New in version 3:

-  Animation Engine rewritten from the ground up
-  New Animated Text to enhance the story telling experience
-  New repository of transition effects
-  New Image Media functionality now includes animation options
within all the themes: Ken Burns, Pan & Zoom, Rotation…
-  Many new themes
-  Improvements in interface & workflow
-  Enhanced Export & Sharing functionality

PulpMotion

In December of 2009, Knox Bronson approached Rae Douglass at the Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley, California with the idea of presenting the first ever gallery exhibit of iPhone photography. Rae said yes, and within days, Knox had created a website and had put out a call for submissions through iphontography bloggers and flickr groups.
Pictures flooded in from all over the world. Amazing pictures, all done on iPhones. No editing on a computer was allowed, and suspect images were checked and removed if found to have been edited elsewhere.
At the end of a 30-day submission window, an independent jury was convened to vote on and choose 200 images. The show opened on January 30th and ran through the month of February, garnering rave reviews and exposing the world to the beauty of this emergent medium and nascent art form.
This is a movie of the 200 finalists, with music by show co-founder, Knox Bronson.

See the video here

reaceed releases the beta version of its latest Mac application: Elasty HD.
Elasty HD is a toolbox for people who like recording movies: it gives access to features pretty common in image processing but quite unusual in movie processing. And some more advanced features are also available…

What’s new in Elasty HD 2.0β?
Stabilization

Improved Motion Tracking
Special Effects
Rotate
Flip
Crop
Separate Rendering for Sound and Image
Scene Breaks (with probe deactivation and reactivation)
Retiming (acceleration and slow motion).

More Information:

Everplay, a bite-sized iTunes alternative, features Last.fm, Cover Flow:Browse. Search. Play.
Flip through your iTunes playlists in one easy-to-navigate cover flow window. Create and manage playlists on-the-fly. Shuffle and play without launching iTunes. Play count and meta data is automatically updated by Everplay’s background daemon as soon as iTunes is launched.

Stream. Share. Shout.
Scrobble your music to Last FM, ban or love tracks. Listen to personalized radio, share music with your friends, leave an artist or user a shout, and discover new music based on similarity with your iTunes collection. Everplay is fully integrated with Last FM web and radio services.

(Via EverPlay.)

Today a new title has been added to BenVista’s digital image enlargement software series PhotoZoom. Following to their release of a new Pro version last Summer, BenVista now released PhotoZoom Classic 3.
With the new product, BenVista strives for widening the PhotoZoom user base. While the Pro version is designed mainly for professionals, PhotoZoom Classic 3 aims at home users. Accessibility forms a key factor here, both with respect to ease-of-use and pricing. Nonetheless, quality has been maintained as much as possible.
BenVista’s CEO, D. Schoolwerth, explains: “The fact that PhotoZoom Classic 3 is designed for home users certainly does not prevent it from producing professional results. The software is equipped with BenVista’s award-winning, patented S-Spline resize technologies. That includes S-Spline XL, a technology which until recently has only been offered by the more expensive PhotoZoom Pro 2, and which is known for its image enlargements of outstanding quality”.
With regard to ease-of-use, Schoolwerth continues: “PhotoZoom Classic 3 offers a number of S-Spline based presets that were specially designed for different types of images. With these presets a lot of preliminary work has already been done, and the user won’t have to bother with technical settings. Results can be compared with one another in a large preview window. This way the user is able to determine in a fast and convenient way which preset is most suitable for enlarging the given image. For example: there is a preset that suppresses noise and compression artifacts. Perfect for images from the Internet!”.
PhotoZoom Classic 3 runs as a stand-alone application, and is available for both Mac OS X and Windows. Free demo versions can be downloaded directly from the BenVista website: www.benvista.com. Also, BenVista offers various upgrade options to registered users.

PhotoZoom3

Aquafadas is pleased to announce the immediate availability of VideoPier and VideoPier HD 1.3. The VideoPier family of products is aimed at videographers who own MPEG-2 or AVCHD camcorders and who struggle with these video formats on their Mac.

The new version now provides complete support for Elgato’s Turbo.264 and Elgato’s Turbo.264 HD. Export directly from VideoPier – exporting to iPod or iPhone is now faster and easier thanks to Elgato’s Turbo.264

In addition, the new version offers tools for clip management. It is possible to delete clips – both from the application and the hard drive. Also, you can now use drag and drop functionality to move clips from one event to another.

Finally, multiple selections are now made easier with a more intuitive line display and an issue with decoding video from Sanyo camcorders has been fixed.

About VideoPier and VideoPier HD
VideoPier and VideoPier HD make it very easy to transfer clips from these camcorders to a central location on their Mac, without requiring any conversion, without any loss in quality. The clips appear grouped by Events in the VideoPier elegant user interface, ready to be viewed, organized and converted to any format.
VideoPier handles equally well data that has already been copied to disk and will let you access all your clips easily. In addition, VideoPier HD lets you capture HDV material directly from tape based HDV camcorders. VideoPier comes with an extensive set of export functionality, to iMovie 06/08, iPhone, Quicktime, and Final Cut, Avid Media Composer only available with VideoPier HD.

