movie Wizard. In addition, the program now features a new audio tool and an option to wirelessly transfer mobile video projects from the upcoming Android app Movie Edit Touch via WLAN. The new Movie Wizard allows users to select specific templates from a variety of styles and categories and give their videos a unique look. The Plus and Premium versions also offer the full version of NewBlue Titler EX for creating impressive titles, captions and closing credits in just a few steps.

Adobe has posted ACR 8.7 and Adobe DNG converter 8.7 as "release candidates." These updates add support for raw image files generated by the Nikon D750, Casio EX-100PRO, Fujifilm X30, Leaf Credo 50, Leica V-Lux (Typ 114, pictured), Panasonic DMC-GM1S, Sony ILCE-5100 and Sony ILCE-QX1; and lens profiles for 16 Sony, Tokina, SLR Magic, Pentax, Voigtländer and Leica lenses.

Website: Adobe

Olympus has released the free Olympus Capture application, which enables tethered shooting with the OM-D E-M1 compact system camera. Available in Mac and Windows versions, Olympus Capture allows E-M1 users to remotely control their cameras, giving them access to exposure, focus, depth-of-field preview, ISO sensitivity and white balance, among other settings. You can even control up to four wirelessly synced flash units directly from the program. Photos taken using Olympus Capture can easily be imported into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Capture One Pro for post-processing. The Olympus Capture software can be downloaded from the website below (do note that you need to have Firmware Version 2.0 installed on your OM-D E-M1 for tethered shooting).

Website: Get Olympus Capture

Zoner Photo Studio 17 is now available in the US. Zoner’s latest version of this complete photo editing and management software package offers several exciting new features including Home Sharing, an easy and seamless way to share memories on your TV, PC and smartphone; the new and improved Cartoon and Lens Flare tools, a much more efficient photo management interface and more robust tools for working with raw files. Among the improvements is a new Automatic button that streamlines working with the histogram and colours – one click now reveals the optimal settings. Zoner Photo Studio 17 also now reflects all changes in the raw conversion module in pictures’ previews in the Manager and Viewer. Working with large photo collections is now significantly faster and smoother courtesy of the program’s Smarter Catalog and an improved Side Panel in the Manager. Zoner Photo Studio 17 is available now for $89. Upgrades from older versions are priced at $49.

Plasq have released Comic Life 3, the latest edition of its award-winning photo comic creation software for iOS. This edition includes a new suite of image processing tools including new parametric filters and an Instant Alpha tool that makes it easy to knock out backgrounds right inside the app. Comic Life 3 also introduces a script editor letting you create stories right in the app and easily take your words to the comic page thanks to new SmartScript technology. Comic Life 3 for iOS is available from the App Store for $2.99