Powered by RelayWare™ relationship management software by Foundation Network Ltd., Corel Partners is a centralised information service that enables Corel to effectively communicate with its diverse range of partners, including distribution, retail, retail, corporate, academic, and reseller partners across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Partners who register and receive accreditation on www.corelpartners.co.uk will not only have 24 hour access to all the latest company and product information but will also receive the latest news, promotions and current offers via their mailbox, ensuring they are always connected and able to work collaboratively with Corel to maximise sales activities and grow their business.

“This new service will provide an invaluable tool to help Partners understand and market our products in the best way possible. It is designed to strengthen the great relationship we have built over many years with existing partners as well as build up a network of new partners, who will now have the opportunity to work in a much more proactive way with Corel”, said Brett Denly, Senior Director EMEA Sales, Corel.

Registering
Corel Partners is currently available in English and German languages. If you would like to register as a partner with Corel and learn more about its latest products and incentives, then please visit www.corelpartners.co.uk. In addition, if you are one of the first partners to sign up for this new service, you will qualify for a free, not-for-resale, version of the newly released Corel® Digital Studio™ 2010.

PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–onOne Software, Inc., a leading developer of time-saving solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers, today announced a new version of Photo Essentials 3 for Adobe Photoshop Elements. onOne Photo Essentials 3 is a collection of five tools that painlessly correct color, remove unwanted backgrounds, add photographic effects and enlarge photos. These easy-to-use tools help photography enthusiasts get the job done quickly and easily in Adobe® Photoshop® Elements.

Supporting the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0, onOne’s Photo Essentials 3.0 offers these capabilities:

* New Photo Essentials Palette – The Palette provides quick access to all five modules from a single location right inside Photoshop Elements.

* Make It Cool – New in Essentials 3, this offers a library with dozens of professional effects that can be added to images in one click.

* Make It Better – Turn your snapshots into professional images. Automatically fix brightness, contrast, color and sharpness with no need to understand cryptic sliders.

* Cut It Out – Easily remove an unwanted background while maintaining fine detail such as hair, clouds and glass.

* Frame It – Choose from hundreds of easy to add edge and border effects to give pictures the perfect finishing touch.

* Enlarge It – Get sharp, poster sized prints out of your photos, even from camera phones.

“Our mission is to provide tools that help make digital photography easier, faster and better. onOne Photo Essentials 3 delivers on this by helping amateur photographers spend less time in front of their computer correcting their digital images and more time behind the camera taking pictures,” said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software. “And with this new version of Photo Essentials 3 comes a completely new module, Make It Cool, based on our award-winning PhotoTools 2 plug-in, a new dynamic range optimization algorithm in Make It Better and a new version of the Photo Essentials Palette.”

Availability

onOne Software’s Photo Essentials 3 will be available in October 2009 for $69.99. Customers who purchase Photo Essentials 2 on or after September 24, 2009 will receive a complimentary upgrade to Photo Essentials 3 as an electronic download for free. For more information on Photo Essentials, please visit www.ononesoftware.com/essentials.

About onOne Software

onOne Software, Inc. a leading developer of innovative software tools for photographers, develops time-saving software solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers. onOne Software solutions have been created to help photographers spend more of their time behind the camera taking pictures instead of the computer workstation. Solutions include a wide range of easy-to-use plug-in enhancements for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, Apple Aperture and Apple iPhoto as well as photography apps for the Apple iPhone. Founded in 2005, onOne Software is a privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. For additional information, visit www.ononesoftware.com or call 1-888-968-1468.

© 2009 onOne Software. All rights reserved. onOne Software and the onOne Software logo are registered trademarks in the United States, and all are the property of onOne Software. Adobe, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

The maintenance update is delivered for free, either via the integrated function, or through a download from the official web site. New users have the chance to try the latest FontExplorer X Pro version free for up to 30 days.

The software allows for easy management and precise control of fonts, which can be activated or deactivated depending on several preset factors. For example, users can activate their predefined fonts when using Adobe InDesign, Illustrator or QuarkXPress software applications, and deactivate them when the programs are closed.
Another thing they can do is set access to typefaces from a specific place, or tag fonts with their preferred keyword.
They also can check shapes and forms of specific characters at any time, compare kerning pairs, shapes and forms, as well as create sample text paragraphs for preview.
Additional fonts can be purchased from the integrated online store.

The QuarkXPress 8.1 update improves PDF output capabilities and introduces features that make the page layout process even more intuitive and productive says Quark.

Additionally, QuarkXPress 8.1 introduces a ‘Native Transparency’ mode for creating PDFs, which can offer designers faster and more flexible PDF output support and provide greater control over the PDF workflow process.

The mode allows objects to which transparency has been applied within QuarkXPress to remain unflattened in the final PDF output says Quark.

