PCPhoto
New Breed Photo SoftwareBreaking from the traditional menu-intensive approach to photo workflow, these apps are designed from the ground up for the needs of digital photographers |
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Page 2 of 4 Recovery and Fill Light in the Tone adjustments are wonderful controls for dealing with highlights and shadows. First, set your whites with Exposure and blacks with the Black slider, then refine the highlight and shadow detail with the Recovery and Fill Light sliders. When working with Hue, Saturation and Luminance, each has separate sliders for eight colors: red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple and magenta. If you don’t want to go slider crazy, the Target Adjustment tool is available for the HSL controls. Simply activate the specific target you want to adjust, select the area in the image with your cursor and let the arrow keys control the work. On the left panel of Develop, a selection of tone Presets is also available. These include Antique Grayscale, Cyanotype, Direct Positive, Grayscale Conversion, Sepia Tone and four tone curve settings for different levels of contrast. Slideshow. Perhaps the simplest of all the modules, Slideshow lets you easily produce—you guessed it—slideshows. Music can be added as well as text, but you’re limited to a single transition style, and the only export format is PDF. This means the music and transitions will be lost along the way, however. Print. While Slideshow remains a tad underdeveloped at this point, the Print module is a solid contribution. The editing panels let you create custom page grids for a single image all the way to 5x8 (40-image) contact sheets, complete with custom text and metadata—file name, aperture, focal length and type of camera. Templates can be saved as presets and applied to new projects at will. Before printing, an identity plate with your name in elegant cursive can be placed below a photograph. Three types of sharpening can be applied (optional). Page margins, color management and printer resolution can all be selected. Web. If all this isn’t enough to impress, the Web module has a nice selection of HTML and Flash photo gallery templates with adjustable layout. The color palette can be selected for each section of the pages—text, header text, menu text, background, border and so on. Collection title, Collection description, photo captions, identity plate, copyright watermark, contact info, and e-mail link can all be included. Lightroom is available for Windows and Mac OS X. List Price: $299. Contact: Adobe, www.adobe.com.  Left: Lightroom puts essential enhancement controls right in front of you, rather than buried in menus. Below: The Lightroom interface organizes your workflow into five basic categories and gives you quick access to your image library.
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