Nikon Capture NX 2 Full Version

There are lots of photo opportunities that wait beyond the behind-the-camera experience you have with any of the Nikon D-series DSLR cameras. Nikon Capture-NX software is like having a professional darkroom and editing lab of your own. It’s easy to use yet uncompromising in quality. Capture NX 2 features award-winning U Point technology for precision selection and application of enhancements without complicated selections or layer masks. Designed to closely match the way photographers work with their images, Capture NX 2 is easy to learn and creates the highest quality results. Now you can selectively edit photographs without the need to manually outline or mask the area for editing. Simply place a Selection Control Point anywhere on the photograph then choose from almost any adjustment such as D-Lighting, Unsharp Mask or Noise Reduction, while limiting the ?reach? of that adjustment to just the selected area. Capture NX 2 adds an automatic retouch tool to its image editing toolbox allowing users to seamlessly remove blemishes, dust and other distracting elements from photographs while maintaining the integrity of the image. With just a simple slider adjustment you can easily open up shadows or recover blown-out highlights. Highlight recovery is most effective for RAW (NEF) files however it will work with JPEG and TIFF files as well. Color Control Points (improved operation) Black/White/Neutral Control Points (improved layout) Color management control with Soft Proofing Color Aberration Control, D-Lighting (High Speed/High Quality), Image Dust Off, Vignette Control and Fisheye-to-Rectilinear Image Transformation Noise Reduction - global or selective adjustments Distortion Control - reduces pincushion and barrel distortion effects Color Booster Color Balance Contrast/Brightness Saturation/Warmth Photo Enhance (for toning, sepia, black and white) Levels/Curves Editor, LCH Editor, Auto Levels

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Nikon Capture NX 2 Upgrade from Capture NX 1 x

There are lots of photo opportunities that wait beyond the behind-the-camera experience you have with any of the Nikon D-series DSLR cameras. Nikon Capture-NX software is like having a professional darkroom and editing lab of your own. It’s easy to use yet uncompromising in quality. Capture NX 2 features award-winning U Point technology for precision selection and application of enhancements without complicated selections or layer masks. Designed to closely match the way photographers work with their images, Capture NX 2 is easy to learn and creates the highest quality results. Now you can selectively edit photographs without the need to manually outline or mask the area for editing. Simply place a Selection Control Point anywhere on the photograph then choose from almost any adjustment such as D-Lighting, Unsharp Mask or Noise Reduction, while limiting the ?reach? of that adjustment to just the selected area. Capture NX 2 adds an automatic retouch tool to its image editing toolbox allowing users to seamlessly remove blemishes, dust and other distracting elements from photographs while maintaining the integrity of the image. With just a simple slider adjustment you can easily open up shadows or recover blown-out highlights. Highlight recovery is most effective for RAW (NEF) files however it will work with JPEG and TIFF files as well. Color Control Points (improved operation) Black/White/Neutral Control Points (improved layout) Color management control with Soft Proofing Color Aberration Control, D-Lighting (High Speed/High Quality), Image Dust Off, Vignette Control and Fisheye-to-Rectilinear Image Transformation Noise Reduction - global or selective adjustments Distortion Control - reduces pincushion and barrel distortion effects Color Booster Color Balance Contrast/Brightness Saturation/Warmth Photo Enhance (for toning, sepia, black and white) Levels/Curves Editor, LCH Editor, Auto Levels

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Photo and Video Expressions Premium Suite

Welcome to the all-in-one, complete digital media suite! Unlike other media management software, Photo & Video Expressions is comprehensive and easy-to-learn. You’ll spend less time working on your media projects and more time entertaining your friends and family with impressive creations. It does all of the work for you. It even comes with the same powerful tools used by design professionals. No other media management software is this fast and easy. Turn Photos and Music into Slide Show Movies to play on DVD. Convert Slides Shows to play on your iPod, PSP, PDA’s & Cell Phone.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars pepsime0 reviews photo & video expressions
Photo & Video Expressions Premium Suite

The program allows the person operating to capture vivid details about whatever you are currently using. It automaticly includes the music with the photos in sync.

5 Stars A Huge Timesaver
This product is just what I have been looking for to present photos and video in an easy-to-use presentation format. I have spent hours and even days putting together slide presentations for Boy Scouts, athletic team awards ceremonies, and other important events. On Christmas day I was able to take all of the photos of my family making cookies, unwrapping presents and having dinner together and, in a half an hour, put together a great looking DVD presentation to give them before everyone left for the evening. It also includes a really easy to use CD label maker which I use to make labels and DVD covers for. Overall, I would say that this is a great value and a real timesaver.