QuarkXPress 8.1 also addresses outstanding issues reported by users and introduces improved design features that enable faster and more precise page creation.

A new keyboard modifier makes picture drag and drop more precise and predictable promise Quark.

Item Styles and Item Find/Change now fully integrate drop shadows, and users can update Item Styles with a single click to reflect changes they make in the layout.

QuarkXPress spell checking is now carried out with a new palette that enables users to save time by more easily adjusting their text as necessary while in the middle of the spell-checking process.

QuarkXPress is also the only layout application that gives layer-by-layer controls in its output options, offering the ability to send content with multiple variants to an output provider within a single PDF.

Today, life is a little less rosy for Microsoft, as it calls out in its recent 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As TechFlash highlights, Google Android is now called out by Microsoft as a competitor, as are Apple, Opera, and Google in browsers, whereas only Mozilla was deemed worthy of Microsoft’s competitive glare in 2008.

Even more interesting to me, however, is Microsoft’s acknowledgment of its increasing competition with Red Hat, Canonical (Ubuntu), and other open-source companies given the different business models these companies use to undermine Microsoft. Yes, Red Hat has made Microsoft’s hit list for years, and it has also called out open source as a threat, but there’s a far greater variety of open-source threats for it to worry about now.

Accordingly, Microsoft’s annual report for its fiscal year 2009 reads like open-source Whac-A-Mole.

Microsoft highlights its ‘desktop’ competitors…

Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat. Apple takes an integrated approach to the PC experience and has made inroads in share, particularly in the U.S. and in the consumer segment. The Linux operating system, which is also derived from Unix and is available without payment under a General Public License, has gained some acceptance, especially in emerging markets, as competitive pressures lead OEMs to reduce costs and new, lower-price PC form-factors gain adoption. Partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been actively working with alternative Linux-based operating systems.

The Windows operating system also faces competition from alternative platforms and new devices that may reduce consumer demand for traditional PCs. Competitors such as Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Opera Software Company offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of Windows products. User and usage volumes on mobile devices are increasing around the world relative to the PC. OEMs have been working to make the Google Android mobile operating system more compatible with small form-factor PCs or netbooks.

…and server competitors…

Our server operating system products face intense competition from a wide variety of server operating systems and server applications, offered by companies with a variety of market approaches….Nearly all computer manufacturers offer server hardware for the Linux operating system and many contribute to Linux operating system development. The competitive position of Linux has also benefited from the large number of compatible applications now produced by many leading commercial and non-commercial software developers. A number of companies supply versions of Linux, including Novell and Red Hat….

Our Web application platform software competes with open source software such as Apache, Linux, MySQL, and PHP, and we compete against Java middleware such as Geronimo, JBoss, and Spring Framework.

…and even office productivity application competitors:

Competitors to the Microsoft Office system include many software application vendors such as Adobe, Apple, Corel, Google, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Zoho, and local application developers in Asia and Europe….The OpenOffice.org project provides a freely downloadable cross-platform application that also has been adapted by various commercial software vendors to sell under their brands, including IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.

One should assume that Microsoft exaggerates the impact of competition in order to stave off further antitrust inquiries, but it’s telling that it calls out so much open-source competition for its broad product portfolio.

Of course, open source is also increasingly a tool used by Microsoft to distribute and develop software. Microsoft must choose whether to be a friend or foe to open source, especially as it seeks to build its next billion-dollar businesses.

But given that Microsoft opts to call out the fact that “Certain ‘open source’ software business models challenge our license-based software model” and that “To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue, and operating margins may decline,” it seems that Microsoft is preoccupied with open source as a threat, rather than as an opportunity. That’s unfortunate.

During Print 09, X-Rite/Pantone will be demonstrating its full range of standards-compliant color management solutions for profiling and calibrating scanners, monitors, RIPs, printers and presses; press quality control tools for proofs, plates and prints; ink formulation tools; dedicated flexography and packaging solutions; and process control and color certification for the digital supply chain. A significant new product introduction will be announced on September 7, 2009.

Visitors to the X-Rite/Pantone booth will see how X-Rite/Pantone color solutions serve every stage of the print production value supply chain for commercial, on-demand and package printing, from concept to consumer, from inspiration to production. Together, X-Rite and Pantone offer an unmatched set of solutions designed to help users achieve their color, fast, consistently, and across all media. Throughout the show, X-Rite/Pantone will offer a custom ROI calculation service designed to help print shops of all sizes quickly calculate how quickly they could recoup their investment to help them chose the most appropriate product for their needs.

