Expression Media 1.0 - Microsoft

For many digital photographers in the late 1990s and early into this decade, iView MediaPro was the image manager of choice. It was fast, flexible, and easy to use, complementing Adobe Photoshop () and providing a clean way to manage your files. In mid-2006, Microsoft bought MediaPro's parent company, iView Multimedia, and the program is now marketed as Expression Media, part of Microsoft's Expression Studio... read more at Macworld

Alien Skin Software Image Doctor 2 - Alien Skin Software

Alien Skin is best known for its special effects Photoshop plug-ins - EyeCandy, Xenofex and Splat. But it's also responsible for Image Doctor, which has been newly upgraded with an enhanced feature set... read more at MacUserUK

GraphicConverter X 6.0.1 - LemkeSoft

First things first: GraphicConverter's name is too modest. Converting between a large number of formats is far from all it does - it also has a selection of image-editing tools such as red-eye removal. The range of compatible formats is constantly expanding, and it can now import the HD Photo format... read more at MacUserUK

Vertus Fluid Mask 3 - Vertus

Adobe keeps infusing more masking magic into its various Photoshop iterations, but digital-imaging wizards need all the help they can get when it comes to perhaps the most difficult imaging task: the challenge of separating an object from its background. Fluid Mask 3 is an impressive, time-saving tool that focuses on this challenge... read more at MacLife

BenVista PhotoZoom Pro 2 - BenVista

Why is that when you enlarge a photo, it looks great on your computer screen, but then when you print the enlargement, it’s a big old mess? The edges become saw-toothed lines, and JPEG artifacts - those big square blocks that make up color in low-resolution images - mar your once-beautiful photo almost beyond recognition... read more at MacLife

Snap Art - Alien Skin Software

Turning a photograph into digital art is no easy task. Fortunately, Alien Skin’s Snap Art plug-infor Adobe Photoshop and other photo editors takes the heavy lifting out of creating sketches, paintings, comics, and stylized illustrations from photographs. Designed for both hobbyists and professional artists, Snap Art consists of ten natural-media art filters... read more at Macworld

iPhoto '08 - Apple

Five years ago, when iPhoto was first released, digital cameras were not yet ubiquitous, and organizing photos on your Mac meant putting files into folders and praying that you could keep track of which version of which photo was the right one. Since that time, we’ve seen the rise of the inexpensive digital SLR, the emergence of the Raw file format... read more at Macworld

LightZone 3.0 - Light Crafts

It’s a great time to be a digital photographer. The price of digital SLR cameras are falling, and in the last year or so some amazing new software packages have debuted that make advanced photo editing easier and more affordable than ever before. Among the most intuitive is a relatively new kid on the block called LightZone, and it’s gaining popularity... read more at Macworld

PhotoScore Ultimate 5 - Neuratron

Optical character recognition is nothing new: applications have been turning scanned pages into live text for years. But PhotoScore Ultimate takes the process to a new level with its ability to read sheet music... read more at MacUserUK

PictoColor iCorrect Portrait 1.5 - PictoColor

PictoColor's iCorrect Portrait is a Photoshop-compatible filter plug-in designed to make colour correction a simpler and more reliably repeatable task than it is with Photoshop's existing feature set... read more at MacUserUK

PictoColor iCorrect EditLab 6.0 - PictoColor

PictoColor is a developer with a very specific stable of tools; its speciality is colour correction and processing, and iCorrect EditLab ProApp 6.0 is a standalone product that helps to produce professional-quality colour-corrected photos, reliably, easily and consistently. As well as helping process images individually, this tool is designed to help batch-process images and even perform corrections essentially automatically... read more at MacUserUK

Morpheus Photo Animation Suite Mac v3 Professional - Morpheus Software

Morphing - creating smooth transitions between pairs of images - has been around for years. The third version of Morpheus Photo Animation Suite brings together three applications in one, allowing complex morphs to be constructed with relative ease... read more at MacUserUK

PhotoFract 2 - Human Software

Like the mullet haircut, fractals aren't really making a comeback; we've just stopped pretending they went away. These zoomable patterns are produced by simple equations with complex numbers that have a 'real' part and an 'imaginary' part based on i, the square root of -1. Various fractal programs are available for the Mac, including the shareware Fractal Domains (fractaldomains.com), but the point of PhotoFract is to do it within Photoshop... read more at MacUserUK

Geophoto 1.1 - Ovolab

After the vacation of your life, all you have are your photos. With Geophoto, you can give your photos context by tagging them with global coordinates. The software displays a globe with photo thumbnails that are assigned to specific locations, and it's fun to spin and stop the globe and click to look at pictures... read more at MacUserUK

