Macphun is a major photography software player for iOS devices and on the Mac. They always offer good value, and high quality apps. Since many of our readers do much of their photography on iOS devices and have Macs this bundle should be of interest.
Macphun is offering 6 strong best-in-class photo editing tools, that can be used standalone, or as a plug in to Photoshop and/or Lightroom.
In addition, the bundle includes more than 40 high quality e-books and video presentations, some tied to the tools offered in the bundle, while some are basic photography videos. The offer also includes more than 1200 textures, presets and sample raw files that support the tutorials.
Macphun calls this their Creative Kit XXL. It’s $129, and the company values the bundle of software, tutorials and e-books at about $2000.
The Photo Editing Software
First off is Intensify. This software/plugin has been a big seller. It’s designed to bring out color in your images, and also can add clarity and change things like curves. It’s all based on presets, making it easy to see the results. It’s an excellent and useful tool, and Photoshop has nothing to compare with it natively. Just by itself, Intensify sells for $60.
FX Photo Studio is basically a sophisticated filter app. It’s an evolution of a similar tool offered for iOS. The app also features a variety of special effects. I consider this the weakest of the offerings, but some people will like the one-click application of changes. It retails for $40.
Snapheal is a real winner. It’s similar to Content Aware Fill in Photoshop, but my testing shows it to be easier to use and more powerful. It’s great for blemish removal, and even large groups of people can be easily removed from a landscape or indoor photo. The app features dynamic settings that give you more control than Photoshop offers in its tool. Snapheal retails for $50.
Noiseless is another winner. I like it better than the Photosop noise reduction options, and I think it is certainly on a par with the NIK tools noise reduction offerings. It’s especially nice if you have a noisy iPhone image. Bring it into your Mac, and you’ll see the image improve with little, if any, loss of detail. This is a $60 tool on its own.
Tonality is one of the best black and white plugins around, and I’ve used a lot of them. There are presets for many different looks, and each one exposes the control sliders so you can adjust to taste. Or you can just start on your own. It’s a really impressive app and it sells on its own for $60.
Finally, the bundle features Focus. The app adds professional lens effects to your images, allowing you to add soft focus to parts of your photo, and it can mimic tilt-shift lenses to give you a miniature effect. It sells for $60 outside the bundle.
Other apps included
The bundle also includes apps Macphun did not create, including Resize Sense, Watermark Sense, Picture Collage Maker, Circular Studio, Flame Painter 3 and Crazy Talk 7 (facial animation software).
E-books and tutorials
The Macphun bundle comes with more than 40 e-books and tutorials on video. I am skeptical about a lot of photo e-books, as they are often sloppily done and don’t have great content. Here, however, Macphun has done a great job. While every book is not directly applicable to the kind of photography I am interested in, there are many that are, and those are terrific. As an example, a book on Photographing Death Valley has maps, places to stay, tips on shooting specific locations, and a variety of locations I’ve never been to even though I make frequent photo trips there. Other books on topics like shooting the night sky will get you outside taking great milky way and star field shots on the first night. I think the average person might use half of these e-books, but just the books you’ll use are worth the price of the bundle.
Other topics include street photography, Using Photos for OS X, iCloud for Photographers, Mac Security, Shooting Africa, Post Processing recipes, Extending Dynamic Range with Luminosity Masks and much more.
Summing up
This Macphun bundle is available until the end of this month. If you are a serious photographer, it’s worth the money. I don’t think there really is $2000 worth here, because if you were buying separately you would pass on some of the plugins and some of the e-books, but I think there is easily $500 worth here for the average photog, and at $129 this is a bargain.
You may not use every plugin, and you certainly won’t use every e-book, but this package still rates as a bargain. I tried every Macphun plugin and some of the 3rd party apps. Everything is high quality, and I saw no bugs or crashes. If you are intrigued, check the details out at Macphun.
