Mike Wong is the VP of Marketing at onOne Software, located in Portland, Oregon.
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I'm happy to post that Genuine Fractals 5 and Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 are now available. If you purchased Genuine Fractals 4.1 (standard or Print Pro) you will get an email from us in the next day or two with your free upgrade instructions.
Read the full press release here.
Learn more about Genuine Fractals 5 here.
I'm in New York this week for a few days for some events and training at the Calumet Photo store. Acting like a tourist for a day, I did the last free thing to do in New York and took the Staten Island Ferry from Lower Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty over to Staten Island. I thought it would be uneventful, but this is New York and anything can happen. Not to overreact here, but we had a bit of a hard landing. The ferry hit the pier pretty hard, more than a few people fell over contrary to what the story said, but I think everybody looked okay.
Anyway, here are some pictures that I took on the way from Manhattan.
Off to Boston tomorrow. If I get any good shots, I'll post 'em.
All images copyright 2007 Michael Wong
Our very own Dan Harlacher is now blogging! If you don't know Dan, he is the product manager for all of the Photoshop Plug-Ins here at onOne. Dan used to run a couple of photography studios of his own and his wife still runs one. We keep Dan pretty busy recording new product tutorials, traveling across the country speaking and doing demos, but he's somehow found the time to start up his blog. It's brand new, but check it out and subscribe to his RSS feed.
It's been almost 2 years that onOne Software has been in business. We launched our company back in June of 2005 but didn't make it official with a functioning website until a month later in July. Back then, I really liked the colors that we had picked out for the site - some nice soothing grays and a blue that my wife said looked like it came from a West Elm color swatch.
Even though I liked the colors, a part of me had wanted to make the site darker. Black. Dark grays. That kind of thing. Everything seems to "pop" better on a black background. Well, we're coming up on 2 years of having everything up and running and we've decided to revisit our color choices. If you've been to our site at all today, you'll notice a big change in the colors. The layout is pretty much the same, though we've added a lot more content to the individual product pages for those users who have been asking us for more information. We kept the same layout more or less so returning users wouldn't have to figure out where everything is, but we've drastically changed the colors. I'm quite happy with how the whole thing turned out. We've got a great guy working for us who knows HTML, CSS and a bunch of other web acronymns really well and was able to crank this out pretty quickly. His name is Chris and he occasionally answers the phone for Technical Support or Customer Service so if you talk to him, give him a "nice job" on the site redesign.
Ever since we released our PhotoPresets with One-Click WOW! with Jack Davis, we have started getting more and more requests for taking some of our other plug-ins for Photoshop® over to Photoshop Lightroom™ - specifically Genuine Fractals and PhotoFrame Pro. That makes sense as you might think (or have already been telling us), but right now, there's no official support within Lightroom for plug-ins. But there is a way to get frames around your images when using the Print module within Lightroom.
To get a border or edge effect on your image when printing from Lightroom, you need to add a graphical identity plate. Once you add one (or two or three) you can access them from the Identity Plate section in the Print Module. Here's how to do it.
Step 1
Within Lightroom, go to the Lightroom menu and choose Identity Plate Setup...
Step 2
Make sure the checkbox to Enable the Identity Plate is checked and then choose the radio button to "Use a graphical identity plate".
Click the Locate File button and navigate through the dialog box to find the file you want to use. It's important that you use a PNG file that you have saved with transparency. This is the important part. I've found that a 600 pixel by 400 pixel file works pretty good. If you make the file too big, Lightroom slows down considerably when you try to access the frame in the Print module and can take a while to remove it using the Identity Plate Setup dialog. I've printed several different frames that started out as 600 x 400 pixels on images up to 13 x 19 inches on my Epson R2400 and they look good.
After you've chosen your file, go up to the pop-up menu next to the Enable check box, and choose Save As... at the bottom. Give it a name that will help you remember what it is and then click OK.
Step 3
After you've added the frames you want, select the image you want to print and then go to the Print module. Make any necessary adjustments for print size, sharpening, etc and then click on the checkbox (if it's not already checked) for the Identity Plate.
Look closely in the rectangle below the checkbox and in the lower right hand corner, you'll see an arrow pointing down. Click on it and a menu will appear with all of your custom Identity Plates.
Now, just choose the Identity Plate you want to use and it will show up on your image in the center of the Lightroom window. Use the Scale slider to adjust the size or you can grab a corner or side of the frame and adjust the size directly over the image to be printed. You can position the frame however you want.
I've created a bunch (20 to be precise) of frames using PhotoFrame Pro 3.1 in Photoshop CS3 and saved them out in the Identity Plate-friendly PNG format. You can download them here for free. Feel free to use them however you want within Lightroom.
If you download them and use them, please send me an email and let me know how you like them. I used a combination of frames from the Brush, Camera, Marker, Emulsion, Instant Film (aka Pola frames) and some traditional Vignette frames as well as a couple of simple 2 pixel stroke frames. I hope you enjoy them.
One more thing, if you install them and then want to remove them, that's simple. Go to the Identity Plate Setup dialog, click on the pop-up menu next to the Enable checkbox and click the Remove option. Lightroom will walk you through it from there.
[ Update 05-08-2007 ] See an earlier post from Sean McCormack on this technique with credit given to Andreas Noren as the first person (even before the Adobe engineers!) who discovered this technique.
Yesterday was the first day of the 2007 Photoshop World Boston Conference & Expo and what a great day it was. It all started off with Johnny L from Adobe mentioning onOne Software in the Keynote, which was unexpected from us, but tremendously appreciated and exciting.
When the Expo opened, there was a rush of people who at first flew right past our booth and flocked to the Lynda.com booth (I still need to find out what that was all about), but shortly thereafter, we were busy talking to people and it never let up. A big thank you to all of you who stopped by our booth to say hello, ask questions and purchase products. I really enjoy these shows and seeing people get excited about our products and that's what keeps us going and dedicated to building great products.
One of the highlights of my day yesterday was spending about 20 minutes with Vincent Versace before the Expo opened. He showed me aboug 15 prints that he had done for his Black and White Conversion class. Vincent recently converted one of his 5 mega pixel DSLR cameras to a dedicated Infrared camera. If you know Vincent, you know that he likes Genuine Fractals to increase the size of his 5 mega pixel files large enough to be printed at 36" x 44". The prints were amazing. He said he'll give me some of them, so we'll see what happens later today...
The second highlight came when Judy Morse, an attendee & photographer stopped by our booth and rightfully shared with me that earlier in the day she received the Vincent Versace Award for her photo titled "Molokai Infrared". You can see the photo on the Photoshop World Guru Awards page. The thing that Judy wanted to tell me was that she used one of the frames from PhotoFrame Pro to finish off the picture. Looks to me like one of the vignette frames. Nice job Judy! Congratulations!
I am happy to share with you that we've partnered with Dave Cross (Senior Developer, Education & Curriculum for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals) to create another Digital Frame Collection add-on for PhotoFrame Pro 3. The Dave Cross Digital Frame Collection is now available for immediate purchase (requires PhotoFrame Pro 3 or PhotoFrame 3 Elements) for $39.95.
Dave has created 20 great new frames that I think you're really going to love. Here's a sample of a few of his frames on his own images. All photos copyright Dave Cross.
Be sure to check out these frames. They're really good. You can learn more about Dave at his website at http://www.dcross.com.
