Essentials 2 for iPhoto offers correction, borders

onOne Software this week announced Essentials 2 software for iPhoto, a collection of four easy-to-use software tools to help correct color, creatively blur a photo for dramatic visual impact, add creative borders and resize digital images for high quality large prints. The software tools, the company says, are based on technology used in the professional level onOne Software Photoshop plug-ins PhotoTune 2.2, FocalPoint 1.0, PhotoFrame 3.1 and Genuine Fractals 5. The Essentials 2 for iPhoto software suite provides users of the popular iPhoto image editing and organizing software with four important plug-in solutions to solve common digital imaging problems.

The tools include color correction of photos using technology from PhotoTune, the ability to simulate the effect of selective focus or tilt-shift lenses, selective blurring and/or vignetting an image to focus the viewers attention, adding unique borders and edges around, and increasing the size and resolution of their photos to get larger print sizes by using technology from Genuine Fractals, an industry standard for resizing digital photos.

With the Make It Better tool, users can simply compare color, contrast and brightness adjustments side-by-side and pick the best looking images to adjust an image.
The Blur It tool provides photographers with a way to create realistic depth of field control, plane of focus control and selective focus to any digital image after it is photographed allowing for more control and precision. The focus bug control in Blur It has a tangible, hardware feel much like using a lens, the company claims and photographers can quickly define the "sweet spot" either in a round shape or a plane and then control how much and what kind of blur they would like to add to the image.
The Frame It tool offers realistic film and darkroom edge and border effects to images, such as torn paper, brush strokes or even realistic frames and mats. Users can stack multiple edges and frames to create unique designs from more than 500 included edges and frames.
Enlarge It increases the size of an image without the loss of sharpness and detail and can resize images up to 400 percent and still maintain sharp edges and minute details, onSoftware claims. "It's equivalent to taking a 4x6 print and making it as big as a poster size," the company added.

onOne Software's Essentials 2 for iPhoto is available direct from onOne Software and select Apple Stores for $60.