CameraBag 2 is a collection of filters and effects for your photographs. It’s easy to use, comes with a huge collection of presets, and offers total control over styles, adjustments, and borders. Although it can be used by just selecting a preset or recipe, you can create your own recipes from scratch. The possibilities are endless.

Helicon Focus is an application that allows you to create a completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the areas in focus. Its main use is for macro photography and microscopic photography, but it does wonders to beat the diffraction problem on landscape photography as well.

Corel has released its first professional photo catalogue and RAW editing software, AfterShot Pro. It’s based on a number of technologies that are widely known and respected in the photography world, such as Noise Ninja, Perfectly Clear, and Bibble Pro, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

DxO Labs released DxO Optics Pro 7 some weeks ago. It now boasts dramatically improved performance, a couple of new features, and an even bigger database of bodies and lenses than ever before. DxO Optics Pro 7 remains one of the top Camera RAW editors, and much better than Adobe Lightroom in my opinion.

Vue is the 3D application that has been used for box office successes such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Avatar. Vue 10 is the latest version and it includes new features such as stackable render screens, edge-based anti-aliasing, more natural ecosystem animations, etc.

In The Art of Photographic Lighting, Eib Eibelshaeuser goes on to explain how photographers can use and create lighting conditions to obtain exactly those photos they want. It’s become a hefty volume.

Enlarging a digital image is a tricky thing. It can be done in Photoshop using the bicubic resizing algorithm, but the results look muddy at best. Enlarging images using Alien Skin’s Blow Up 3 looks better and can be specifically targeted at screen and print output. Blow Up 3′s results are very close to the industry’s top resizing app, SizeFixer XL.

Autodesk’s Autodesk 123D Catch and Autodesk 123D Make Technology Preview enable anyone to quickly and easily capture 3D models from the world around them, and additionally turn 3D models into their own artistic creations. The new technology shows Autodesk continuing to push boundaries in personal manufacturing, giving more people the tools to create things and share them with others.

Julian Bleecker is a photographer, digital media artist and the founder of “Hello, Skater Girl”. Mr. Bleeker captures women skaters all over the US. He got tired of the Ken Burns effect for his art projects and discovered an Adobe After Effects plug-in that gave him more creative freedom.

We all know JPEG. It’s the most supported image format by still cameras, including dSLRs. JPEG is a compressed image format, meaning that at 100% image quality, it still uses a compression algorithm to keep image files small. This translates in lower storage needs and faster processing. JPEG is omnipresent, but it’s not the best compressed image format. There’s a superior format called JPEG 2000. You will find in SilverFast and GraphicConverter software — not surprisingly both German products — but in not one camera. Not even in digital Hasselblads.