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

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

Well I think the folks at Autodesk have been listening to the content creators since the last release. The new version of the Autodesk 3ds Max Creation Suite 2012 has a lot to brag about. While the Suite includes Motion Builder, Mudbox, and Softimage, this review will focus on 3ds Max. With that said, there are still plenty of cool new features, so let’s get to it.

As artists, programmers, film producers, and production professionals, you know that we’re always under the gun to produce faster, better-quality, stunning visuals. Well, our cries for help have been heard. One of the coolest new features that’s going to help out across the board in 3ds Max, Maya, MotionBuilder, Mudbox, and Softimage is the new Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core, which introduces a completely revamped viewport system that provides much-needed improvements to performance and visual quality. Also, it now has the capability of a “one-click workflow” that allows users to jump easily between Max and the other products in the Entertainment Creation Suite. This feature alone is going to save a ton of time for everyone and will increase productivity (and reduce frustration) considerably.

Another key component that Nitrous brings to the table is that it supports unlimited lights, soft shadows, tone mapping, and high-quality transparency, as well as a host of other new features that will improve quality and creativity. But that’s not all—in addition to high-quality, realistic display, Nitrous viewports can also display stylized images to create a variety of non-photorealistic effects, such as acrylic, ink, colored pencil, colored ink, graphite, pastel, and technical drawing. Wow!

Some of the other cool new features include enhancement to the Ribbon UI; for instance, the modeling Ribbon now correctly adjusts to dark UI color schemes, which allows for faster performance, and offers a more consistent contextual UI location. Also newly implemented in the Ribbon is tooltip-based, contextual Help: When any Ribbon tooltip is open, you just press F1 to bring up Help to the specific section that describes that tool.

The next update that jumps out is the Slate Material Editor, where improvements include the following: You can now use the keyboard to navigate the Material/Map Browser; Undo and Redo now work with the Slate Material Editor operations rather than navigation changes to the active View; and in material, map, and controller nodes, spinners and numeric fields now behave more like the way they do in other parts of the 3ds Max interface.

I know a lot of you may not think this next one is a great feature, but I think it’s what every program should do to speed up the process. New to the 2012 release, the 3ds Max Help function is being published on the Autodesk website, so you can access the latest available documentation there. This change also significantly reduces the footprint of locally installed data to your computer and makes 3ds Max run a bit faster. I don’t know about you, but any gain in productivity and resources works for me.

This new version is a game changer that only gets better the deeper you get into it. As I said before, I think that Autodesk has really stepped it up with this release of 3ds Max Entertainment Creation Suite 2012, keeping 3ds Max on at the top of the 3D world.

Company: Autodesk, Inc.
Price: $6,495
Web: http://usa.autodesk.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Interface; 64-bit for Mac; new brushes/tools
Not: Price may be steep for most

Version Cue was a good idea that never took off. It was too hard to use for small agencies and not robust enough for large ones. Evolphin Zoom 2.8 fills the gap left by Version Cue’s demise—quite nicely, too. The software is easy to install and set up on either Macintosh or Windows.

The Zoom 2.8 software combines project management with user access controls. It can even produce timesheets—a great asset for a time-based agency. Like Version Cue, it keeps backup versions of files as the files are checked back in (committed). The versions can then be compared for changes.

I had no problem with the software on my Mac and Windows systems; within 30 minutes, I had it running and everything worked as described.

Although not available on the website, the basic price breakdown for 1-3 users is $250 per user with no additional charge for the server product; however, for 4–25 users it’s $250 per user and $9,999 for the server product. Perhaps there should be a slightly more tiered price structure; jumping from 3 to 4 users increases the cost $10,000—a bit much for a small 4- to 6-person agency.

Something I’d like in future versions is not to have to use a separate checkout and check-in menu. Instead, it would be nice if users could use the standard Open and Save menus where I envision the software would then bring up the necessary checkout and check-in versioning dialogs.

Zoom offers many more features, both big and small, than this short review can mention. If your company is in need of an all-inclusive project management, version-tracking software system, you should definitely check out Evolphin Zoom 2.8.

