presets

VSCO has just announced that it's releasing its popular mobile app photo filters on desktop. The filters are packaged in a pack called VSCO Mobile Presets 01 (MP1).

In Phase One’s recent update to Capture One Pro 10, it added a new Styles & Presets tool for applying presets to images. The company has now begun selling presets in Style Packs, each containing 15 to 18 Styles.

Alien Skin just released the new version of their flagship Exposure software, adding features like a histogram, History panel, and Spot Heal tool that make it a much more powerful stand-alone RAW photo editor than ever before.

When Adobe launched a major Creative Cloud update that brought the powerful new Dehaze slider to Lightroom CC, photographers who had purchased a standalone copy of Lightroom 6 instead of subscribing to Adobe CC didn't receive the new features.

If that describes you, there's some great news for you today: your Lightroom 6.1 can have Dehaze as well thanks to a new free preset pack by Prolost.

VSCO helps photographers easily add the look of film to their images. Lens Distortions does the same thing, except with out of focus glass shards. The service provides a Photoshop Action pack that lets you add an out-of-focus object between you and your subject.

Preset maker Really Nice Images has announced RNI All Films 3.0, a new film simulation suite that aims to rival the software offered by companies such as DXO and VSCO. RNI claims to be so realistic in its simulation of film that film photographers are fooled by resulting photos in blind tests.

It's "simulation more convincing than actual film," Really Nice Images says.

It was around this time last year that we shared a new product called SHORTCUT-S, a 319-key keyboard designed specifically for editing photos in Photoshop.

Creatives soon began asking the company to branch out into other popular programs, and today the company is doing just that. SHORTCUT-S tells us that it will soon be launching dedicated keyboards for 13 other programs, one of which is Adobe Lightroom.

Today, Google has officially announced Analog Efex Pro II, the latest update to its Nik Collection line-up. Striving to “pay homage to the classical, vintage, and alternative processing techniques that photographers used so many years ago,” this update includes a plethora of new features and fixes, further refining the program and taking it to the next level.

VSCO is expanding its popular line of film emulation presets/profiles yet again. The company has announced Film 04, a new pack of emulators that help photographers recreate the look of various slide film stocks in digital photos. It's "the most authentic film emulation available," the company says.

Recently, I was looking through a photo gallery of a potential new hire and was a bit dismayed by her use of a particular photo enhancement editing choice. All of her photos were very overly processed with multiple styles, much like the photo below.  She did have a wonderful eye, and her composition and posing were really lovely. But her processing choices really distracted from the beauty of her work. The people in her photos didn’t look real.

We've featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram's popular filters. What's unique about this new offering is that the presets aren't limited to the latest version of the mobile app's filters -- there's also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.