Click on the links above to get a little bit more information on this tour, and why you should come.  I can guarantee that you are going to learn at ton at these spots – I for one am super excited to be able to get to you guys out there.

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The Edge 80 Optic is the newest addition to the Lensbaby Optic Swap System. It’s a tilt-shift optic that, when tilted, creates a sharp area of focus through the photo that’s bordered by a blur. Move the lens left or right to create a vertical area (or slice) of focus, up or down for a horizontal area, and diagonally for, well, you get the point. It takes some practice to consistently achieve the desired results. When pointed straight ahead, it can be used as a traditional lens.

Edge 80 is an 80mm f/2.8–22 lens with an aperture ring on the optic itself, as opposed to the washers that you manually change on other Lensbaby optics. It’s compatible with Lensbaby Composer Pro, Composer, Muse, Scout, and Control Freak lens bodies.

The quality of the optic is very good and Edge 80 shouldn’t be thought of as a novelty lens. The aperture ring shifts securely between f-stops and the focus ring is smooth. Lensbaby claims a minimum focusing distance of 19″ (17″ when tilted). To achieve this distance, manually pull the end of the lens, the part that looks like a filter, to extend it and enter close focus mode. The transition from sharp focus to blur is subtle, yielding pleasing results. To get the full effect of a tilt-shift-type lens, you need to use larger apertures. When at f/16 or f/22, the effect is not too pronounced; however, at f/2.8 or f/4, the results are much more dramatic.

Tilt-shift lenses are expensive; very expensive. The Edge 80 optic is a solid option for photographers who are on a budget, especially if you already own a Lensbaby lens body.

Company: Lensbaby Inc.
Price: $300
Web: www.lensbaby.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Quality; built-in aperture ring; price
Not: Learning curve

So take a minute today and join NAPP president Scott Kelby and Photoshop Guy Matt Kloskowski as they cover everything you need to know about the beta with helpful video tutorials and tips.

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You’ve been working in Photoshop and just finished designing a knockout interface for a website and its companion app. Now you’re faced with the daunting task of slicing and exporting layers into PNG files for the final product. PNG Express is about to make your life easier.

PNG Express is a powerful plug-in that allows you to add tags to the names of groups and layers and, with the click of a button, exports them into PNG files. Let’s say you design a series of buttons with multiple states. By creating a group containing each button’s layers and adding the prefix “PNG:” to the group’s name, you’re telling PNG Express which layers to export. By adding the prefix “STATE:_on” or “STATE:_off” to the label of the corresponding layers in a group, PNG Express will export and name resulting files based on the state. For example, a group named “PNG:map” containing layers labeled STATE:_on and STATE:_off will result in the following files be exported: map_on.png and map_off.png. Adding the suffix “–m” to a layer or group’s name will merge the layer with other visible layers. This is particularly helpful if you have layers containing blends that interact with other layers. Another great feature is the ability to specify the exact dimensions of the asset to be exported, rather than being restricted to PNG Express’ determination.

I found PNG Express to be a stable product that significantly reduces development time. The documentation and example files make it easy to learn the program. PNG Express is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or newer for both Mac and Windows.

Company: Rune Lund-Hermansen
Price: $29 (single user); $129 (unlimited business)
Web: www.pngexpress.com
Rating: 5
Hot:  Saves time
Not: 

Hydra Pro 3 from Creaceed SPRL allows you to create high-dynamic-range (HDR) images. You can import up to seven regular photos to this image editor and it will create a stunning final image, called an HDR image. I found it to be one heck of a simple program, while still providing ample creative control.

This seven-image limit is enough for most common situations, such as a brightly lit room with an even more brightly lit window. Of the five scenes I used for testing Hydra Pro 3, two certainly covered the 16 or 24 f-stops the human eye can see. Those required more images (12 and 16, respectively) to avoid banding and noise.

Hydra Pro 3 has excellent automatic alignment and ghost-removal features, but even better, you can manually adjust these with intuitive tools, such as the X-ray feature, to align images. The ghost-removal feature is just as intuitive and more powerful than any competitors’ products.

The program has presets, as well as global and local adjustments. The local adjustments are grouped together in a drop-down menu that, at first sight, looks overly simple: Details, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, and Brightness. You can, however, adjust all areas (light and dark), and red, green, or blue channels individually, as well. And you can add up to three probes—adjustments localized using an easy-to-set, but accurate mask. In between your edits, you can save snapshots to switch between variants.