Company: Evolphin Software
Price: Based on # of users
Web: www.evolphin.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Provides (relatively) easy-to-use version control
Not: Big price jump for 4+ users

Okay, gang, hold on to your hats! Autodesk has released the new version of the Entertainment Creation Suite 2012 for Maya. This new release not only has killer upgrades to Maya but Autodesk has also made some long overdue improvements to Mudbox and MotionBuilder, as well as the addition of Softimage to the Premium bundle. The Softimage software includes Face Robot (for complex face rigging), the Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) visual programming system, as well as the Lagoa Multiphysics dynamic solver system written in ICE. I’ve only used Softimage sparingly but one of Autodesk’s goals was to bring the programs together (much like the Adobe Creative Suite) to allow them to work together better in a simpler way. They’ve done that with the introduction of the “one-click” send-to functions that allow you to send and receive data from the other programs in the suite quickly and easily, thus increasing productivity drastically. The company has come through with flying colors on this one for sure.

That’s what the bundle has to offer, so let’s take a look at the new features in Maya, MotionBuilder, and Mudbox in the Premium version of Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2012 that we tested.

Maya 2012
There are a ton of new features and enhancements in all of the programs, and while we can’t hit them all, I’ll touch on a few of them. The first thing that’s exciting is the unification of the HumanIK solver and UI between MotionBuilder and Maya. This really pushes to streamline the animation and motion-capture process and is sure to have an impact on the productivity side of your projects.

Another new feature (that’s long overdue) is editable motion trails. These provide a fast workflow directly in the Maya scene for editing the position and timing of keyframes. The motion trails display with your animated models, eliminating the need to leave the scene for the Graph Editor. Updates to the Camera Sequencer include a new playlist for more efficient shot management, improved multitrack audio, and the addition of the Ubercam, which lets you quickly output all shots to a single camera.

Other new features include two new HumanIK windows: the Characterization tool, which allows you to speed up mapping a skeleton to a HumanIK rig, and the Character Controls for quickly selecting parts when animating or pinning and adjusting Reach and Pull settings.

MotionBuilder 2012 and Mudbox 2012
The key to both MotionBuilder and Mudbox 2012 is that they now offer the “one-click” send-to functions that allow you to send and receive data from the other programs in the Entertainment Creation Suite.

Mudbox has become even better with the addition of PTEX, which lets you start painting without having UVs on your mesh and allows you to paint across multiple meshes. Something else that’s really cool: If you want to stay UV free, you can export directly to PTEX files.

MotionBuilder has received its fair share of enhancements, as well: A new Dark GUI and updated character picker; FCurve Editor changes; and new characterization tools; as well as a dockable GUI! Yep, you heard right; finally, a dockable GUI.

Once again, there’s not enough space on one page to really explore the vast new features of the Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2012. The new features are another great step forward for Autodesk, and you definitely owe it to yourself to check it out, as it’s more than worth the upgrade.

Company: Autodesk, Inc.
Price: $6,495 (Standard: $4,995)
Web: http://usa.autodesk.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Interoperability between programs; editable motion trails
Not:

DxO Optics Pro Elite 6.6 is a rich and deep RAW and JPEG image processor/editor. It begins with a unique approach that gives you a big “leg up” on improving the quality of your images. DxO Labs technicians test, measure, and analyze manufacturers’ DSLR camera sensors and lens combinations and group them in modules—there are presently more than 4,512 modules. They find the inherent defects (such as barrel and pin cushioning, vignetting, chromatic aberration, fringing, noise, and much more) and then create precision algorithms that specifically correct for them.

When you select an image to work on, DxO Optics Pro Elite 6.6 recognizes the equipment used in shooting from the EXIF data. It automatically applies the corrections and optimizes your image. I know of no other RAW processor that gives you this much of a timesaving head start; for example, I found it especially effective in correcting lens distortion in architectural shots. Aside from these core corrections, DxO Optics Pro Elite lets you select from a list of additional presets to apply to one image or a batch of images for processing. If by chance your equipment isn’t supported (the website lists supported equipment) or you just want to control the process, the software includes comprehensive manual adjustments.

