Digital Anarchy Announces Two Plugins For Aperture, Knoll Light Factory And ToonIt! Photo

Digital Anarchy, a leading provider of cost-effective special effects software for Adobe and Apple products, has announced the release of two software products for use in Apple's Aperture.
Knoll Light Factory generates lighting effects that dramatically enhance the natural or man-made lighting in photographs. ToonIt! Photo creates cartoon-like images from photographs, freeing artists from time consuming techniques such as hand painting and masking. Both products are currently available for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.
Jim Tierney, President of Digital Anarchy, said: "Customers have responded tremendously to our Photoshop plugins and asked if they could get the same functionality for Aperture. This release gives photographers and digital artists a great way of working with images that they're managing in the Aperture environment."
Aperture gives photographers the ability to manage large groups of images and work with RAW files. By using image processing filters like ToonIt and Knoll Light Factory directly in this environment, it is easy to design with multiple images and compare the results side by side. The Aperture workflow can be a huge time saver when dealing with Digital Anarchy effects and empowers photographers by giving them complete creative control.
Knoll Light Factory is a powerful tool for enhancing stock photos, wedding/portrait photography and landscape photography. The plugin creates extremely realistic lens flares and other lighting effects, including sun rays, street lamps, headlights, candle flames, light rays and glows.
These lighting elements and vibrant graphic effects are not available natively in Aperture and go far beyond the standard lens flare found in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Light Factory has been used in many feature films and television shows, and was originally written by John Knoll, Academy Award winning Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, to create the Photo Torpedoes in 'Star Trek First Contact'.
ToonIt! Photo analyses photographs and then creates flat regions of colour and outlines that produce a cel-shaded cartoon look. A believable 'toon' effect is almost automatic and Aperture users have a great deal of control to customise the cartoon with different paint styles, shading and outlines.
One of the key features of ToonIt! is its ability to translate the details of the human face and form into a believable cartoon. This process is great for turning a sequence of photographs into a graphic novel or cartoon sequence with very little work involved.
(KMcA/BMcC)