Faster and more powerful: onOne Perfect Photo Suite update ships next month

 

 

If you're using onOne Software's Perfect Photo Suite 8, we've great news for you. If not, the company's just given you a reason to reconsider adding Perfect Photo Suite to your digital darkroom. In the next few weeks, an updated Perfect Photo Suite 8.5 is set to land, and it brings quite a few worthwhile updates.

Perfect Photo Suite 8, if you're not familiar with the bundle, includes nine different plug-in tools for apps including Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, and Apple Aperture. It can also be used as a standalone app in its own right. Tools in the current suite include all of the following:

• Perfect Effects 8: Filters and presets

• Perfect Enhance 8: Basic adjustments and object removal

• Perfect Portrait 8: Improve skin, teeth, eyes and more

• Perfect Resize 8: Genuine Fractals-based enlargement

• Perfect B&W 8: Recreate black and white film looks and darkroom effects

• Perfect Browse 8: Image browser and batch-editing selection tool

• Perfect Layers 8: Extend Lightroom and Aperture with layers, content-aware fill and more

• Perfect Mask 8: Remove backgrounds and mask complex subjects

• Perfect Batch 8: Batch-process images including presets

So what does Perfect Photo Suite 8.5 add to these? Perhaps most helpfully, Perfect Layers 8 and Perfect Enhance will sport improved content-aware fill -- dubbed Perfect Eraser -- that can better handle background gradients. That should prove to be useful when dealing with object removal in front of sunrises and sunsets in particular. They'll also offer better masking, thanks to the ability to add multiple masking bugs on a layer. And the image browser in Perfect Browse should create thumbnails and previews faster, as well as adding new file management tools.

In addition to the above, bug fixes and performance enhancements are promised throughout the suite.

Best of all, Perfect Photo Suite 8.5 is promised as a free update for existing Perfect Photo Suite 8 owners, while the full suite can be purchased right now thru this Friday for just US$50-150, depending on whether you need only the standalone version, support for all but Photoshop, or support for all possible apps as a plug-in. That's a pretty good deal, given that ordinarily you'd pay US$100 to $150 for Perfect Effects 8, Perfect Mask 8, or Perfect Resize 8; the only three products in the suite that can be bought separately.

Watch for the new release in the middle of next month, and get a 30-day free trial from the onOne Software website.