Corel has delivered its first “service pack” update to its photo workflow tool, AfterShot Pro (formerly known as Bibble 5.x). The program is aimed at professional photographers and competes with programs like Aperture, Lightroom and ACDSee Pro. The new update adds support for 20 new cameras, improved highlight recovery processing, and improved plugin SDK, support for higher-resolution file sizes, and two new plugins.
AfterShot Pro, which unlike its competitors runs on all three major platforms, works with both RAW and JPEG formats and can organize and tag photos along with some editing features. Edits are non-destructive and don’t require importation. Noise reduction is handled via Noise Ninja and the program features “Perfectly Clear” technology to automatically fix lighting, tint and fading issues without introducing color or clipping problems. It also supports web gallery creation as well as archive functions.
The new version adds RAW support for Canon’s PowerShot G1 X, S100, and 5D Mark III; Nikon’s D4, D800, and D800e; Panasonic’s GX1 and FZ150; Samsung’s NX100, NX200, NX5, NX10 and NX11, and Sony’s NEX-C3, A35 and A57 models. Also added were the Fuji X100, Leica V-LUX 3, the Pentax K-01 and the Olympus OM-D E-M5.
Two new plugins are also introduced — Equalizer adds further automatic color correction options, while Nostalgia creates specific vintage B&W and color film simulations to the images. The update squashes a number of minor bugs, including a one-pixel artifact that would appear in the center of some images, localization issues, program instability when removing heal or clone layers, runtime issues on Fedora Linux, an output issue that prevented images from being converted to the correct color space, a “no label” menu bar issue and improvements to the “de-mosaicing” feature.
In addition, the maximum supported image size for JPEG or TIFF images has been increased to 40 megapixels (up from 30). The program sells for $80. For the Mac, the software requires OS X 10.5 or higher on Intel machines with 2GB of RAM or more.