Photoshop CS3 Extended - Adobe

Photoshop CS3 Extended includes all of the same features as Photoshop CS3 but adds a brand-new set of tools and capabilities for the integration of 3-D models, video and animation, and image measurement and analysis... read more at Macworld

Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 - Adobe

Adobe Photoshop slices, dices, and in the hands of an expert, it can turn photographic water into wine - or so it would seem. True, Photoshop has been the catchall application for digital-photography enthusiasts and pros, but it was designed for editing individual images... read more at MacLife

Fluid Mask 2.0 - Vertus

For the uninitiated, a mask in an imaging application such as Photoshop protects specific areas of your image. Photoshop CS2's approach to complex background masking leaves much to be desired. And although masking is greatly improved in Photoshop CS3, if you don't plan to upgrade right away, you'd be wise to consider Vertus's Fluid Mask... read more at MacLife

Instant Gallery 1.7 - Alien Skin Software

There are dozens of gallery-making applications that offer a little bit more style and customisation than you find in iPhoto, and Instant Gallery is one of the nicer ones of the bunch. It looks very restrained and minimalist, but packs in a lot of features and some flair for making elegant, modern gallery pages in a snap... read more at MacUserUK

Alien Skin SnapArt - Alien Skin Software

There has long been a vogue for treating photographs to make them resemble paintings and drawings. There are a number of filters within Photoshop that aim to perform the task, although these are frequently clumsy and difficult to use effectively... read more at MacUserUK

Adobe Photoshop CS3 - Adobe

Adobe has never before released a public beta of Photoshop, and the fact that it has been released this early in the product cycle is testament to the pressure brought specifically by Mac users frustrated at not yet having a native version of Photoshop to run on Intel Macs... read more at MacUserUK

Stitcher Unlimited 5.5 - Real Viz

Stitcher Unlimited is a very different tool than PTGui, because it's mainly used as a QuickTime VR authoring tool à la Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio (may it rest in peace). But Stitcher was one of the earliest (and, for a long time, one of the best) tools available for creating panoramic images... read more at MacLife

PTGui 6.0.3 - New House Internet Services

The application has simple and advanced modes. Simple mode automates most of the three-step process of stitching together photos to create a panorama. Images load and fall into their approximate positions with amazing speed. Control points, which match identical features in overlapping image areas, set themselves without prompting, too... read more at MacLife

Bibble Pro 4.9 - Bibble Labs

When digital photographers shoot in RAW mode, the image data is transferred directly from the imaging chip to the storage medium without any processing or compression. Most serious photographers prefer this unaltered state because it offers the most freedom to achieve cool effects and touch up images in postproduction. Many photographers use applications like Bibble Pro to tweak large batches of photos to perfection... read more at MacLife

Blow Up - Alien Skin Software

Enlarging images in Photoshop is part art, part science. The art part is a combination of skill and good fortune. The science part is more predictable: The fewer pixels an image has, the worse it will look the more you enlarge it. When you need to take a small, low-resolution image—usually from the Web—and enlarge it for print publication, you usually get a cruddy-looking, obviously pixelated picture... read more at MacLife

PhotoFrame Pro 3 - onOne Software

PhotoFrame Pro 3 creates high-quality borders and frames for your photos, and it’s easy to use. But we can’t help but wonder whether there’s really a crowd of digital-photo librarians itching to spend $160 just to add virtual frames to their photos... read more at MacLife

NeatImage 4.2 - NeatImage

Noise is the main problem facing every digital photographer. Whether it's produced by shooting in low light conditions, by a poor-quality image sensor in your camera or by over-enthusiastic Jpeg compression, noise is the one feature that can render an image unusable. Photoshop has a built-in noise reduction filter, but it's slow and clumsy, and tends to over-soften images. Luckily, then, NeatImage redresses the balance... read more at MacUserUK

Coloriage 3.2 - Akvis

Colouring black-and-white photographs is an awkward, time-consuming business at the best of times. Coloriage makes the process much simpler: in just a few minutes, it's possible to produce compelling, accurate results with the minimum amount of effort... read more at MacUserUK

Nikon Capture NX - Nikon

Nikon Capture first saw the light of day in 1999 when Nikon launched the D1 camera. It enabled, among others, Nef Raw files (Nikon electronic files) to be processed as the ultimate option when you had sufficient post-production time. Version 4 appeared last year, and was at least the equal of any other program when it came to working with Raw or 16-bit Tiff files. It did do some things better than Photoshop in the early stages of a post-production workflow... read more at MacUserUK

Aperture 1.5 - Apple

Almost a year to the day since its initial release, Aperture receives its fifth update, the first to move it beyond a subset of version 1.1. Although some were hoping - indeed predicting - that this would be a fullblown version 2 release, we're not convinced there's enough here to justify that... read more at MacUserUK