Reviews

Last week I was invited to see a preview of the new Perfect Photo Suite 6 from onOne Software. Sworn to secrecy and bound by a non disclosure agreement (NDA), I’ve spent the last few days bursting at the seams. Yesterday at Photoshop World in Las Vegas, the cat was out of the bag (thank goodness) and I am now free to give an opinion.

At the outset, I have to say that onOne have not asked me to write this (or paid me!). The thoughts set out below are a genuine reaction to what I believe is a huge milestone in photoediting. I work with a number of manufacturers of both hardware and software. I am often asked to try out new products, give feedback or to get involved with product launches. The reason I am asked to do this, is because the partners I choose to work with value and respect my integrity and my independent voice. I don’t seek to to sell their products and I don’t work with companies whose products I haven’t paid cold, hard cash for. I just give an honest appraisal of the products I am asked to try, or simply explain the decisions I make when I choose the tools I use for my day to day work.

I’m a Partner of onOne and have, for a few years now, used their products, given seminars, tutorials and webinars for the company and supported them at events such as Focus on Imaging and the SWPP conference. I use Suite 5.5 as part of my everyday workflow and rely on it, as both a time saving piece of software and, more importantly, as a means of extending my creativity.

I always look forward to new releases of software and hardware products and I knew that the Suite was due for an upgrade. However, when I saw the private demonstration webinar given to a select group of World-Wide Partners by Brian Matiash the other day, I was completely taken aback. This, it’s fair to say, is not a simple  upgrade. Many of the component parts of the Suite have undergone a total rewrite, new features have been added by the bucketload and the look and feel is now slicker and much more modern. The new features and layout make for an incredibly powerful set of tools. So powerful in fact, that I found myself questioning the need for Photoshop at all.

Photoshop, is a toolkit built to service the needs of a wide community of users, be they from the graphics industry, photography, video, 3D design or areas that service the needs of the many other industry professionals and enthusiasts that have come to rely on it down the years. As such, it’s a beast of a programme that can do everything (and more) that one could ask, but that has a correspondingly huge learning curve (just take a look at how many 500+ page Photoshop manuals are available). I use Photoshop pretty well everyday and in all of my post production work, but how much of it’s enormous potential do I need to tap in to? I use quite a small proportion of it’s tools actually but, since I know those tools quite well, I can use them to their full potential and produce a huge and diverse range of effects, that serve my image making well.

The beauty of the onOne products is that they are, first and foremost, built with the photographer in mind. Sure, web-designers and animators will find things in there that enhance their work too, but principally, these are tools that are specifically designed to help photographers expand their creative vision. In it’s latest incarnation, Perfect Photo Suite 6 takes this to a new level.

A cool feature is the way in which Suite 6 can be accessed. Until now, in order to use tools such as those provided by onOne, Photoshop (or more recently Aperture or Lightroom) was needed as a platform that the third party software quite literally, plugs-in to. Although the new Suite can be used like that too, onOne have dramatically moved the goalposts and Suite 6 has the added benefit that it also can be used as a stand alone programme. This frees the photographer from the need to purchase (or find a dodgy copy of) Photoshop / Aperture / Lightroom and, better yet, frees the user from all of the superfluous tools that Photoshop contains (honestly, how many photographers really use the “Slice” Tools?).

What I particularly love about Suite 6 is that it has been designed in a modular fashion, allowing the photographer / retoucher to seamlessly move between the component parts, to create a mask, blend layers or maybe add effects, then perhaps alter the apparent depth of field, all within the Suite and without passing it back to another programme. This is surely a much more efficient way of working.

Very briefly, there are seven components to the Suite (Perfect Layers 2, Perfect Portrait, Perfect Effects 3, Perfect Mask 5, Perfect Resize 7, Focal point 2 and Photoframe 4.6). Those that know my work, will understand how excited I am, in particular, by Perfect Mask, Perfect Portrait and Perfect Effects. Hopefully I will be able to write more about the various parts of the suite once I get my hands on it, but, in the meantime,  I’d thoroughly recommend a visit to the onOne site to gain access to the full product information and the many great tutorials to be found there.

The Suite isn’t available until late October, but I am soon to get a BETA version to try out. I really want to give it a work out and to test it on my latest project (see my previous post).

I look forward to sharing the experience here in the not too distant future