20seven

Devigner blog about development and design

Naked Light Public Beta


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The public beta of Naked Light will be available later today. The counter on their home page is counting down the minutes.

Naked Light is a new, Mac and Leopard only, non-destructive editing tool for photographers. This coming on the heels of a quickly maturing Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture.

What’s really caught my eye here is Naked Light has node based editing. Coming from a 3D background, node based editing is fairly common in apps by Softimage and Digital Fusion which I spent years working with.

From the developer’s site the app seems to be touted as resolution independent, with vector and raster based painting tools as well as the ability to dodge and burn in stops. Combine that with a noise brush and the fact that every filter can have it’s own masks, this sounds like a contender in the photographer’s toolkit.

“Tools (and filters) in Naked light use precise, photographer-friendly units. You can dodge and burn using stops, paint in millimeters, and blur by inches.

Because Naked light has no set resolution, you can zoom in—up to 64×—to work on tiny details. When you zoom out, everything will be crisply and precisely laid out.

Brush strokes are perfectly laid out at subpixel precision, creating the smoothest, finest renderings of any paint program."

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For Aperture users this should be at the least a good time to try something new while we wait to see what Apple has in store for us with an upgrade. I’ll be grabbing the beta later today and will post back on my experiences.