Knoll Light Factory by Digital Anarchy.Orginally created by Photoshop’s co-creator, John Knoll, Light Factory was created to produce the photon torpedo effect for the Star Trek movies.

What do you think Light Factory (Version 3.0) ,do that Photoshop’s built-in lighting effects not able to do?According to Jim Tierney, Digital Anarchy’s president:

The lights that can be created and simulated go far beyond the simple lens flare that is built into Photoshop. Photoshop’s Lens Flare has three preset looks and the only thing that you can change is the position, size, and brightness. Knoll Light Factory provides over a 100 different light and flare presets. Each light/flare is created using combinations of the 17 different element types that occur when a light is photographed. The Light elements can be combined in any way, with lots of copies of only couple elements, one instance of each element, or any combination in between. Each element has five to ten different adjustable parameters, providing a practically infinite number of configurations and combinations.

Image credit:Macworld

Light Factory offers a series of options in the Preset list on the left side. You simply need to double-click the elements you wish to apply to your image. A list of selective elements (Elements of Lights), you can switch them on or off to view the results of different settings.Below are the Element Parameters, where each effect can be customized individually.

Once you customize each Element, you can adjust the overall effects of the Light Elements just below the large preview image. And unlike Photoshop’s built-in lighting effects, Light Factory allows full control over the movement of the lighting in your image. Just click and drag the flares around in the preview image.

image credit : Macworld

The $149 Knoll Light Factory 3.0 is a Universal Binary plug-in, compatible with Photoshop 7.0 through CS3 and Photoshop Elements 3.0 and 4.0 (and Elements 5.0 on Windows), and a demo is available to get your hands dirty. It works perfectly on my Mac Pro running Leopard and Photoshop CS3.This is a spectacular plugin if works with lots of images that need a extra lighting.

courtesy : Macworld

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PayPerPost will be launching a new social network in January 2008 called SocialSpark.The company says about 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers will create profiles. Users visiting the site will then “browse the public profiles of advertisers and bloggers along with their associated sponsorship and blog related data.”

SocialSpark also promises to have an open API, so as to allow “information to flow into and out of the system”, and will offer support for Google’s OpenSocial.

Analytics tools installed on a blogger’s blog allow SocialSpark to provide traffic data on the blog’s public profile. Advertisers are provided with a complete picture of a blog’s influence including visits and page views, along with other demographic information such as aggregate gender, age, location, interest and other visitor information. That data allows advertisers to build their street teams based on the audience of the blogger. Once a campaign is launched, advertisers can monitor CPC and CPM as well as gauge brand awareness and campaign impact across the blogosphere.

Coutessy : crashutah

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