BW Workflow Pro

The Fred Miranda BW Workflow Pro Plug-In for Photoshop provides numerous ways to convert a color image to monochrome. In addition to manual modes, and various custom settings, there are many pre-set options, including 8 preset filter selections, 32 duotone presets, 18 tritone presets, 6 quadtone presets, 3 film grain presets and 4 dynamic range presets. All effects are easily previewed.

The plug-in works with PS 5.5, 6.0. 7.0 and CS, but not with PS Elements.

More details here.

Hold your mouse cursor over the image to see the effect.

JAlbum

Few things in life are free - especially good things. JAlbum is an exception. This program is designed to create photo albums of your digital images for uploading and subsequent viewing on a web site. Here's an example.

The appearance of albums create with JAlbum can be highly customized, and the program can link to non-image files. JAlbum also contains an FTP client to make it easy to publish photo albums on the web.

For digital photographers, an additional bonus is the ability to extract the EXIF data and display it along with the image. There is even a special "Photo-Geek" option for this purpose.

JAlbum can be downloaded here.

Noise Ninja

Digital noise is a problem for many digital cameras, especially at higher ISO values. Noise Ninja does a terrific job of removing digital noise from TIFF or JPG files. The software is available as a stand-alone program (as shown opposite) or as a plug-in for Photoshop.

While excellent for removing high ISO noise, a lesser-known use of the program is to produce cleaner, smoother enlargements from even low-ISO images.

See some images before and after processing with Noise Ninja or get full details at the PictureCode website.

Read a more detailed review at Luminous Landscape.