3 Stars For the price, you won’t find better for slideshows
I LOVE this program for slideshows and still images. And if you are doing slideshows, you will adore this program and make your friends jealous that you have all these computer editing skills.

This program is …almost perfect…but I CANNOT recommend it for video and I only have two complaints:

1. As a previous reviewer mentioned, the audio features could have some added features to help you fade your music in and out when you clip a song short of the natural beginning or ending, instead of abrupt starts and stops, but I suppose you could create a file in a different program to clip your music fades and import, but who would bother with all that when everything else is offered here.

2. The resulting formatting of my digital videos in this program makes them jerky in some places and have what I would call little “artifact” blips in others. This doesn’t occur when you preview, it is happening when you are in the “creating a disc” and “transcoding” How I know this is that everytime you go through the transcoding process, it will put the little blips in different spots, but if you just make copies of one transcoded, it will put the blips in the same place on each disc. This means, it is not my blank DVD discs, it is not my DVD writer either. It is some problem with the transcoding of the video during the formatting process within the program, right before it actually burns to the DVD. This has got to be a bug within the program and I have contacted the software maker and will update if a solution or patch becomes available.

If you are making slideshows from still images, by all means snatch this up, you will love it!

If you are using digital videos, prepare to have them somewhat butchered by periodic blips on your TV screen and some videos will just seem jerky and hard to watch.

4 Stars Good Software
I was looking for software that was simple to use, integrate video and slideshows, insert captions for pictures and make DVDs. This is what this software does. I have only made slideshows and have not used the video portion of the software as I am still learning. There seems to be no editing function for music selection for slideshows and there is a standard pause between different selections that cannot be changed. This is a good program for someone just starting out and easier to use than ROXIO which came with the computer.

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Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9

Create the perfect montage from all of your media in one, easy-to-use, and reliable application with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9. It contains new import and export project wizards to help you get started making your movies even faster and also helps with outputting projects to the proper formats for sharing across a range of delivery options. Sony Creative Software’s exclusive Show Me How interactive tutorials are also included to help you learn the software more efficiently while completing the task at hand. The Show Me How tutorials make it easy to complete a project step-by-step.

Show Me How interactive tutorials are also included to help you learn the software more efficiently while completing the task at hand. The Show Me How tutorials make it easy to complete a project step-by-step.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars I’ve made some nice DVDs
I have owned this software for about two weeks. My only prior experience with video editing is Movie Maker and InterVideo WinDVD. I was originally going to purchase Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8 but then I noticed this version was just released and it has some new features.

After some initial frustration I am happy with the purchase. The learning curve is what is so frustrating especially for a novice like me. I made two coasters (though I admit that was really my fault) and at one point I was considering trying to return it for a refund because I was getting so stressed. I still get frustrated with the fact that you have to use two separate programs: Vegas Movie Studio 9 to make the movie and DVD Architect 4.5 (included) to make the menus and author the disc.

Now that I’ve been playing with it every day for two weeks, things are better now. It just takes hours and hours of working with the software which in turn makes the user more familiar with how to navigate through it and achieve a desirable result. No more stress. Now that I have made a couple of DVDs successfully I have a whole new appreciation of Sony Vegas. They turned out great! My movies have a beautiful 16:9 widescreen representation, great audio, decent menus, good video FX, and I’ve had a blast customizing them. The “Show Me How” tutorial is a lifesaver, but it has its limits.

I have experienced no crashes or anything even close to a crash. I’m using a 3-year-old HP Media Center desktop PC, running Windows XP, with Pentium 4 processor, and 2GB of RAM. I give it 4 stars because of the huge amount of information that is presented at first and the trouble it can cause a newbie and I think the average user is not going to use a lot of the advanced features.

4 Stars Overall, Pretty Good
Before I say anything else, I’d just like to warn potential buyers that Movie Studio 9 does not do Bezier masking. In other words, you can’t cut out one person and put them on a different background unless you use a predefined shape, like a square, circle, etc. If you want Bezier masking and you still want Vegas, then you need to get Vegas Pro.

Otherwise, the product is great. The tutorials are very useful, especially for beginners. There is an amazing number of effects and transitions, especially when compared to Windows Movie Maker. It’s great for home movie creation.

I’d say if you’re considering it, definitely give it a shot. Sony has free trials on their website, so you really have nothing to lose. Their knowledgebase is pretty extensive and if you can’t find the answer to your question, you can always contact their customer service. They give useful answers fairly promptly.

