The Mac is in the midst of a photo editor renaissance, with applications like Photos for macOS continuing to improve and third-party options likes Affinity Photo popping up. Adobe, too, recently launched Lightroom CC, an all new cloud-based version of Lightroom for the Mac. Today, Macphun, the developers behind several popular photography applications for macOS, are introducing Luminar 2018, their answer to the increasingly competitive software landscape.
Black Friday is upon us and there is a long list of great deals on accessories, software and more for all of your Apple devices. Below we’ve collected some of the best we’ve seen, and check back often throughout the weekend as we update with more finds. Below you’ll find some significant discounts on popular iPhone, iPad, and Mac accessories, as well as some deals on rarely discounted software: Expand Expanding Close
Expanding its suite of outstanding photo editing apps, Macphun today announced Aurora HDR, a powerful but easy-to-use tool for creating High Dynamic Range images. Co-developed by leading HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff, Aurora HDR automatically combines several exposures of the same image, bringing out bright colors and shadow detail that are lost by a single exposure.
Unlike typical HDR compositing, which yields a finished image that’s hard to meaningfully edit, Aurora HDR includes nearly 40 one-click presets to change the look of the image, including Signature Pro presets developed by Ratcliff. The app can be used in standalone or plug-in modes, and incorporates a large collection of detail, noise, and intensity adjustment tools borrowed from Macphun’s Creative Kit 2016 (reviewed here), notably including selective adjustment brushes.
Great photographers are made, not born, and even the best photographers have plenty of unimpressive shots in their collections. But in the age of digital photography, it’s possible to create a great photograph without being a great photographer. You can even accomplish this days after snapping your photo, so long as you have the right post-processing software and a little time to play around.
Macphun’s Creative Kit 2016 ($150) provides photographers of all skill levels with six different tools that make bland or imperfect photos look great. This year’s Creative Kit includes the Pro versions of Macphun’s Focus, FX Photo Studio, Intensify, Noiseless, Snapheal, and Tonality, each renamed “CK” and expanded with extra features. All six of the apps are designed to be super easy to use, yielding great results even without diving into the manual controls, though there are rewards for tweaking their settings. Better yet, the standalone apps now work as plug-ins for OS X Photos, Aperture, Photoshop, and Lightroom, and can easily be used in combination with one another for even more powerful editing…
Macphun, maker of elegantly powerful photo editing tools including Tonality, Noiseless, and FX Photo Studio, has announced the impending release of Creative Kit 2016 — a bundle of 6 of the company’s Pro apps for a discounted price of $150. Creative Kit 2016 includes:
Noiseless CK (reviewed here) and Tonality CK (reviewed here), separately capable of eliminating various types of noise from images, and converting color images into beautiful black and white versions — both highly impressive, as our reviews discuss;
FX Photo Studio CK, a filter, frame, and brush-based photo editing tool that lets you convert simple photos into pieces of art; and
Snapheal CK, Focus CK, and Intensify CK, apps to erase unwanted items from photos, add lens effects such as blurs, or enhance subtle details in your images, respectively…
Even though it’s known as “black and white photography,” balanced grays are what make monochrome images striking or flat. Today, MacPhun released Tonality 1.2 ($18) and Tonality Pro 1.2 ($70), tools designed specifically for making the best possible black and white images from color photos. Both versions work with popular photo library management tools, newly including the Mac version of Apple Photos. The Pro version now plugs into Adobe’s new Lightroom CC, and adds RAW support for both new cameras and Lightroom.
Like MacPhun’s excellent noise-removing app Noiseless, Tonality uses a super-simple interface to let you preview potential changes to your images. The window’s bottom initially scrolls across 13 “Basic” presets, ranging from the intelligent “Adaptive Exposure” to the simpler “Underexposed;” 10 different categories collectively contain 150 different presets. Each preset effect starts at maximum, but can be muted using a single slider. Power users can access a right-side pane with controls for exposure, contrast, clarity, structure/micro-structure, color and tone filters, split-toning, glow, blur, vignette, and grain. Additionally, masking tools and a gradient filter let you alter specific areas of your images while leaving others untouched. The differences are so dramatic that you’ll never feel satisfied with a one-step “apply B&W filter” button again.
As a serious photographer, I do as much as I can to make my daily shots excellent, using cameras with low-noise sensors and fast lenses — then trying to keep them as steady as possible in low light. But even the latest and best cameras can’t snap perfectly clean images in dark surroundings. Grainy noise is basically inevitable in darkness, and the more basic the camera you’re using, the more likely it is to appear in a wider variety of pictures. To reduce noise, you can either shell out thousands of dollars for new camera gear, or try to fix your noisy photos with software.
Having spent years trying to fix noisy photos with software, including the noise reduction filters included with fully-featured photo editing applications such as Adobe’s Photoshop, I can tell you that the results typically aren’t great. Unless you’re willing to invest in an expensive noise-reduction plug-in, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to clean your image up, and it probably won’t be beautiful when you’re done. So when I learned about MacPhun’s Noiseless ($18), an app designed to do only one thing — eliminate noise — I was simultaneously skeptical and intrigued. Given that standalone noise-reduction apps often sell for 4 to 8 times as much, could an affordable single-purpose app meaningfully improve some seriously messed-up photos? The answer is “yes,” and at a far lower price than buying a comparably noise-free camera…
