Although billed with the creative tag of an interactive multimedia tool, Opus Pro 04 is clearly designed with the business user in mind. While this may not be everyone’s cup of Java, the corporate space is obviously where the money is, so a tool that addresses this market directly is definitely worth a look. The company promotes the use of Opus Pro as ...
Profile Mechanic consists of two independent programs, sold separately. Profile Mechanic Monitor can calibrate and write ICC correction profiles for CRT and LCD monitors. It provides a small USB colorimeter sensor with interchangeable supports for both types of monitor. Profile Mechanic Scanner creates correction profiles for any flatbed or transparency scanner, as well as digital cameras.
FileMaker seems to be aiming straight at the content creation market with version 7 of this database solution. There is a new field type called a Container that can be used to store digital pictures, movies, music, and other digital media – up to 4GB per field. It’s not only for the creative side of the business though, as the Container field can handle Word documents, full Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, PowerPoint presentation files, OLE objects, and more.
Despite its position as one of the lowest-cost digital SLRs on the market, the Sigma SD10 has some of the most innovative technology. Together with its SD9 predecessor, released in 2002 but still available, these are the only reasonably high-resolution users of the Foveon X3 sensor – although Polaroid offers a 2mp version on a consumer camera.
Primatte Chromakey is one of two compositing aids for still images we’re testing this month. Like Cinematte, it’s a Photoshop plug-in, and it works on the same principle of removing a single-coloured backdrop from a studio-shot photograph, leaving a natural-looking cutout that can be added to a new background ...
Most digital cameras are rather boxy in shape, so Sony’s higher end cameras are a little different. The DSC-F828 – like its predecessor, the 5-megapixel DSC-F717 – is L-shaped, thanks to its massive lens barrel to one side at the front. The two sections of the unit are joined by a hefty hinge that lets the lens rotate on a perpendicular axis to the body ...
Cinematte is a blue or green screen cutout plug-in for Photoshop that creates natural-looking composites for superimposition over any new background image, or a pure white background. You just need to photograph your subject in front of a standard blue or green screen ...
The Oki C5100n colour LED printer has all the makings of a shared studio laser printer. It has USB 2.0 and ethernet interfaces, as well as plenty of paper capacity, all for a very reasonable £699. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support the Mac platform, it’s slow, and the printer’s output just isn’t good enough to meet the high quality demands of most creative professionals.
Creating Web sites is a lot easier now than it was ten, or even five years ago. NetObjects Fusion has been around since the late 90s offering an easy to use Web site-authoring solution for those who don’t understand HTML and other Web code. NetObjects Fusion maintains this tradition with a host of wizards and tools to create anything from ...
Director MX 2004 is finally shipping, and the upgrade to the premier multimedia-authoring tool boasts some improvements that you’ll notice at first glance. The ability to dock Movie in a Window (MIAW) tools alongside the other Director palettes is great, and the Windows version features some interface enhancements.
For many digital creatives, asset management software stopped being useful when Photoshop 7 introduced the File Browser. However, there’s much more to this application than mere thumbnail browsing.
On paper, the Sovereign Pro looks like a powerful bargain laptop. Based around ATI’s powerful Mobile Radeon 9600 graphics chip and a large 15.1-inch screen, this notebook boasts a desktop processor, a large hard drive, FireWire, USB 2.0, and ...
Minds-Eye-View's Click Away is a utility program for stitching together two circular still images taken back-to-back using a 180+ degree fisheye lens, to produce a seamless fully spherical image. This immersive viewing is useful for things like interactive Web site tours of houses, museums, tourist attractions, and car interiors.
Occasionally an upgrade ditches the ‘ooh’, ‘aah’ new features for an expansive list of seemingly minor updates that combine to leave a wide smile on your face. One such release is Video Toaster 3, the latest version of NewTek’s live production system that the company now calls VT[3], but which UK reseller Onevideo calls Video Toaster 3.
PitStop Professional is a surprisingly versatile utility that helps the accurate professional printing of PDF documents. It's a combination of manual-editing tools with a comprehensive preflight checker, automatic fixing abilities, and Enfocus’ Certified PDF Technology for embedding file history and restoration metadata.
U&I Software’s ArtMatic Voyager is a keenly priced, dedicated 3D landscape generator for Mac OS 9 and OS X that can produce scenes of stunning realism or worlds of fantastic imagination.
Despite Adobe’s decision to drop version numbers and call everything CS, the splash screen reveals what we all knew anyway: this is InDesign 3.0.
Illustrator CS is an old-fashioned upgrade that just gives you some new graphics and type tools to play with. It’s got eye-candy, in other words.
We’ve all been there. There’s an image that you absolutely, positively must use in a Quark document, but the client’s sent you a 300-pixel-wide Web ...
"This is Flash as you know and love it, taken to the next level.” That’s part of the marketing blurb accompanying the launch of Flash ...
