From time to time, polarizing, neutral density (ND), or other filters all need to be screwed onto a lens barrel. One common trait of the screw threads on lenses is that they are a pain to work with, making it difficult to avoid cross-threads. Additionally, ND and polarizing filters pose their own positioning problems.

All these troubles may be solved by the Xume Quick-Release Adapters and exchange system. Xume’s brilliant idea is based on magnetic lens adapter rings and filter holders. The Xume system requires the user to only go through the threading nightmare once for every filter. When the lens adapter ring is in place, each filter can be attached by simply placing it onto the lens adapter ring. This way, Xume also solves the problem with ND or polarizing filters, as you can rotate filters easily without loosening them.

I tested with a 24–105mm and a 16–70mm lens (77mm thread, currently the only one available). The magnetic force was strong enough to keep my filters firmly attached to the lens adapter ring, even when I accidentally bumped the camera into a pile of user guides on my table. The only disadvantage I found to the Xume system was that it will create vignetting with wide-angle lenses below 24mm. You also need to mount your lens cap on a filter or a filter holder, as the lens adapters are slightly larger than conventional holders.

A single filter holder costs $11.95 and a lens adapter ring costs $32.95. A Starter Kit with one lens adapter and two filter holders is available for $53.95, and a Pro Kit with two lens adapter rings and four filter holders is available for $104.95.

Company: Xume
Price: $104.95 (Pro Kit)
Web: http://xumeadapters1.gostorego.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: No more cross-threading; mounts fast
Not: Wide-angles below 24mm suffer from vignetting

Perfect Portrait 1 is a huge timesaver for portrait photographers. It automatically identifies faces and features, and with a press of a button, eyes become whiter and clearer, teeth become whiter, lips have greater definition, wrinkles are softened, and shine and blemishes are reduced. In addition, color casts can be improved, based on the ethnicity of each face in the photo.

Age- and gender-specific presets give you a headstart for many common problems. Then, sliders let you adjust every improvement, and manual tools let you paint away stray hairs, blemishes, and wrinkles. (Wacom tablet features are supported.) When you find a combination of settings that work, you can save them as your own preset for use on other photos. I found the presets to be tremendously useful, requiring only a few tweaks of the sliders to get my ideal result.

Brushes let you fine-tune the auto-generated masks for face, eyes, and mouth, which is essential for some photos. Unfortunately, undoing a brush stroke requires multiple presses of Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z), and you cannot save your masks for future adjustment. I recommend using the auto-mask feature on photos you show your clients, and fine-tuning the masks for your final candidates.

Perfect Portrait works either as a standalone program or as a plug-in to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, or Apple’s Aperture. In Photoshop, it can be applied as a smart filter for later editing—otherwise it adds a new layer. In Lightroom and Aperture, adjustments can be applied to multiple images at once.

Company: onOne Software
Price: $99.95
Web: www.ononesoftware.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Instant fixes for many photos; adjusts skin color by ethnicity
Not: Interface requires Flash, which causes delays

Ansel Adams was part of a group of San Francisco realistic landscape photographers who called themselves Group f/64. The name came from their desire to achieve maximum depth of field (DOF). However, attaining maximum DOF can be challenging, especially in macro photography. Stopping a lens down to its smallest aperture extends DOF but introduces diffraction. Enter Helicon Focus software. It produces an edge-to-edge focused image by combining partially focused areas from multiple files of a scene.

The Helicon Focus interface and process is amazingly simple to use considering the task. The hardest work is taking the pictures. A tripod is a must. It’s important to take enough pictures of a scene, incrementally changing the focusing distance with each consecutive shot. Small incremental movements of the focus barrel work best for macro shooting, while broader focusing is fine for most landscapes. It’s very similar to taking a successful panoramic by carefully overlapping shots.

Helicon compensates for change in object size that occurs from refocusing. Files for the image are imported in consecutive order and appear as small thumbnails in a source palette to the right side of the preview window. You can delete files but the thumbnail size and the order they appear in can’t be adjusted, which is frustrating for proper editing. For optimization of your image, the Smooth and Radius sliders adjust the transitional areas of the multiple files.

I loaded 25 RAW files from my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, and in a little more than a minute, I had a stunning image. You can remove artifacts using a retouching brush that allows you to clone from a selected source file to the resulting image. Images can be saved as JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs, or PSDs. Maximum DOF has a profound image impact, and Helicon Focus does a wonderful job.

