Plugins

Snapheal Pro is a standalone app as well as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture. In addition to making a model's skin look perfect, the app has basic image-adjusting tools that you can apply to selected areas.

Photographers often retouch portraits for skin blemishes, and you can do the same when editing a video. The algorithm to make skin smoother and improve its looks is the same, but to accommodate a moving subject, you must have the means to follow the subject's face as it moves across the frames.

Completely Overhauled Compositing Powerhouse Nodes 2 is a video plug-in that works with Apple's Final Cut Pro X and Motion, and Adobe After Effects …

PDF2ID has come a long way since version 2 was last reviewed in Layers magazine (September/October 2009, p. 93). The new version 4 is exclusively for InDesign CC, although the previous version is available for InDesign CS4-CS6.

Piccure is a plug-in for reducing camera shake blur, the same issue that's addressed by the new Shake Reduction filter in Photoshop CC. As with Shake Reduction in Photoshop CC, the usual caveats apply: this won't help images that were not focused correctly, and the more obvious the camera shake, the less effective it will be. In short, don't expect miracles.

Digital Anarchy recently updated its Beauty Box plug-in for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Aperture. It's touted as an "easy and powerful way of smoothing out skin and removing blemishes." That's somewhat true.

For creative professionals, tracking time spent on projects is a necessary fact of life. In an ideal world, your computer would track the time you spend on projects, and you could then adjust the numbers to account for mistakes, and include additional time spent on noncomputer tasks. If you spend most of your billable time in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, InCopy, or Flash, or in Microsoft Office, CreativeWorx offers exactly that possibility with their TimeTracker system.

Adobe has a color-to-black-and-white conversion feature in Photoshop and Lightroom but recently, there's been a growing number of third-party conversion plug-ins. Now, enter BlackMagic from PSKiss with a different approach: It's a set of more than 50 distinctly different, black-and-white Lightroom presets and brushes to convert color files to black and white.