Hydra Pro 3 exports to TIFF, JPEG, 32-bit OpenEXR, and Radiance. It also supports batch processing and comes with plug-ins for Aperture and Lightroom.

Company: Creaceed SPRL
Price: $99.99
Web: www.creaceed.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot:  Easy to use; alignment and ghost removal; creative features
Not:  Only seven images supported

As many industries and consumers migrate toward cloud-based storage, there are still advantages to physical drive solutions that don’t require any Internet connection, and many offer speeds that are simply not possible for most consumer connections. Factor in drive performance and the addition of an mSATA SSD card (sold separately), and you have the Drobo Mini. It’s leaner and meaner than other Drobo models, but those features come at a lofty price.

Unlike its predecessors, the Drobo Mini has some new technologies that might make you forget about cloud-based storage solutions and think more about the new Thunderbolt connectivity, as well as USB 3, which provides greater portability. Although the Mini doesn’t offer network connectivity, if you have a late-model computer, you may not miss it with Thunderbolt. Drobo provides faster transfer speeds in the Mini than most earlier Drobos, and offers up to 4 TB of storage across four 2.5″ SATA disk drive bays, and an mSATA SSD to boost performance. Like other Drobo models, you can upgrade and intermingle various drive sizes but, for the fastest solution, Drobo recommends 7,200-RPM SATA II or III hard drives, plus a 32-GB mSATA SSD. The model we tested had four Seagate Momentus 750-GB, 7,200-RPM drives and a Crucial m4 mSATA 32-GB SSD with a total street price of around $970.

As a storage device, the Mini works like any other external drive when you drag folders and files. With the Drobo Mini, a 1-GB video-file transfer took more than just the few seconds anticipated, but it was approximately five times (5x) faster than our Drobo S, and nearly 20x faster than our original Drobo. The results were similar with a 5-GB folder of digital images. Although the Drobo’s BeyondRAID setup is proprietary, it’s invisible to the end user because the Drobo Dashboard configures your Mini after installation and keeps everything up to date for you. Drobo’s single- or dual-drive redundancy helps protect data from drive failure, as well. This is plenty of performance for most commercial photographers, videographers, and designers who need this amount of storage space on site. Upgrading drives is easy, and the bays are hot swappable. All of this technology makes for what’s clearly the most reliable Drobo storage solution to date.

Its slim design is pure Drobo, only smaller. At a little less than 2″ high, approximately 7″ deep, and 7″ wide, this smaller (for Drobo) footprint and its weight of 2.2 lbs make it more portable. The Mini also features the beloved Drobo blinking spread of drive-activity lights and an illuminating front-frame perimeter. The rear panel consists of two cooling fan vents, a power port, USB 3, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports for easy daisy-chain connections with additional devices. The undercarriage is where the mSATA SSD hides under a roughly 1×3″ panel.

The Drobo Mini is clearly a leap forward in performance, but it may still have room to improve in speed when compared to similar storage solutions from competitors. Being one of the relatively early Thunderbolt solutions, however, does give Drobo an advantage over current offerings such as LaCie’s 2big 4-TB RAID storage ($599), which only connects via Thunderbolt; and Other World Computing’s 4-TB Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 w/eSATA ($564.99), which doesn’t offer USB 3 or Thunderbolt connectivity. G-Technology offers the 4-TB G-Speed eS with optional RAID card ($899.95), but it has a larger form factor.

The key is to find the storage you need, with excellent performance, but without breaking the bank. In this case, Drobo Mini is faster than previous Drobo models, but maybe not as fast as some of their competitors. With a relatively fair price for this level of RAID quality, fans of Drobo will love everything that’s familiar about the simplicity and design of the Mini. If you need this amount of speed, security, and compact size with a lot of storage space, check out the Drobo Mini. While it may not win any races, it should keep your head out of the clouds.

Company: Drobo, Inc.
Price: $649 (body only; drives are extra)
Web: www.drobo.com
Rating: 3
Hot:  Compact; battery for cached data; Thunderbolt/USB
Not:  Boot-up time; speed vs. competitor’s products, price

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