4 Stars Really Nice ..but has a few frustrating things to it
First of - I am an amateur .. I needed to make a small movie to be shown at my parents-in-law’s wedding anniversary using raw footage and old snaps ..I decided to use this after playing with Moviemaker, Primiere elements and Vegas .. I still have the trial version .. and am close to finishing my project .. So I am not an expert user - but have figured out quite a bit.

It has a really lots of features .. dedicated volume and panning envelopes for each of the 4 audio tracks - really helps in mixing up tracks .. The software also automatically loaded up all my VST effects that I have for my Music workstation software …

The video event panning and zoom control is simply too good .. You can do so much with your stills …make them literally spring to life .. there are many high quality transitions included that you will not find in Windows movie maker ( especially the double blur crossover) which give your movie a nice professional touch.

Media Bins are definite plus - Better way to organize than anything I have seen.

Now for the irritating points:

There is no easy way to order snaps/ clips in the media bin .. even free software Picasa supports drag drop operations to sequence the snaps the way you want … Ordering snaps in the timeline is too much of a pain.. I would love if Sony would let us use the Media Bin as a staging area rather than just a place to dump related artifacts.

The Trimmer can definitely improved upon.. right now you can select portions of the clip you would like to include … but on trying to re-trim the clip ..you are back to square one with the Original clip instead on simply having to trim portions of your current clip. .. This wastes my time … and does irritate me …

Overall- it is a nice product — surely worth a shot.

1 Star if you can get it to work
i tried all versions of this software both trial and a purchased version. it will not even start on an xp computer with an nvidia graphics card. sony support is non existant. originally i downloaded a trial version and installed on an xp machine with ati graphics card & it was pretty nice. the trial ran out so i figured i’d put it on my main machine (with an nvidia card). be warned it doesn’t work!!!

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Adobe Contribute CS4

Collaboratively author, review, and publish web content while maintaining site integrity ? without learning HTML, all with Adobe Contribute CS4.

Content expiration notification - Set the expiration value for a single Contribute page or multiple pages, and Contribute will notify the designated content contributors when the expiration date nears Dynamic website editing - Add content to dynamic websites powered by Movable Type, TypePad, or WordPress with Contribute CS4 Rich media support - Drag and drop your images, FLV and SWF files, or PDF documents into your Contribute pages. Contribute automatically uploads the dependent files to the web server when the pages are published in administrator-selected locations Auto-Save - enables you to specify how frequently updated drafts are saved. Content remains in draft format until the review and publish process is initiated Visual blog configuration - Avoid editing the BlogHub.csi file manually in a text editor to achieve specific goals such as allowing images wider than 150 pixels. All such preferences are accessed visually Site root-relative links - Gain a finer degree of control over code. Website administrators can quickly specify whether links to pages or other elements are written as document-relative or site root-relative links

User Ratings and Reviews

3 Stars Few compelling new features
Contribute 4 comes with the Adobe Web Suite so I didn’t really pay for it. That’s good because I don’t think it really offers anything compelling enough to justify upgrading from CS 3. And it really doesn’t offer enough more to justify the $50 price hike for the full version.

The interface has changed a lot, making Contribute look more like other Adobe apps. With Dreamweaver and Photoshop I didn’t find that to be a problem. With Contribute I prefer the old layout and see no advantage in changing to change.

There is a new collaboration function that my be useful for teams who work on a Contribute site. Working with, at most, one other person on a site with Contribute, I can’t tell how useful that would be. And most larger organizations I have worked with use real content management systems and have no use for Contribute, so I can’t see Adobe selling a lot of copies on this new feature.

Contribute promises a feature that may be compelling for some, the ability to add a Contribute toolbar to Firefox that lets people edit pages right in the browser. Unfortunately, that doesn’t yet work with version 3 of Firefox and I don’t have a copy of version 2 around to test with. But since you can download SeaMonkey for free and get the same rendering engine as Firefox, as well as the ability use the same program for browsing and for editing, I don’t see this as worth $200.

Since the the CS 4 version of Dreamweaver has been both a bit faster and more stable than CS 3, I’d hoped that Contribute would be too, but I can’t tell any difference. It’s still slow to load, slow to update pages, and crashes occasionally. I once asked an Adobe rep about this and he said it was because the pages had to upload to the server. I can open web pages in a text editor via my ftp client and have saved changes effected almost instantly, so I’m not really convinced that the glacial speed of Contribute can be totally justified by that explanation.

Still, Contribute does work and does allow people to update websites, add pages, images and media to their websites without much technical knowledge. So it does have value. If you need a new copy of Contribute this will do the job. That said, this update isn’t at all compelling. If you have CS 3, you can safely pass this version. If, like me, you got it as part of the new CS 4 suite then it’s no worse.

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