Corel is adding several new features to its Pinnacle Studio for iPad video editing app. What will you get? New fast-and slow-motion creative effects, updated title styles, faster performance and greater stability.

The Studio app costs $12.99 in the apps store and the feature upgrade will be free to current Studio app owners. Using the app you can perform some sophisticated edits to your video footage, such as arranging clips, adding effects and music, without having to import it into your computer.

Corel is also launching a new online forum for those in need of some help with the app.

Publishing and image software developer Serif recently updated their popular photo editing software program dubbed PhotoPlus X6 opening the $89 title to a broader range of photo enthusiasts.  The new version now allows photographers of any level to quickly and easily produce some truly unique and original image creations with a just a few clicks.

Compatible with Windows 8, PhotoPlus X6 features a smart edge refinement tool which selects and adjusts the more detailed parts of photos such as hairs and leaves; non-destructive crop; tilt shift effects with Depth-of-Field filter; vector masks; and improvements to noise reduction, zoom range and guides.  Also, with its new 64-bit engine, PhotoPlus X6 edits very large images without slowing down.

For under $100 Serif has brought an inexpensive software program that offers a nice balance between quick fixes as well as more advanced editing features for those that want to delve a bit deeper.

Far be it from us to suggest you need some photo-retouching, but on the off chance you want to give your Facebook portraits a little makeover, Arcsoft has released a free app that does just that. Perfect365 is a Facebook app that delivers a few “one click” portrait fixes, plus the ability to make several manual corrections to your pics if you wish. You can apply make-up effects too.

The app is free for Facebook users and available on  iOS devices for a fee ($4.99 for iPad, $1.99 for iPhone).

A Windows version of Perfect365 with more features, including the ability to save and print high-resolution pictures is available for $29.99.

NOTE: This is the second of a two-part blog post that provides a glimpse inside a research lab at Xerox where scientists and imaging specialists are developing the latest technology.  You are invited to play with technology currently being developed and provide valuable feedback directly to the research team. The first post can be found here.

Guest blogger Craig Saunders manages computer vision research at Xerox’s European research lab in Grenoble, France. Craig’s primary research interests lie in Machine Learning and the development and application of algorithms to a wide variety of application domains including digital photos. He has a PhD in Machine Learning

In the last blog entry I covered a little bit the technologies around image classification and retrieval.  These are very mature technologies, being investigated my many research groups.    In this post we’ll discuss a newer line of emerging research: Aesthetic Image Assessment.

As we discussed before, categorization technology is mature and very good image representations and mathematical models have been found to tackle the problem (if you extract an image patch that looks like a wheel, then the image is more likely to contain a car then a horse for example).  But what about aesthetic judgment?  What makes an image good or bad, pretty or ugly? These are hard questions to answer because they are subjective and depend on the content (a city-scene shot might require pin-sharp focus and great depth of field, whereas a portrait or macro shot might want the subject in focus and the background blurred for instance).

So how do you go about creating an algorithm that can even attempt this problem?  Essentially the two key elements are the same as in the categorization case:  first you need to find a good representation for the images, and secondly you need to learn a mathematical model from data.   You can use the same representation as we did before to find ‘visual words’ or ‘parts of things’ – but content only tells some of the story.  So you might also consider using other features of the image such as exposure, amount of blur, color and so on.  Once you have a  combination of these types of attributes you can apply similar mathematical techniques to the ones used for categorization, only this time instead of taking examples of ‘car’, ‘horse’, ‘beach’ to train our algorithm, we use  examples where people have personally judged a photo as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or have given some kind of score.

Is it even possible?

Note that the aesthetic classification is a much harder problem to solve than categorization.  Also one can think of many different ways to tackle it (Do you try and learn good/bad separately for each category?  Do you learn a general model?  What happens to photos where human judgments do not agree?).  There are many questions, and it is unlikely to be a ‘solved problem’ any time soon, even if that’s possible.   But imagine how easy it would be to select the best photo if some software existed that would help you remove ‘obviously bad’ images and select the best one for the task at hand.

Take a look

Try out our first attempt at doing this by checking out the aesthetic image search demo on Open Xerox. While you can’t upload your own images yet – this demo will give you a taste of what the technology can do. Using a set of images in the demo collection the technology first tries to classify the content (beach, flower, boat, etc.) and then tries to rank the images into good/bad.  It’s not perfect but it provides a glimpse of where our research is headed.

