Photoshop CS5
Illustrator CS5
Dreamweaver CS5
Flash CS5
InDesign CS5
After Effects CS5
Premiere Pro CS5
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.
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.
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.
PhotoCopy is an interesting, one-trick wonder plug-in that is easy to use. Essentially, it adjusts an image’s brightness, color, tone, detail, grain, and texture to match either a built-in preset or another loaded image.
Topaz Labs recently released Lens Effects, a plug-in that offers the ability to add a wide variety of lens-type effects to your photos.
The area where more and more developers are focusing their attention seems to be performance to make the dream of one-click corrections more of a reality, eliminating the need for more tweaking after the fact.
onOne Software has rebranded Genuine Fractals, the industry standard for image resizing, as Perfect Resize.
Topaz Labs’ reputation for easy-to-use and effective plug-ins for Photoshop makes them a favorite developer for a lot of photographers and designers—myself included—but while their latest addition, InFocus, is great in theory, it requires more experience and finesse to produce the results in the same ways as its siblings.
This product’s tools make the creation of packaging extremely intuitive, allowing designers of all levels to create folded 3D designs directly in Adobe Illustrator.
While they’re not new to the plug-in market, Boris FX has released their own take on cartoon filters. The Boris Continuum Unit: Cartoon Look breaks out four filters from the larger plug-in package Continuum Complete.
