December 09, 2005

New plug-ins from Alien Skin, GridIron, Akvis

• Longtime Photoshop developer Alien Skin has announced Exposure. “Foremost a film simulator,” the plug-in can “quickly and easily evoke the vivid colors of Velvia®, the rich blacks of Kodachrome®, or the sensitivity of Ektachrome®,” as well as facilitate cross processing, push processing, and glamour portrait softening. [Via] I remember talking to the brilliant photo-illustrator Sanjay Kothari about how he’d simulate film stocks and processes. He asked for just this sort of tool.

• After Effects developer GridIron Software has announced Nucleo, applying the company’s expertise in multi-machine rendering to speeding up single machines with multiple CPUs and/or multi-core processors. Rendering and preview tasks are said to be sped up by as much as 300%. [Via]
• Akvis has updated its Coloriage plug-in for black and white colorization. The tool also looks interesting for trying out color schemes in a photo, colorizing a hand-drawn sketch, and more; see the tutorials on their site. [Via]