>> Filter Forge Freepack 3 - Free Photoshop Plugins

+ Filter Forge, Inc. today released Filter Forge Freepack 3 - Frames, and announced a 20% discount for its flagship product, Filter Forge. The theme of the third Filter Forge freepack is frames -- the plugin comprises seven effect filters, each capable of framing any photo in a creative way. For example, Painting Frame generates realistic wooden frames with paint flaking off; Halftone Frame will frame an image with a pattern of dots of varying size; Simple Frame gives photos a classic elegant feel; Grunge Frame makes a photo look ragged and edgy; and Film Frame produces a black film-like vignette. Over the course of the year 2008, Filter Forge, Inc. plans to release four more Filter Forge freepacks, each centered around a different theme. The freepacks are based on the technology used in the company's flagship product, Filter Forge, an innovative Photoshop plugin allowing users to create their own filters in a visual editor. All Filter Forge freepacks are available for download at the company website: www.filterforge.com/download/.

Download Free Photoshop Brushes*

+ CGIndia, the Graphics magazine has published a handpicked List of Free Photoshop Brushes - the "crème de la crème" of photoshop brushes. Brushes are the most commonly used tool in Photoshop and you can create some amazing effects by using these custom brushes. The List features 15+ free Photoshop brushes resource sites, featuring the best photoshop Brush sets in diffrent categories. The Brushes sets includes; Abstract Vector set, urban photoshop brushes, Skylines brushes set, Tasty Tattoo Photoshop Brushes, Botched Ornaments, Grunge style Brushes - Scratches, Artifacts, Cracks, Crispy Cracks - Grunge PS Brush Set and many more!

>> Free Photoshop Brushes

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Beta*

+ Just few days after announcing the release of Photoshop® Express public beta, Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced Adobe® Photoshop®Lightroom 2.0 Beta, software which enables professional photographers to import, manage and present large volumes of digital photographs, helping photographers spend more time behind the lens and less time at the computer. Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® answers the digital photographer’s call for a workflow application that allows photographers to quickly work with raw format images. With Lightroom you can manage all of your photographs; showcase them in print, dynamic slideshows, and interactive Web galleries that are a simple to produce. Lightroom’s cross platform support allows photographers to effortlessly work on projects from any Windows or Macintosh computer on-location or in the office. Lightroom—spend less time at the computer, and more time behind the lens, doing what you love.
Lightroom 2.0 beta builds on the success of the first Lightroom beta program and provides photographers with early access to our next release so that you can kick the tires and ensure that this release meets your needs. Lightroom 2.0 beta expires at the end of August 2008. For more information and full feature list please visit - click here

Animating Layers in Photoshop CS3 Extended

+ Extended version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 offers some cool features including 3d layers etc. Below is an tutorial about how to Animate layers in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended by Chad Perkins. Join Adobe Certified Instructor Chad Perkins as he guides you through the new world of animation inside Photoshop CS3 Extended in this tutorial from the lynda.com Online Training Library.

Adobe Launches Photoshop Express Public Beta

+ Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Photoshop® Express public beta, a free Rich Internet Application (RIA) available to anyone who wants to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. During the public beta period, Adobe will solicit Photoshop Express user feedback on product features and functionality, which will continue to evolve over time. As the newest addition to the Photoshop family line, Photoshop Express has taken much of Adobe’s best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.
“Photoshop is trusted technology that has changed the visual landscape of our world. Now, Photoshop Express allows anyone who snaps a digital photo to easily achieve the high-impact results for which Adobe is known,” said Doug Mack, vice president of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “Photoshop Express is a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos whether you’re at home, school or on the road.”
Simple, Fun and Accessible
With Photoshop Express, digital photos can be uploaded and sorted anytime, edited non-destructively to always preserve the original image, and shared from anywhere, on any Web browser. In a few easy clicks, Photoshop Express empowers anyone to make standard edits, such as removing blemishes and red-eye, converting to black and white, cropping and resizing, and much more.
No experience is required to add special effects that will impress friends and family. In keeping with its one-click approach, Photoshop Express offers tricks like Pop Color which selects an object in an image, mutes the background color of the photo and allows the user to swap the object’s color so it jumps off the page. Sketch effects help photos look like drawings and the Distort feature allows you to distort facial features or objects within the images for a comical or artistic effect. Even users with limited photo editing knowledge can simply select what looks best from a line-up of sample photos with visual hints showing different variations of the added effect.
Photoshop Express offers a variety of creative sharing options, including uploading and showing off photos and slideshows in your own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, or conveniently embedding or linking photos to social networking sites and personal blogs without having to leave the application. Slideshows never looked better with animation that makes photos float and fly across the screen, allowing for viewer interactivity and unique presentation styles.
Adobe Photoshop Family
Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended are at the heart of the Photoshop family, joined by solutions for users at every level who want to bring out the best in their digital images. Photoshop Lightroom™ addresses the workflow needs of professional and serious amateur photographers. Photoshop Elements provides exciting tools and sharing options for photo hobbyists.
Photoshop Express is the latest step Adobe is taking to leverage the advanced technology that underpins its award-winning creative products and deliver it to new online communities. In early 2007, Adobe also announced the availability of Adobe® Premiere® Express, an online video editing and mash-up tool on partner sites such as MTV and Photobucket. Adobe Premiere Express leverages the functionality found in Premiere Elements, a fully-featured desktop video editing program.
Free and Available Now
Adobe Photoshop Express beta is available now for free via any Web browser at www.photoshop.com/express .

