Experiment with heavy and light vignette options. In the end editing is all about personal opinion or the job you are trying to complete or get … Which one do you like more?

New Camera App with Infinite, Beautiful Possibilities

Plastic Bullet puts the fun, spontaneity, and unpredictability of plastic-fantastic toy cameras right into your pocket. Just tap to turn your photos into gloriously unpredictable works of art, then tap again to change the look.

Tap the heart to save. Or keep tapping the Refresh button to see new random choices. Each time you tap you get another completely original set of images. If you like one, save it! Plastic Bullet generates infinite possibilities so you’ll never see exactly the same effect twice.

Just like a real plastic camera, photos from Plastic Bullet can be amazing in ways you never expected.

• Watch a video introduction of Plastic Bullet
• Visit the Plastic Bullet product page
• Buy Plastic Bullet now ($1.99 USD)

Highlights

• Get the look of old-fashioned toy cameras like the Lomo and Diana
• Give modern snapshots an artistic look
• Transform images of friends and family
• Photographic art made easy
• Transform photos into beautiful images right on your phone — no computer needed

”A free collection of 32 and 64-bit RAW image decoders for Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Windows Vista introduced a modern and extensible imaging framework called Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The operating system comes with built-in support for several common image formats including jpeg, bmp, png, gif, tiff and HD Photo. WIC makes it possible for 3rd parties to add first-class support for image formats to Windows, complete with thumbnails in Explorer, preview and slideshow support in Photo Gallery / Photo Viewer and metadata search integration.

The FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack provides such platform support for additional formatsand turns Windows Explorer into a raw viewer, through read-only image decoders, simultaneously available in both 32 and 64-bit flavor for Win7, Vista and XP SP3. The codec pack contains 32-bit and 64-bit NEF and 64-bit CR2 codecs, along with 64-bit DNG and a lot more!

WIC-enabled image viewers such as Windows Live™ Photo Gallery, Windows 7′s Media Center and our own FastPictureViewer Professional "automagically" gain the ability to open and view new image formats, play slideshows etc, so does all .NET 3.x and WPF-based applications.

Unconvinced? Since the initial release last September we got tens of thousands of codec packs successfully deployed and thousands of websites pointing at us from all around the world, evenmicrosoft.com points to this page from their Codec Download Page, check it out!

Download the FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack 1.67 (Standalone)
Version 1.67 (Feb 16, 2010) is a minor maintenance release (to keep codecs in sync with FastPictureViewer Professional).

Version 1.66 (Feb 06, 2010) adds support for Sinar CaptureShop (*.cs1) files and Mamiya ZD (*.mef) files.

Version 1.65 (Jan 19, 2010) adds partial support for old Canon EOS 1D and 1Ds files (no metadata).

Version 1.64 (Dec 26, 2009) adds support for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, Canon PowerShot S90, Fuji FinePix S200EXR and Pentax K-x.”

Where did they go?

Well here is the bad news – More than likely if you did not back up your USER file on your old Windows machine those templates might be gone for good.

Here is where to look in Vista and Win 7:

C:/Users/Your User Acct/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Templates

And you thought it would be located in your lightroom catalog? So did I till I lost them all and had to recreate them.

Remember to back up your templates! I would recommend backing up the entire Lightroom user folder under Adobe – Just in case!

Worst case you can just import them in the reinstalled version of Lightroom if needed but at least you have not lost all your hard work.

Some good changes in the past couple versions. Download via the Lightroom 2 Plug-Ins Console – It should prompt you.

Change Log

Version 4.11, 1st October 2009

• PNG watermarks weren’t always working on Mac.

Version 4.00, 30th September 2009

• There’s a new "Canvas" section for placing the (resized) image onto a fixed size canvas. Useful when images have to have a fixed size but you don’t with to crop them.
• Multiple different watermarks may now be added to an image.
• PNG watermarks may now be scaled proportionally.
• Watermarks can now be specified as a percentage of the width or height of the image while preserving the aspect ratio.
• Horizontal/Vertical insets now work in each of the nine watermark positions.
• The limit of 3 text annotations has been removed.
• Fixed a recent bug that stopped TIFF’s being exported in 8-bit mode.
• Fixed a recent bug that stopped borders having no width or height.

• Border widths can now be a percentage of the longest/shortest side.
• Problems related to the saving of presets containing multiple borders have now been solved (I hope!).

Author’s Site: http://timothyarmes.com/lr2mogrify.php

Update is available from your Lightroom Plugins page

The Fractalius plugin creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lightings and high realistic pencil sketches.

This is definitely one of the more fun plugins for photoshop – and I even paid for it because the results can be so cool and fun to play with… Sometimes a plugin should just really mess with pixels and this one does just that.

No details of what has changed yet – but there seems to have been a few fixes lately:

Version 2.12, July 2009

• No Changes listed yet

Version 2.11, 4th July 2009

• The export was being disabled unnecessarily when the watermark height field was empty, even though watermark resizing option was not turned on.

Version 2.00, 2th July 2009

• New JPEG compression option will compress JPEGs to the highest quality that’ll be smaller than the requested file size.
• Text annotations can now include accented characters and other such things.
• Unnecessary punctuation resulting from empty tokens in a text annotation is now removed.
• Text can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so that it’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Watermarks can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so they’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Estoteric errors that resulted from leaving width and height fields blank are now trapped.

For those that use lightroom here are the details of this great export plugin – actually something worth donating money to the author for:

LR2/Mogrify is a Lightroom 2 post-process plug-in that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It’s flexible interface allows you to add borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images.

It’s also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

LR2/Mogrify uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

In contrast to the original LR/Mogrify for Lightroom 1.3 and above, LR2/Mogrify is implemented as a "post-process" plug-in (new to Lightroom 2.0), allowing it to work in tandem with any export plug-in. This allows you to process your images using LR2/Mogrify and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plug-in of your choice.

LR/Mogrify and LR2/Mogrify are donationware plug-ins and are distributed via the Photograper’s Toolbox. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards one of the projects removes this restriction and will give you a serial number that works with both.

You may also be interested in my LR/Enfuse plug-in to blend multiple exposures together.

I have not been a major user of Presets for Lightroom and i have to say that was a point of contention with me and Lightroom. I have a pretty decent amount of experience with Photoshop and both actions and plug-in applications yet I never investigated the world of presets for lightroom.

That all said I was given an opportunity to test the latest set of soon to be released presets from www.CameraDojo.com – The latest set is for B&W work and really produces some great results. Here are a couple examples:

Now you say – Wait a minute that’s a color photo – Well here is where presets become very interesting… Much like those plug-in’s and actions in Photoshop, presets can be combined or stacked to deliver literally 1000’s of combinations and the beauty of Lightroom is the History palette actually lets you understand what you have done and allows for immediate undo’s if you mess up your masterpiece.

I have also (because of the kindness of Kerry Garrison of CameraDojo.com) been provided their other set of presets to test out. You should see more shots and testing and impressions posted about those in the next few weeks.

Highly recommended for those that want to more easily experiment in B&W work in Adobe Lightroom.

Please feel free to post up or email me with any questions.