With each new version, DxO Optics Pro improves its integration with Photoshop and Lightroom, and you can send files on a roundtrip to either application for editing. The current version doesn’t have a print feature but it lets you send processed images to Lightroom or Photoshop for printing.

DxO’s customizable interface allows you to rearrange the palettes and create your own workspace. From the navigation window on the left side of the interface, you access your image folders from your hard drive. DxO Optics Pro Elite 6.6 separates the process into a four-step workflow—select, customize, process, and view—with onscreen help to guide you through each step.

First, you select images that are grouped into a project and appear in filmstrip fashion at the bottom of the interface. Corrections will be applied to these images.

Next, you proceed to the customize step where you can preview the corrections from the presets you’ve chosen. Selecting a single image from the filmstrip lets you view it in the large preview window above the filmstrip. By pressing the D key, you can visually compare this corrected version with the original. You can continue to manually adjust the image with a broad range of editing tools from basic white balance to DxO’s advanced precision multipoint color-correction tool. (This step is analogous to Lightroom’s Develop module.) As you make adjustments, you can create virtual copies.

DxO’s luminance and chrominance noise reduction are particularly good at maintaining detail without softening the image. I shot freely at ISOs higher than 6,400. The single-shot HDR feature does wonders for contrasty images, opening blocked shadows without creating noise, and recovering highlights while maintaining a realistic look. I found it very helpful with interior real estate shots; effectively recovering the bright, exterior landscape seen through windows that otherwise would have been blown out.

When you’re through making edits to your image, the next step is processing, where the corrections are applied. Then you format your files for output as TIFF, DNG, or JPEG, and assign a destination folder. Processing times can be slow—it’s a function of how many files and corrections are being applied. When processing is complete, you can view your files.

DxO Optics Pro Elite 6.6 does an exceptional job of maximizing image quality, from adjusting inherent defects in your equipment to accurately processing colors with rich saturation, smooth transitions, and lots of detail. It’s well suited for RAW processing and worth exploring. Download the 30-day free demo and see for yourself. There’s also a Standard edition available for $169. The Elite addition covers “high-end” cameras, so check the site to see which version you need based on the camera you use.

Company: DxO Labs
Price: $299
Web: www.dxo.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Automatically corrects images based on lens/camera data
Not: No printing or tethering capabilities

Four different Texture Toolkits are currently offered by Digital Juice. I reviewed Texture Toolkit 1 “The Essentials” and Texture Toolkit 2 “Different Strokes.” These are collections of patterns—all high-resolution and most seamlessly repeating—ready for use in your print, Web, animation, or video design work.

Each volume arrives artfully packaged in a slipcase showcasing dozens of the textures included. Using the kit requires Juicer 3.76 or above, which can be downloaded for free from the Digital Juice website (where you’ll also find inspirational galleries and instructional videos). Juicer is Digital Juice’s media management application—a handy catalog browser you use to filter, sort, and export the art (or to send art directly to Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects).

Truth be told, for every hundred useful-looking textures, there are a handful that look like…well, bad wrapping paper patterns (particularly in volume 1, which has some filler textures with no apparent use—like hardboiled egg whites, and hard-on-the-eyes birthday patterns). Eliminating those sad few still leaves you with hundreds of great, seamless patterns to work with. Even at the full, nondiscounted price of the volume, that works out to roughly $0.28 per texture, and I’m willing to bet any designer could make a Texture Toolkit pay for itself in no time. On any given project, I use from one to dozens of textures, so having a huge library like this at my fingertips is quite handy. I’ve barely broken in the first two volumes and have already caught myself looking at Texture Toolkit 3 set on the Digital Juice website (its handmade paper textures look like they’d be great for backgrounds or scrapbook-type layouts).

Company: Digital Juice, Incorporated
Price: $249.95
Web: www.digitaljuice.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Seamless patterns for print, Web, and motion graphics
Not: Time-consuming install; some filler patterns

In the newest update to Corel Painter there are some exciting changes. The interface has undergone a complete overhaul and now provides almost limitless possibilities for customization. You can totally personalize your workflow from palettes and panels to more brushes or fewer brushes. You can choose what to group with what, and add more or have fewer panels and palettes in your own personal workspace. Want a big color wheel and a small Layers panel? No problem, just drag to resize to taste. You can do it all. And now that workspace sharing is back, you can create, export, and import new workspaces to share with other artists
(this is one of the new interface highlights for me).