XDepth for Adobe Photoshop

+ XDepth plugins for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are now available free of charge for Windows and MacOS. XDepth Beta 1 for Adobe Photoshop allows High Dynamic Range image compression that is compatible with the widely-spread Jpeg format. XDepth is fully compatible with Jpeg files.In fact you will be able to open .xdp files in any application that supports Jpeg.You can also rename your .xdp files as .jpg and they will still open as HDR in Photoshop. With some synthetic HDR images the XDepth compressed file is 12 times smaller than its HD Photo counterpart and 173 times smaller than the uncompressed HDR image. HDR images are very difficult to compress. Other technologies drop much of the details in darker areas proportionally to the increased contrast.XDepth maintains the same perceived quality throughout the whole image, regardless of the contrast.XDepth offers a variable bit-depth throughout each HDR image thus providing extra precision only where it's required.
>> Download XDepth for photoshop

DAZ Studio 3D Bridge for Photoshop

+ DAZ Productions Inc., a leading developer of professional-quality 3D software and models, announced today the free public beta version of the DAZ Studio™ 3D Bridge for Photoshop© plug-in. Compatible with Photoshop 7, CS, CS2 and CS3, this new plug-in allows DAZ Studio users to automatically apply 3D imagery and artwork to any Photoshop project. To help users build their 3D Photoshop library, DAZ is additionally offering a free 3D Bridge Starter Bundle, valued at over $230. The 3D Bridge Starter Bundle contains DAZ’s best-selling Aiko 3 Base with several textures, hairstyles and poses; a Millennium dragon, cat and dog; a futuristic car, and the ever popular EmotiGuy. The DAZ Studio 3D Bridge for Photoshop makes it easy for users to do the following:

- View 3D scenes as Photoshop layers

- Change objects and figures simultaneously

- Render directly into Photoshop

- Import, export and modify image maps and textures onto 3D models in Photoshop

- Composite 2D and 3D content seamlessly

- Access DAZ’s full library of quality 3D content

Easily pose characters and objects three-dimensionally in DAZ Studio, and see the results immediately in Photoshop. See how you can harness the power of 3D in your next Photoshop project. You don't even need a U3D export. The limited-time public beta version of the DAZ Studio 3D Bridge for Photoshop is now available for free download at www.daz3d.com/3dbridge.

Topaz Vivacity V1.3.1 For Photoshop

+ Topaz Labs LLC, a software company specializing in image and video enhancement technology, releases Topaz Vivacity V1.3.1, a set of Photoshop plug-ins for image enhancement. The breakthrough super-resolution algorithms used in Topaz Vivacity affect a distinct improvement in imperfect images. Avid photographers and graphics professionals will find Topaz Vivacity invaluable in rescuing otherwise unusable images and to enhance images in all aspects. Graphics designers also can create unique special effects with Vivacity filters.Features include:
(1) enlarge images while still maintaining visual clarity
(2) eliminate ISO noise, film grain and other noise with little loss of details
(3) eliminate JPEG and JPEG2000 compression artifacts
(4) sharpen and enhance edges without overshooting or noise amplification
(5) remove color bleeding and recover color edges, and
(6) create special effects.
The major changes in this update are:- support for multi-cpu systems, such as those with Core 2 Duo or Xeon processors. For example, it can provide a 2.5~3.5 times speed increase on computers with a quad-core CPU.- better compatibility with Windows Vista and Photoshop CS3, and- a new convenient installation that automatically installs the plug-ins properly to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.Pricing Topaz Vivacity retails at $49.99 USD. It is available on the Topaz Labs web site at www.topazlabs.com, and many software download sites.

