It should come as no surprise to digital photographers that, within 48 hours of Apple’s October 2005 Aperture debut, iView Multimedia and Extensis both announced new versions of their own products. Adobe also released new photo software in January.
iView Media Pro Version 3 has some great new features, including a lightbox, better workflow tools and an improved user interface. The Pro Lightbox lets you compare up to four images side by side in a full-screen view, including the histograms, labels and rating for each image. This is very useful for comparing multiple shots of the same subject.
It should come as no surprise to digital photographers that, within 48 hours of Apple’s October 2005 Aperture debut, iView Multimedia and Extensis both announced new versions of their own products. Adobe also released new photo software in January.
iView Media Pro Version 3 has some great new features, including a lightbox, better workflow tools and an improved user interface. The Pro Lightbox lets you compare up to four images side by side in a full-screen view, including the histograms, labels and rating for each image. This is very useful for comparing multiple shots of the same subject.
You can even scroll and zoom in on the same point in all the images, simultaneously or individually.In the workflow area, iView has streamlined the annotations process, providing a user-defined, controlled vocabulary for keyword sorting that is 100 percent compliant with the industry standards for IPTC/XMP Core. This means that you can create your own lists of words to use to describe images and limit entries in the database to just those lists. Those lists can be hierarchical, so if you have a list for cities and countries, by annotating an image with the city, you automatically will get the country. The import features also have been improved, providing you with the ability to batch rename, caption and store in the proper folder as part of the import process.
The user interface also has been improved, especially for searching. The new Visual Search feature lets you select and view subsets of images just by clicking the proper keywords and catalog information.
Extensis also released a major upgrade to its flagship product, Portfolio 8, in December.
Many of the new features in Portfolio 8 are designed to speed up workflow. Improved background cataloging, custom sorts, scratch-pad galleries and enhancements to the built-in synchronization features will make it easier and quicker for users to process their files.
It is now even easier to get started using Portfolio and to find guidance when needed. A new series of sample catalogs are provided for specific tasks, such as professional photography and stock image management.
Additionally, Portfolio can now use automatically created screen previews for making CDs, DVDs, web sites and e-mails, making the process of sharing even offline files significantly faster. The Portfolio 8 product line includes both stand-alone and client/server versions.
In mid-January, Adobe responded to Aperture with a public beta of its program, called Lightroom. Like Aperture, this new Adobe product is intended to address the most critical segments of pro digital photography workflow.
While it’s still a bit early to draw any final conclusions, it’s been generally noted that, although Lightroom lacks the innovative user interface of Aperture and doesn’t provide as useful a process for selecting and sorting images, its speed and feature-set advantages make it a worthy competitor.In addition, the fact that Lightroom can be run on Windows as well as on Macintosh machines gives Adobe a larger market for its product.The recent entries into the digital workflow marketplace from Apple and Adobe will certainly raise the bar and keep both companies on their toes, to the benefit of all digital workflow enthusiasts.
