Type of Article: MacNews News Article

Creaceed (http://www.creaceed.com) has released Hydra 2.2 The upgrade addresses a major feature request from the HDR user community: an HDR plug-In for Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom.

All Hydra’s features are from now on available directly in the Lightroom workflow. From a series of regular photographs of the same scene, the plug-in creates an High Dynamic Range image that’s much closer to what your eyes actually see, according to the folks at Creaceed.

Hydra 2.2 works with Mac OS X 10.5 and higher. It’s Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

The Araelium Group has released DMG Canvas 2.0 (http://www.araelium.com/dmgcanvas), a Mac OS X (10.5 and higher) tool for building disk images from template documents that you create. Version 2.0 offers advanced background layout with customizable text and image objects, and more.

Cheetah 3D (http://www.cheetah3d.com) — software for modeling, animating and rendering 3D objects — has been updated to version 5.3. It adds 64-bit support for Intel 64-bit CPUs and sports some user interface tweaks.

Cheetah3D costs US$149 for a single user version; however, version 5.3 is a free update for all registered users of version 5.x and is a $69 for an upgrade from versions 1.x, 2.x, 3.x and 4.x.. It requires requires at least Mac OS X 10.4 and 16MB of VRAM. It’s a Universal Binary product, which means it will run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

SanDisk Corp. (http://www.sandisk.com) has begun shipping its SanDisk G3 Solid State Drives (SSD) to retailers in North America and Europe. The flash memory-based SanDisk G3 SSD offers an alternative to a 7,200 RPM hard disk drive (HDD) for some customers.

The 120GB SanDisk G3 SSD can endure up to 80TB of data written to it over its lifetime, says says Eric Bone, vice president, retail product marketing, SanDisk. The solid state drives open files up to twice as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD, he adds.