Filter Forge Announces Free Photoshop Plugins

+ Filter Forge, Inc. announced series of free Photoshop plugins and the availability of the first plugin in the series, "Filter Forge Freepack 1 - Metals", which generates photorealistic metal textures and effects.Over the course of the coming year, Filter Forge, Inc. plans to release seven free Photoshop plugins named Filter Forge Freepacks, with each plugin centered around a different theme. The freepacks are based on the technology used in the company's flagship product, Filter Forge, an innovative Photoshop plugin allowing users to create their own filters in a visual editor. Each freepack will be capable of generating seamlessly-tiled textures with professional-grade anti-aliasing, and will take full advantage of modern dual-core processors.
The theme of the first Filter Forge freepack is metals -- the plugin comprises seven filters that produce realistic metal textures and effects. Alien Metal produces a sci-fi texture of an alien-looking metallic surface; Brushed Metal generates a texture of brushed aluminum; Foil produces a texture of crumpled aluminum foil; Diamond Plate creates a texture of an industrial diamond plate floor; Metal Panels generates a metal plating texture; Metalizer produces a smooth metallic surface based on the brightness of the source image; and Rust renders patches of corrosion over the darker areas of the source image. All textures generated by the plugin are seamlessly tiled and can be immediately used as a web background or a game texture.
The free plugin is available for download at the company website: www.filterforge.com/download. Registration is not required. The plugin currently works under Windows only, the OS X version for both Intel and PowerPC processors is in development.

GoMedia's Arsenal Vector Packs - Set #8

+ Jazz Up your Graphic illustrations using these stunning ready to use Vector Art packs, designed by GoMedia, a progressive art and design studio based in Cleveland, Ohio that delivers outstanding creative solutions to their clients all across the globe. GoMedia has released Set #8 of their Arsenal Vector Packs, which sell like hot cakes. Seven individual packs are clubbed together in set #8 featuring 220 high quality and detailed vector pieces including; set of Flourishes, Decorative 2, Arrows 2, Industrial, Religious, Music, and Silhouettes. These Vector packs can be used with adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Corel Draw, while in Photoshop you need to rasterize them. Although all packs included in set #8 are great and have their own purpose of use, but in my opinion Industrial silhouettes vector pack are the one; which is most unique and really useful for making technical or industrial themed illustrations. Above all Jaw dropping 50% discount on set #8 makes it a Steal.

>> Vector Packs set#8

Abstract Vector Photoshop Brushes

via: cgindia

+ Best things in life come for free and so does this great photoshop brushes pack by U.K based digital Graphic artist Paul Willocks. Abstract Vector is "Free Photoshop brushes" set featuring 378 high-quality brushes; made and generously shared Paul. These PS brushes are compatible with CS and CS2 (not sure about CS3). These photoshop brushes are free for personal use only and for using them on any commercial project, please contact Paul Willocks for price quote.

>> download PS brushes

Photoshop® Lightroom™ 1.2 and Photoshop Camera Raw 4.2 plug-in Released

+ Adobe has released Version 1.2 of Photoshop® Lightroom™ and Version 4.2 of Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in, both available for imediate download from adobe.com. The updates offers Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 40D, Fuji FinePix IS-1, Olympus EVOLT E-510, Panasonic DMC-FZ18, and more. Beside additional camera support, Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 1.2 update includes Corrections for several issues including XMP auto-write performance, Windows Vistaﾮ grid display errors, and noise reduction for Bayer patterned sensors.
The camera raw functionality in Adobe® Photoshop® software provides fast and easy access within Photoshop to the "raw" image formats produced by many leading professional and midrange digital cameras. By working with these "digital negatives," you can achieve the results you want with greater artistic control and flexibility while still maintaining the original "raw" files.
>> Camera Raw 4.2 Macintosh ][ Windows®
>> Lightroom 1.2 Macintosh ][ Windows®