The phrase, “in less time with half the effort” is appealing not matter what you’re doing (ok, there are some exceptions). But when it’s attached to a photo editing program, we’re definitely interested. That’s what Topaz Labs has done with their update to the Photoshop plug-in dubbed Adjust 5 that focuses on advanced color and detail techniques.

Among the improvements in Adjust 5 are a “1-click workflow” with 107 new presets split into 7 convenient effect categories; a 4-in-1 selective brush used to dodge, burn, smooth, and brush out adjustments; and a “Finishing Touches” tab that offers options for warmth, grain, and transparency.

The $50 plug-in provides tools to correct and balance image exposure and color, enhance dynamic range with adaptive exposure control, and create single-image HDR effects.

Topaz also claims their “Adaptive Exposure” technology adds more localized contrast to an image, rescues detail from blown out highlights or blocked up shadows, and adjusts basic contrast and brightness.

A 30-day free trial along with additional information are available here.

If you are you’re in luck as DxO Labs recently announced their new DxO FilmPack v3.1 software that brings to digital “all the emotional impact of silver halide photography.” This silver halide simulation software adds 25 creative renderings and an improved user interface.

FilmPack actually applies the characteristic tint, grain and rendering of a traditional silver halide film type to any digital image, regardless of its source according to DxO.

This latest version of FilmPack also adds a resizable filmstrip-style preview system that allows you to better visualize renderings before applying them to your images. The idea here is lend that aforementioned emotional impact of film photography to digital images and DxO claims they have given the utmost consideration to the aesthetic qualities and creative dimensions for each rendering in this program. Vintage effects, color nuances, sepia variations, partial desaturations: each rendering is based on a very subtle combination of grain intensity, film style, vignetting and color filters.

A fully-functional free trial version is available at this link.

Even with the best image stabilization technology, your camcorder and camera videos can suffer from some stomach churning shake. Normally, there’s not much you can do about shake other than endure it but software dubbed Mercalli Easy from proDad promises to fix that. It’s a $15 program and you can download a free trial here.

The software uses a drag-and-drop interface and it makes the corrections automatically, so you don’t have to make any fine-tuned changes yourself (though there is some ability to do this if you want). You can view in a split-screen a before and after scene so you can see and approve the stabilization effect before it’s applied.

In addition to stabilizing your footage, you can perform some other video edits and export your finished video file in a number of formats for viewing online or on mobile devices.

To bring to digital images “all the emotional impact of silver halide photography,” silver halide simulation software from DxO Labs adds 25 creative renderings and an improved user interface.

DxO FilmPack applies “the characteristic tint, grain and rendering of a traditional silver halide film type to any digital image, regardless of its source,” the company says.

FilmPack v3.1 also adds a resizable filmstrip-style preview system that allows users to better visualize renderings before applying them to their images.

DxO says it gives “utmost consideration to the aesthetic qualities and creative dimensions for each rendering to ensure that they would lend images real emotional impact. Vintage effects, color nuances, sepia variations, partial desaturations: each rendering is based on a very subtle combination of grain intensity, film style, vignetting and color filters.

A fully-functional free trial version is available here.

This post originally appeared on PMA Newsline and is republished here with permission.

Mac owners looking for an alternative to Photoshop Elements might want to take a look at Pixelmator, now on version 2.0. Pixelmator is your standard photo editor, with the ability to perform basic edits and fixes such as cropping, red eye removal, etc.

New for Version 2.0 are drawing and retouching tools, and a Content-Aware Fill feature that lets you identify an unwanted element in a photo and remove it – Big Brother style. After you identify the offending object, the software will analyze the surrounding image and swap-in the surrounding pixels to make the object disappear.

A new healing tool lets you remove blemishes and imperfections from a subject, while a sponge tool lets you remove or add colors to a specific area of an image by “painting” on them.

It’s a very comprehensive update and it takes advantage of Apple’s newest operating system Lion with features like Auto Save to preserve your work automatically. Pixelmator 2.0 is available now for an introductory price of $30 in the Mac Apps Store – it’s ordinarily $60.