More info:

70 Beautiful Dual-Screen Desktop Wallpapers | Graphics | Smashing Magazine:

“Dual displays come in handy when you are working on several projects at the same time. They allow you to separate everything, organize and work efficiently. Dual displays are highly suitable for Web designers, Web developers and graphic designers and they are rapidly gaining on popularity in last years.”

(Via smashingmagazine..)

GIMP 2.6 Adds 32-Bit Support, GUI Improvements [Featured Download]: “

Windows/Mac/Linux (all platforms): GIMP, the free, open-source graphics editor, has come out with a 2.6 version, and it’s put some significant changes into the editor’s interface and back-end operations. New to this version are support for 32 bits per color channel and a new GEGL-based backend (turned on and off in the preferences), polygonal and sectional selection with the Free Select Tool, better handling of windows, toolbars, docked tools, and menus, and a ‘brush dynamics’ sub-menu that gives creators serious control over their pixel-pushing tools. Those are just a few of the many changes in this release. GIMP 2.6 is a free download for Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms, though it’s only (officially) available as source code at the moment. Read on for help installing GIMP 2.6 on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Installing GIMP 2.6

• Ubuntu Linux: If you’re comfortable adding third-party sources to your respositories, one helpful user has built a custom source for both Hardy Heron (8.04) and those testing the alpha of 8.10. You can also grab pre-compiled packages from GetDeb.net (also available as one ZIPed up file), put them together, head there in a terminal and run a sudo dpkg -i * command on them.
• Windows: GimpUsers.com points us to a SourceForge-hosted Windows installer for 2.6.
• Other Linux systems/ Mac OS X: For the moment, you’re stuck with compiling from source, or a lot of Google/forum hunting. Ready to take the source code plunge? Refer to Webmonkey’s guide to compiling.

The changes in 2.6 are welcome to many long-time users and, most likely, anyone held back from adopting the free editor because of technical restrictions. What most of us are seriously looking forward to, however, is the serious user interface overhaul promised for future editions.

Let’s hear from our GIMP, and Photoshop, users: What must-have feature is still missing from the open-source editor? What would you do differently if you were in charge of interface design? Share your gripes and glad-hands in the commments.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Photosynth Opens for User-Created 3D Panoramas [Digital Photos]: “

Photosynth, a Microsoft Live Labs project previously available as a view-only tech preview, now lets those signed up with Windows Live to upload and create their own multi-photo walk-through panoramas. The webapp, which requires an 8MB software installation on the user’s side, can stitch together dozens or hundreds of photos and then let viewers ‘walk’ through them, altering perspective and creating entirely new views from the details of all those shots. That means you not only can show off your new workshop shed in your backyard garden, you can let viewers actually step into it and look around. Pretty cool stuff, although those uploads, and the software itself, can take up a bit of bandwidth and memory. Photosynth requires a free download and a Windows Live ID to use.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Feature: Stitch Photos Into Panoramas with Free Software: “Stitch Photos Into Panoramas with Free Software”

(Via lifehacker.)

OS X Portable Applications: “OS X FOSS portable applications are packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you. Warning: Data and passwords stored with Keychain are not portable!”

(Via freesmug.)

ASCIIsee: “ASCIIsee v1.0.1″

Description
The concept of ASCII art is not a new one, but ASCIIsee provides something new. Like many other ASCII art applications, ASCIIsee can load an image of your choice and then convert it into an ASCII art image. However, unlike many other ASCII art applications, ASCIIsee has some distinct differences. Firstly, its output is in colour. Secondly, by utilizing the varying styles and weights of the fonts installed on your computer, you can use ASCIIsee to build your image from a custom message. The image below has been created with the words “This is a demonstration of ASCIIsee”.

(Via brucerayne.)

Rhapsoft – LiveQuartz: “LiveQuartz is a powerful free image editor. It is based on layers and CoreImage filters. You have the layers on the left and the filters on the right of the window. To edit an image, just drag it into the layers’ list and it will be added as a new layer. LiveQuartz is localized in English, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Persian, Russian and Spanish.”

Image formats:

pdf,
jpeg,
tiff,
png,
gif,
bmp,
pict,
raw,
more elements
Image filters:

Distortion Effect,
Geometry Adjustment,
Halftone Effect,
Color Adjustment,
Color Effect,
Tile Effect,
Stylize,
Sharpen,
Blur,
more elements

(Via livequartz.)

Living the Low End: Web Design

Web designing on older macs. Many web designers feel that they need the latest machines to run web design and image manipulation applications. I debunked the later last week by showing you seashore which is a more than capable web image solution. I personally know a bit of HTML and XHTML code but it’s really not practical to design websites by hand (please spare me the hate mail). If you really want to hand code I think you can find your way to the text editor or Textwrangler. But I’m focusing on WYSIWYG editors (or: What You See Is What You Get), the industry standard WYSIWYG editor is Dream Weaver. Unfortunately Dream Weaver is ridiculously expensive and very bloated. I’m going to examine a great open
source, free, and powerful editor called Kompozer.

(Via macmegasite.)

ChocoFlop – Live! Image and Photo Editing : “CoreImage-based, realtime, non-destructive, high dynamic range Image and Photo Editing Application for Mac OS X “

(Via chocoflop.)