Show attendees will be able to see the recently announced IntelliTrax with Print Standardizer, the graphic industry’s first automated press quality control and standardization solution for dynamic dot gain compensation – featuring award-winning technologies from X-Rite and Alwan Color Expertise <http://www.alwancolor.com/> , a world leader in standardization and color management implementation. The combined offering establishes a new class of standardization solutions in the graphic arts industry and includes Alwan’s Print Standardizer software based on the company’s CMYK Optimizer engine and X-Rite’s IntelliTrax, the industry’s choice for automated press-side color control. Designed to address the graphic industry’s ever growing need for standards compliance, it provides an affordable and easy-to-implement standardization solution within the G7™ workflow for analog and digital presses.

X-Rite will also be showcasing its new, streamlined high-end profile creation software portfolio featuring ProfileMaker 5 Platinum <http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=1211> , ProfileMaker 5 Packaging <http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=795> and MonacoPROFILER Platinum <http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=583> .

X-Rite’s new consolidated profiling software portfolio offers high-quality color output for any analog or digital printing technology, including inkjet, laser, offset and flexo printing. X-Rite’s profile creation solutions allow customers to build high-quality, reliable, custom ICC profiles tailored to their specific workflow needs.

X-Rite will demonstrate its ongoing commitment to international standards compliance for printing by showcasing ISO/G7 functionality embedded into its line of software solutions, as well as its portable, handheld spectrophotometers and its auto scanning systems. Print 09 will also mark the first North American showing of X-Rite’s new DensiEye 100 portable reflection densitometer.

Additionally, attendees will view a variety of essential PANTONE® Color tools, including the PANTONE Goe™ System, coated and uncoated, PANTONE GoeBridge™ and PANTONE Color Bridge™. With 2,058 colors, the Goe System offers a significantly expanded color palette, yet is based on only 10 ink mixing bases that are readily available anywhere in the world, ensuring color consistency while keeping ink inventory to a minimum for printers. The new bases deliver technically sound colors that are compatible with aqueous and UV coatings. Colors have been designed for printing uniform ink film thicknesses, which allows for equal drying times and more control when matching color on press. This enables press operators to run jobs at the same ink settings, providing significant production efficiencies.

Available in a portable, fan-guide format, GoeBridge lets users accurately visualize and evaluate how the more than 2,000 solid colors in the PANTONE Goe System will reproduce in CMYK on coated paper. The guide also provides CMYK, sRGB and HTML data for repurposing Goe colors in multiple color spaces.

Color Bridge, available in coated and uncoated stock, is another invaluable, multi-purpose tool that shows users how PANTONE MATCHING SYTEM® Colors reproduce in CMYK in a side-by-side comparison. The guide also provides sRGB and HTML values for repurposing PANTONE Colors on monitors and Web pages.

Visitors to the X-Rite/Pantone theater will also be able to attend a series of presentations given by renowned industry professionals on current industry and technology issues that will include, among others, the following topics:

· “Defining and Managing Spot Colors through your Packaging Workflow,” presented by Jay Sperry, research associate at Clemson University’s Sonoco Institute of Packaging Design and Graphics

· “Industry first: dynamic dot gain calibration – close loop from press to Platesetter”, presented by David Hunter, owner of Pilot Marketing

“The expectations organizations and individuals have for communicating and collaborating in the workplace continues to grow significantly,” said Sandeep Mehrotra, Director Sales, Adobe Systems. “The ability to break through and communicate a message in a compelling way has never been at a greater premium. Acrobat 9 is a response to this environment and is poised to fundamentally change how professionals communicate and collaborate using electronic documents.”

For the first time, Acrobat 9 provides deep support for Adobe Flash technology, enabling users to include Adobe Flash Player compatible video and application files in PDF documents. Recipients simply need free Adobe Reader® 9 software to consume the content. Now, static documents can come to life as dynamic communications.

Acrobat 9 also includes the ability to unify a wide range of content into a single document with the new concept of PDF Portfolios. PDF Portfolios enable business professionals to assemble multiple media types, such as documents, video, audio, and even 3D objects, into one, compressed PDF file. Users can then choose among several professional layouts—or create their own—to quickly integrate content, define navigation, and add polish and branding. As a result, communications such as sales proposals, legal documents, and product collateral can become far more customized and compelling.

In addition, Acrobat 9 provides access to capabilities for collaborating live within a PDF document—enabled by working with Acrobat.com, a new suite of hosted services Adobe introduced as public beta today. For example, a salesperson could use Acrobat 9 to send a lengthy contract to clients. The sales professional, or any of the recipients using Adobe Reader1, can then drive the group’s navigation through the PDF document in real-time working with Acrobat.com. This helps ensure everyone is literally, and figuratively, on the same page.

