Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Supported file formats: Major RAW formats; image formats BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PCD,
PICT, PNG, PSD, TGA, TIFF, WMF, VFZ/PFZ, STN Genuine Fractals, and SID MrSID;
document formats INDD, PDF, PSD, AI, PPT, TXT, FHX, QXD, DOC, and XLS; audio visual
formats AIFF, AU, AVI, SWF, Mac Sound File, MIDI, MPEG1/2/4, MP3, MOV, WAV, DV,
3GPP, and 3GPP2 Mobile Phone Video
Price level: Approx. $200
Address: Extensis, Inc., 1800 SW First Avenue, Suite 500, Portland, OR 97201, United States
www.extensis.com
FotoStation PRO
Chapter 6 ■ Digital Asset Management (DAM) 65
Vendor: FotoWare
Purpose: Digital asset management, with workgroup collaboration tools, data mining, and image
enhancement
Description
FotoStation PRO is a fully customizable DAM workstation, with image editing features,
data mining, workgroup collaboration, and over 70 sort options. It has extensive organizing
capabilities, allowing you to append detailed text descriptions to images and
perform multi-archive searches. Features like drag-and-drop image placement with autocropping
make it especially useful in a newspaper or magazine environment.
One of FotoStation PRO’s key selling points is its data mining feature, which allows the
user to find images without formulating a specific search. It lets you hunt for appropriate
images by using a “word list” that can locate all files with those words in a given
XMP text field, or by a single keyword, date, or range of dates. You can assemble collections
of images as named projects with complete project descriptions.
FotoStation PRO can also index the contents of offline media such as DVDs, creating
offline archives that are fully searchable. It has plenty of image editing features, such as
hue and saturation settings, curves, manual color balance adjustment, and a sophisticated
noise reduction feature called SmartClean. Color management with ICC profiles
is fully implemented. A start-up wizard makes it easy for new users, whereas experienced
users can customize the interface according to their preferences.
Comments
FotoStation PRO is one of a new breed of image organizer that imposes an additional
level of indexing on an existing collection. You could call it an “image reorganizer,” as
it can help to tame archives and make it easier to find pictorial content to illustrate published
articles. Version 6.0 saw a shift from IPTC to XMP metadata; the introduction
of SmartColor, an automatic image enhancement tool; and SmartClean, a server-based
solution to reduce noise and improve color saturation in the stored images.