Company: Helicon Soft Ltd.
Price: $250
Web: www.heliconsoft.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Solves shallow DOF problems; 64-bit mode
Not: Lack of flexible image culling

FontAgent Pro Enterprise Server is one of the fastest font servers I’ve used. This latest version uses the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) architecture and is multithreaded to take advantage of multicore Macs. The actual server setup involves setting up users, groups, and permissions. The user permissions are very straightforward. For a large number of users, the server can import users and groups from LDAP. As indicated, the users can be broken down into groups, and font libraries can be limited to certain groups. User lists can also be loaded in from a CSV spreadsheet file, making setup a snap.

There’s some additional setup in the System Preference Pane installed, including the server license info and synchronization schedule. Additional licenses or seats can be added at any time. Every user needing to access the server is required to have FontAgent Pro (FAP) installed. Assuming the users have the proper permission, they can upload any custom font libraries and sets directly to the server after they connect to it. Other user benefits include built-in font inspection, smart sets, and smart classification of fonts. Of course, FAP auto-activates in most of the critical Adobe software, so the correct font is always available.

FontAgent Pro Server is a synchronization-type server, so if the server is out, users still have full access to their libraries. Therefore, the only major network activity is when the individual users are synchronizing with the server—and that’s very fast, even over a wireless network.

The cost is $1,695 for the server software, with client software costing an additional $1,175 for ten users. Additional discounts are available for 20, 50, and more users.

Company: Insider Software, Inc.
Price: $1,695, plus client software
Web: www.insidersoftware.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Fast; easy to use
Not:

It’s hard to avoid artifacts and blur when you need to print an image larger than its current resolution allows. There are several solutions for enlarging an image, and given how far these technologies have come, it’s more about selecting the most appropriate solution for your specific situation. Alien Skin has a strong update to their Blow Up plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom that you may wish to size up for yourself.

Blow Up 3 separates itself from its competitors with Smart Crop. This is a favorite feature providing the option to resize and crop your image in a way that targets the subject matter based on the content. This feature is easy to toggle in the preference settings. Image size is increased by first converting the pixels into vector data, up scaling the data, and then converting it back to the now-larger pixel map. This method maintains clarity far better than bicubic enlarging.

Batch processing is just a matter of setting up a batch action, as you would for any action. Blow Up 3 doesn’t create a new layer in Photoshop in use with an action, so according to Alien Skin, duplicating the layer first is a necessity. In single image use, a checkbox provides the option for the output to appear in a new layer. Unfortunately, Blow Up 3 doesn’t create output tiling unless your original images are already in seamless tile format. Alien Skin recommends keeping the magnification to 400% or less for best results, and print tests confirm their estimate as being accurate.

Blow Up 3 is fast from start to finish with quick previews and rendering. Enlarging an image is simple via the somewhat plain interface, but the real test is the quality of the results, and Blow Up 3 gets big applause.

Company: Alien Skin Software
Price: $199
Web: www.alienskin.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Effective enlargement; simplicity; performance
Not: No tiling

“Effortless” skin retouching often ends in even more effort—and is usually more apparent—but Smooth Skins from Digital Heavens offers a lot of options, with a lot of support. It teaches all levels of Photoshop users a better way to clean up even dramatic skin imperfections but also gives the pros the natural results they want.

Launching the tutorial first demystified every aspect of the installation and use of Smooth Skins. Like other actions, the set is loaded from within the Actions panel in Photoshop, or by double-clicking on the action file, but Digital Heavens also includes an action that explains what will happen and why. Smooth Skins is clearly for larger image files, supporting both 8- and 16-bit images, but in spite of adding steps to editing your image, the results occur much more quickly.

Once the action splits your image into both high- and low-pass layers (texture and luminosity, respectively), you can select from a variety of smoothing types. Each of the actions produces its own style of correction with as much or as little as you need based on your desired look. Unlike traditional plug-ins, after the actions run, the user applies the results to specific areas by painting on a layer mask. If you don’t love the change, undo is also much faster than with other retouching plug-ins.

When all is said and done, Smooth Skin’s output is natural and the process becomes fun as you play with the limitless possibilities. With a bit of use to become more fluid, this nondestructive skin-correction software can be stacked, blended, adjusted, and corrected with just your eyes as a guide, allowing for quite a retouching feeding frenzy.

