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I love Mask Pro. I'm not going to do a detailed review, that hardly seems necessary, but I'll just say I love it and here's an example. This took less than 60 seconds total. Click for full size.
The sun was setting so the sky is a wide range of blues, reds, and yellows, with dark greens and medium to dark browns making up the trees. I just painted over the trees after setting a few keep colors and a few drop colors.
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photoshop, onone, maskpro
I am blown away. Apple's update to its iLife suite of "digital lifestyle" apps is really, really good. And to go along with all the new hotness, .Mac subscribers now have 10G of space instead of just 1 (a very necessary improvement).
So I haven't been through all the apps but the new iPhoto is worth the upgrade by itself. It's ridiculously fast and has a number of seemingly small features that really make a big difference. One is that double-clicking on a thumbnail now gets you an instant zoomed view of the image rather than edit mode. Another is the new events feature, which visually catalogues your images by event instead of just by roll or date. It means you can keep each of your events collapsed into one thumbnail and easily get to it as needed (instead of the sea of photos approach taken previously, though that is still available if you like).
There are two new features that stand out though... the first (which goes along with the events view) is "scrubbing". In your events view, as you move the mouse across the thumbnail for an event, iPhoto shows you all the photos in the event... it changes the thumbnail temporarily to wherever your mouse is in the event. This allows you to find photos very quickly without even opening an event.
The second feature is the web gallery. The new web galleries are gorgeous, Apple has done a good job of using open source "web 2.0" components to build a really amazing web UI (see my gallery here). They've also added the ability to email photos into a gallery, which is very cool on the iPhone (Flickr has had this for a long time, but the .Mac web gallery is a much more manageable medium for most people, especially those with less tech savvy). I wouldn't send family members to my Flickr site, it's just too much... but I can send them to my .Mac gallery and I can easily keep it updated and it's simple and clean for them to visit and see updates.
Oh, and the web gallery... it does scrubbing too... very cool. Not to mention the carousel view. I could go on. I'm really impressed with the new photo stuff.
Frustrating note: iPhoto won't work with the web galleries right out of the box... once you've installed iLife '08, run software update and it'll fetch 7.0.1 (or greater) and things will work.
The only other app I've spent time in is iMovie, which looks so cool I'm tempted to go buy an HD camcorder just to play with it.
Technorati Tags:
apple, macosx, ilife
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