EXCITING NEWS!
onOne has announced Perfect Photo Suite 9. It's available for preorder now and will be ready to install by late October.
Anyone who follows my photography knows that I love onOne's products. I started using Genuine Fractals (now Perfect Resize) to enlarge film scans about 15 years ago, and I've been using onOne in my workflow ever sense. I love Perfect Photo Suite 8.5 and am really exicted to get my hands on Suite 9 next month!
onOne's Perfect Photo Suite 8.5 is filled with powerful yet intuitive, user-friendly editing tools and Suite 9 promises to not only improve on this, but adds some really exciting new power toys. Here are a just a few that I'm the most excited to try out...
Lightning-Fast Preview Mode:
Perfect Browse 9 has a new lightning-fast preview mode that allows us to see previews of our RAW files instantly as we import them. Imagine culling, sorting and applying metadata to images instantaneously as they download from the camera or memory card. No more waiting for all the files to download and new previews to be built before I can even sort through the obvious out-of-focus culls.
After quickly culling and sorting in Perfect Browse, we can either work on the best images directly, using Suite 9 as a stand alone, or we can import them into our our favorite RAW developer like Lightroom or Aperture pre-culled and with all the applied metadata from Perfect Browse intact! This feature alone is going to be a HUGE timesaver. Anything that saves me time in post means I have more time to be creative in the field, which leads to more post... It's a vicious cycle isn't it?
Smart Photos:
Wait, photos with built-in intelligence? Photos that can edit themselves? No, not quite yet, but Smart Photos are a great step forward nonetheless. Many of us who have been enjoying onOne's easy-to-use, layered workflow have long wished that each of our filter adjustments, layers and masks could be retained to re-edit whenever we wish. Now with Smart Photos, that wish becomes reality!
Faster Processing:
onOne is promising that Perfect Photo Suite 9 will load filters and presets 30% faster than before. Along with the the new lightning-fast preview mode, this processing speed boost is going to shave time off my editing workflow. Anything that saves me time in post production gives me more time to be out creating new images behind the camera. Nothing makes me more happy than that!
Improved Perfect Brush:
All of us who use the Perfect Brush love it. The Perfect Brush enables us to quickly and simply paint effects in and out of specific parts of an image.As amazing as the Perfect Brush is, onOne is promising dramatically improved edge smoothing performance in Perfect Photo Suite 9.
Noise Reduction:
I always say that noise reduction and sharpening are an art unto themselves. When I talk to fellow photographers about this I get a plethora of answers about how each of them address noise reduction. It's something that onOne hasn't offered before and I'm really happy to see them include it in Suite 9. I can't wait to try it out.
A Host of other Improvements:
I've touched on the new features that I'm most excited about, but there are scads of other new goodies in Suite 9 to talk about. A streamlined interface, improved masking, brand new effects, killer new cropping tools, simplification of controls and the list goes on. If you haven't yet experienced photo editing in onOne's Perfect Photo Suite but are curious after reading this, check out this video of me working on a low light image from the Enchantments.
If you want Suite 9 as soon as it comes out, I know I do, you can pre-order it as either an upgrade or as a first time user. Using the links provided on this blog (like this one) will help support my photography habit. Think of it as a tip jar and thanks in advance everybody!
Finally A Hopeful Suggestion:
I'm really hoping that along with all these improvements the engineers at onOne add an option in the preferences to allow me to set which hard drive the suite writes data to when my computer's RAM fills up. I only need this because I frequently work with HUGE panoramic merger files on a new Mac Pro computer with a small solid state system drive. Sometimes when I load a 300 megapixel panoramic and start building up masked effect layers, my 32GB of ram and limited free system drive space fill up too quickly. I'd rather have onOne use my fast external dedicated scratch drives the way I do when video or time-lapse editing in Adobe Premiere. I don't know if this feature is built into Suite 9 yet, but I'm hoping for it and keeping my fingers crossed...