Company: Digital Heavens
Price: £24.95
Web: www.digitalheavens.co.uk
Rating: 5
Hot: Effective solution; natural-looking output; thorough tutorials
Not:

NoiseControl 1 is a plug-in for Photoshop and compatible programs (both Mac and Windows) that’s remarkably effective at reducing image noise while keeping edge details and natural grain. It can also sharpen a noisy image without increasing noise, and even add simulated film grain to an image to make it appear more natural.

While discerning photographers may use NoiseControl’s advanced controls, its two-button Easy mode works well on most images. The Auto Sample button finds a flat area in the image and samples the noise there to remove the noise from all areas. The Auto Preset button uses the EXIF camera and ISO data built into your photo to take a guess at what to remove. I found both to be remarkably effective.

You can even create custom presets for your camera by shooting a series of photos at various ISO settings, adjusting them in NoiseControl, and then saving the result. (Investing a little time in this process will save tons of time later.) To batch process images, include NoiseControl in a Photoshop action; to apply NoiseControl nondestructively, just convert your image to a smart object first.

NoiseControl is very fast, both in previewing and in applying the result. You can zoom into the preview and resize the preview window as large as you need it. Helpfully, you can even preview just the noise to be removed. Unfortunately, in testing on my Mac, I ran into two interface problems: the Split View feature—helpful for seeing a before and after view—wouldn’t turn off, and I couldn’t resize the Preview Limit rectangle as described. The Plugin Site is working on these issues and may have fixed these problems by the time you read this.

Company: The Plugin Site
Price: $49.95
Web: http://thepluginsite.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Fast, effective, and automatic; advanced controls
Not: Interface glitches reduce efficiency

Snap Art 3 is Alien Skin’s latest version of their painting and drawing effects plug-in software for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Elements. And it’s exactly what the name implies—software for quickly transforming photographic images into stylized art. There’s a comprehensive collection of preset styles to get you started such as crayon, oil paint, pencil, comics, and watercolor that are further broken down into subgroups for landscapes, portraits, abstracts, etc. You can globally adjust the preset style using sliders to modify brushstroke, surface texture, color, light, etc., or locally use a layer mask to modify your image.

At any point in your exploration you can save and name your modifications. Snap Art processes large files relatively quickly and renders your image in a large preview window. The tools and controls are easy to use and the process is intuitive, but just in case, the interface has mouseover tooltips and there’s a collection of video tutorials on Alien Skin’s website.
For some, Snap Art’s quick results might be a legitimacy issue. Making art is supposed to be a difficult, time-consuming process. However, within minutes of opening one of my pictures in Snap Art 3, I was struck with the effects and couldn’t deny that I liked what I saw: complex brushstrokes, clean edges, delicate pointillism, and more. I made several prints on canvas paper that appeared natural without a manufactured look.

Snap Art is made to order for busy wedding photographers who need to deliver that special moment in a unique artistic manner. Snap Art lets us explore our images and expand our vision. It’s well worth trying out.

Company: Alien Skin Software, LLC
Price: $199
Web: www.alienskin.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Quality artistic effects
Not: No written manual

In addition to calibrating displays, X-Rite’s i1Display Pro also calibrates projectors, measures ambient light, and corrects for glare (for displays lacking a hood). The i1Display Pro comes with X-Rite’s new i1Profiler software.

The i1Display Pro instrument is faster and with better quality than the i1Display 2 or any other colorimeter in the same price range. It has a lens sitting in front of the sensor (like X-Rite’s multi-thousand dollar Hubble system) and a moveable arm that holds the ambient diffuser. The bottom reveals a tripod thread for calibrating projectors. When measuring, a blue LED flashes.

The i1Profiler software auto-detects any type of LCD screen or projector in Basic mode. The user can overrule the software’s choice in Advanced mode, which also enables more features, such as quality control, automatic ambient light adjustment, and testing uniformity of your display.

Our test in Basic mode resulted in calibration settings that were too bright. (Apparently, this is done to open up shadows but happens at the cost of overexposing bright areas.) Using the largest patch number in Advanced mode, the calibration and profile were much better—delta-E of less than 4 (in Basic it was less than 6); however, it took more time (10 minutes instead of 4) to finish calibration. The software erroneously detected Automatic Display Control (ADC) support on my system.

With i1Profiler software, the user enjoys automatic correction (or notification) of luminance levels to changing ambient light at three different time intervals. The ADC support and compensation for glare can be enabled during calibration. For quality checks, you can use a color target, an image, or a Pantone color swatch.

Company: X-Rite, Inc.
Price: $269
Web: www.xrite.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Ease-of-use; speed; flexibility; accuracy
Not: Not terribly accurate in Basic mode