The Navigator panel is a great addition to Painter 12. No more switching to the Zoom tool to move around a large image. Simply go to the Navigator display and move the red rectangle to the area you wish to move to. The Navigator panel also includes image information such as Width, Height, Resolution, and more.

The Temporal Color palette is another awesome addition that brings the color to you wherever you are in the document. It has a bit of a clunky shortcut (especially for us left-handers), so I advise a hot key on your tablet or pen.

Painter 12 has some big changes to the brush engine. Now it’s easy to customize your brushes (this gets my vote for the best improvement of an existing feature). Not only can you adjust size and opacity on the fly, you can adjust the angle and squeeze, too. Do you have an awesome new variation of a basic brush? Want to save it quickly? Click on the Painter Brushes flyout menu and choose Save Variant. That’s it!

There’s even a custom canvas preset feature. Say you always use a certain resolution, color, and texture. Pick your favorite settings in the New Image dialog, and then click Add to create the preset.

You can also easily create a symmetrical painting with the new Mirror Painting feature—a very cool addition for illustrators. With the Kaleidoscope Painting features, you can create beautiful kaleidoscopes in a few minutes or a few hours because it’s easy to get lost in the creation of these (this has my vote for the coolest new addition to Painter 12). This can be a great stress reliever; what better way to wash away tension than to create a beautiful work of art.

The new Real Watercolor brushes are the closest to traditional watercolors I’ve seen and are unmatched by any other software. The Real Wet Oil brushes are hands down the best brushes out there at simulating traditional oil brushes. The turpentine feature allows you to alter the paint appearance to opaque or transparent and allows for the creation of color washes.

Other features include an enhanced RealBristle painting system, 64-bit support for Windows, a Clone Source palette, and new Gel brushes and Merge modes. Painter 12 also has new digital airbrushes, enhanced Mac OS and Adobe Photoshop support,
and additional file format support for more compatibility with industry standards.

Corel Painter 12 is a great rework of the interface and creates a much more user-friendly atmosphere than ever before. The addition of the new painting modes and the Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil brushes make this upgrade a must-have if you’ve been frustrated by the limitations of customization in past upgrades.

Company: Corel Corporation
Price: $429 (Upgrade: $229)
Web: www.corel.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Kaleidoscopes; customization; 64-bit for Windows
Not: 64-bit for Macs

In spite of a few minor criticisms, version 11 continues to make Toast the industry standard for burning CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs; managing your multimedia for storage or online hosting; and in some aspects, managing your files. Longtime Toast fans will notice a new startup assistant for selecting the type of project. A very simple, clean layout for this inviting user interface is a refreshing change, but power users may wish to turn this feature off by unchecking the box at the bottom-left corner of the window. New users will find video and PDF tutorials under the Help menu.

There’s a noticeable improvement in performance on the software side (given that burn speeds are limited to the capability of your drive), and Roxio has added social media sharing of your video files via Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo with conversion, editing, and audio effects before uploading. Toast also exports video formatted for iOS devices, such as an iPad, but the software could be more space-limitation aware of all of its export types and online hosts in the same way it is for physical media. To add still more value, Toast 11 can capture audio from your system or online.

The only bumps in the road occurred with burning an MP3 CD in that an iTunes library stored on an external drive would not show up in the Media Browser. Also, as simple as it is to move from iTunes to Toast, when dragging-and-dropping the titles to the disc creation window, the software doesn’t recognize when those audio files aren’t in the MP3 format. It will burn the CD regardless of this issue, but the disc will only play the MP3 file types on your player. In spite of these minor issues, Toast Titanium 11 is a great product that continues to set the standard—bar none.

Company: Roxio
Price: $99.99
Web: www.roxio.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Fast; easy; great features and value
Not: Doesn’t recognize all file types to match disc media; doesn’t recognize iTunes library on external drive