When I was walking the tradeshow floor at Photoshop World last month, I was just amazed at some of the new plug-in applications that are now available for Photoshop. One that really caught my eye is called Fluid Mask 3 by a company called Vertus. A friend and I just stood and watched the demo for a good 15 minutes with our jaws hanging as the company rep made selection after impossible selection with an ease and quickness that was just astounding. Well, now I have a copy and I am going to give it a good run through. I’m not ready to give it a review yet as I have just started playing with it but already I am impressed with the power of this new tool. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the short video on the Vertus site. I’m sure you will be amazed too.
There was also some software that was being demonstrated, but not on the show floor. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the beta software currently under development by OnOne and Nik. I can’t talk about the Nik stuff because I am an official beta-tester and had to sign an NDA but I am really excited with what I have seen so far.
Speaking of beta testing, one of the products from OnOne that we saw was called Liquid Resize and it is currently available to download in beta format right here. It is a slick little piece of software that will let you resize an image, say from 4×6 to 4×5 by throwing out the “unimportant” pixel information and keeping those items that matter. They call it “Content Aware” resizing but whatever it’s called, it is just about the slickest thing I have seen in some time.
Yesterday I got on a Black and White kick and started processing some old images. Here are the results (I should have been cutting my grass but rain and a flat lawn tractor tire kept me inside, what a pitty).
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