Additionally, Acrobat 9 users can access Acrobat.com for storing and sharing files, use it as a central location for collecting data as part of a forms process, and to gather comments in a shared document review. Acrobat.com includes other services, such as Adobe ConnectNow, personal Web conferencing that provides desktop sharing, video and voice conferencing, and integrated chat; and Adobe Buzzword®, an elegant, Web-based word processor that can be used to easily co-author and share documents for comment and review, creating high-quality print results.

The Acrobat 9 family consists of Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and the new Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software. The most comprehensive member of the family, Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, includes Adobe Presenter software for easily turning Microsoft® PowerPoint presentations into multimedia experiences that can be published as PDF files.

- Picture Content Tool: Allows users to grab, rotate, and scale images in real-time without typing in numbers or switching from tool to tool.
- Item Tool and Text Content Tool: Smart behaviour within these tools allows for less switching between tools, even for rotation and managing multiple items.
- New Bézier Pen Tools: Draw illustrations directly in QuarkXPress 8 with the redefined Bézier Pen tool.

The new interface and design experience QuarkXPress 8 brings is already receiving positive reviews from industry experts. Analyst and consultant Andreas Pfeiffer is the authour of many productivity reports for the design and publishing industry and specialises in benchmarking creative software. He notes, “QuarkXPress 8 manages one of the most difficult tasks in software development: to rethink the user interface to make it more efficient, more productive, and more enjoyable, without alienating the experienced user. The potential productivity gains of the new release should be considerable.”

Designer-driven Typography
QuarkXPress 8 delivers powerful and advanced text features in a way that puts even more control in the hands of the designer. It is the first page-layout application to offer hanging characters with paragraph-by-paragraph control, multiple and easy-to-use presets, and the freedom for users to create and share their own hanging character settings.

Design Across Media
QuarkXPress 8 allows for synchronised and simultaneous design across print, Web, and Flash. Users can incorporate sound, video, animation, and interactivity into their layouts through a built-in, designer-friendly interactive layout tool that was previously available as Quark Interactive Designer.

Without any programming skills, designers and creative professionals can share print content on the Web and in Flash format without purchasing multiple applications or learning code. This functionality enables QuarkXPress users to create fully integrated print, Web, and Flash campaigns with shared images, text, styles, and more.

Tim Banister, General Manager of Desktop Technology for Quark, said: “QuarkXPress 8 demonstrates our understanding of the way designers work today, and underscores Quark’s commitment to continually providing innovative software that pushes the design experience forward.

“We have combined highly intuitive software with the design control elements that are critical in the creative process, and as a result believe QuarkXPress 8 will not only be a seamless upgrade for existing QuarkXPress users, but the most accessible professional page-layout software for new users to learn as well.”

The Design Premium suite gains the Fireworks CS3 Web graphics and site prototyping tool, and all versions ship with a bonus seven-hour Total Training DVD (Adobe CS3 Design Workflow).

Acrobat 9 Pro costs £425, or £145 as an upgrade. The software is also available as Acrobat 9 Extended for £619 (or £245 as an upgrade) — which includes support for 3D CAD formats — or Acrobat 9 Standard for £245 (£99 as an upgrade), which is aimed at large companies using corporate communications.

The suites cost £1,409 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium, £895 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Standard, £1,195 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium, £1,969 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection.

All prices exclude VAT.

With Acrobat 9 Pro, designers can combine PDF files, video, audio, and other documents into easy-to-distribute PDF Portfolios, which can be browsed using customizable interactive navigation designed in Adobe Flash. Designers also can include Flash Player compatible video and application files in their PDF files and then play back this content in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9 software.

Acrobat 9 Pro enables designers to collaborate on documents more effectively and efficiently, according to Adobe. Now, users can create and manage forms and collect forms data more easily using Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat.com. Available as public beta for free signup, Acrobat.com is a new suite of hosted services Adobe also introduced today. Designers using Acrobat 9 also have the flexibility to access Acrobat.com to co-navigate PDF documents in real-time. Clients require Adobe Reader to participate.

With the intelligent Overprint Preview feature, print professionals now can accurately view interactions between overlapping objects because Overprint Preview automatically toggles on and off in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9. Print professionals also can reliably convert colours from one colour space to another, switch RGB and CMYK blacks to solid black, and map one colour to another colour, including mapping colours to Pantone spot colours using built-in, industry-standard Pantone libraries.

The Compare Documents feature identifies differences including changes to text, text formatting, images, line weights and backgrounds between versions of documents.

Adobe Fireworks CS3, now bundled with Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium edition, provides designers with a flexible tool to prototype Web pages for interactive design projects. Fireworks CS3 includes a common library of pre-built assets, provides the ability to quickly edit vector artwork and bitmap images, and allows seamless integration with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash.

Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 will begin shipping worldwide by July 2008. All editions will run on Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5 on Intel-based systems and Microsoft Windows XP Vista platforms.