Digital Anarchy, a provider of cost-effective special effects software for Adobe and Apple products, has released two software products for use in Apple's Aperture. Knoll Light Factory generates lighting effects that dramatically enhance the natural or man-made lighting in photographs. ToonIt! Photo creates cartoon-like images from photographs, freeing artists from time consuming techniques such as hand painting and masking. Both products are currently available for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.
Aperture gives photographers the ability to manage large groups of images and work with RAW files. By using image processing filters like ToonIt and Knoll Light Factory directly in this environment, it is easy to design with multiple images and compare the results side by side. The Aperture workflow can be a huge time saver when dealing with Digital Anarchy effects and empowers photographers by giving them complete creative control.
Knoll Light Factory is a powerful tool for enhancing stock photos, wedding/portrait photography, and landscape photography. The plugin creates extremely realistic lens flares and other lighting effects, including sun rays, street lamps, headlights, candle flames, light rays, and glows. These lighting elements and vibrant graphic effects are not available natively in Aperture, and go far beyond the standard lens flare found in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Light Factory has been used in many feature films and television shows, and was originally written by John Knoll, Academy Award winning Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, to create the Photon Torpedoes in Star Trek First Contact.
ToonIt! Photo analyzes photographs and then creates flat regions of color and outlines that produce a cel-shaded cartoon look. A believable toon effect is almost automatic, and Aperture users have a great deal of control to customize the cartoon with different paint styles, shading and outlines. One of the key features of ToonIt! is its ability to translate the details of the human face and form into a believable cartoon. This process is great for turning a sequence of photographs into a graphic novel or cartoon sequence with very little work involved.
Knoll Light Factory 3.0 for Aperture is priced at $129 USD. ToonIt! 2.0 for Aperture is priced at $129 USD. The products will be on sale for $99 each from until February 28, 2009. Owners of the Photoshop version of these plugins can purchase the Aperture plugins for $49 each.
The products are available for Aperture 2.0 and higher. Both products run on Macintosh OS 10.4, 10.5 and higher, and are native to both Intel and PPC systems. Aperture is a Mac-only application. For Windows/Vista use, Knoll Light Factory and ToonIt! are available as separate products for Adobe Photoshop. Demo filters and samples of all products are available at
www.digitalanarchy.com .
