DASHBOARD for Photoshop update is 3-in-1 and free.

We've been working really hard on our latest version of the Dashboard 4 Pro for Photoshop® and now it's even better! We've now combined our Action Dashboard, Borders and Textures Dashboard, and AutoAlbum Dashboard in to one slick panel where you can tab quickly between the different tool sets. It's more compact and easier to use. But wait, there's more...

The Dashboard 4 Pro is a free Photoshop plugin that allows you to quickly search through all of your actions and launch them instantly. It also gives your own actions super powers, like one-click undo and paintability! The free Dashboard includes a collection of our groovy image enhancing and time saving actions. You can demo any of our other award-winning actions, or our borders and textures, immediately and purchase if you want to. There is no catch. You can continue to use the Dashboard and the essential tools for free, forever. It would be silly not to try it, so download it now!

This is the original, and most powerful Photoshop Action and Effect manager availablash

The Dashboard now combines all tool palettes in to one.

We've added some other cool features too:

• Super Search! Normally, when you search, you can limit your searches to a certain category by using the category drop down menu. With Super Search, just type the * character at the end of your search and it will search everything, everywhere!
• Home button – one click to return to your All Actions category
• Customizing! – Our actions were made to be flexible and customizable. All layers are kept in tact for your tweaking pleasure. Now, if you have a favorite way of modifying our actions, you can save our action with your modifications to the actions palette as a new action. Since the Dashboard reads all actions in the actions palette, your custom creations are also available via the Dashboard too!
• Batch Processing – Using the customizing feature, you can now batch process with any effect. Just export it to your actions palette and use the standard Photoshop batch processing tools!
• Better organized categories – general use categories are at the top, followed by a category for each of our action sets. 
• Mini previews – our effects include miniature sample previews so you have a visual idea of what each action does!
• New graphics and sizing options make the Dashboard a welcome addition to your Photoshop workspace.

This update is free to all our existing users and new users can also get the Dashboard 4 Pro free to control their actions or use our essential tools set. We currently have the default and carbon fiber skin designs available, but will soon have many more! What could be better than that? OK, fine, chocolate covered bananas are pretty good too.

Watch the video at the end for an overview of how powerful the Dashboard is and how it is used.

The new DASHBOARD comes in the default skin and my personal favorite, carbon fiber. You can install either one. More fun skin designs on the way!

Click to play video

The DASHBOARD 3-in-1 update adds features, simplifies

Later today we'll be releasing a big update to our popular Photoshop plugin, the Action Dashboard. We've combined the Action Dashboard, Borders & Textures (BorTex) Dashboard, and the AutoAlbum Dashboard in to one panel. Searching through your actions, or ours, is simpler and faster. You can batch process and customize any of our effects too. A detailed overview will be posted soon! 

Top 3 Lightroom 5 new features!

Lightroom 5 was officially announced today and we wanted to let everyone know that our existing Lightroom Presets packages all work fantastically with the new update! From our main quiver "Workflow Collection" to our popular and funky "Vintage Delish" set, they all work great and give you popular, beautiful looks with a single click.  

We also have a complete collection with all our popular presets AND our Workflow video tutorial. Anyone who purchases now will get a free upgrade to the Lightroom 5 video when it's released shortly. 

Lightroom 5 has several new features  and our soon-to-be-released Lightroom 5 Workflow training video will cover them all and explain how to integrate them in to an efficient and complete workflow system – as I teach in my hands-on workshops. However, here's a quick rundown of the main features I'm excited about and why:

1.  Smart Previews – these are essentially larger, more robust previews of your full-sized images that provide enough information to do Develop mode adjustments, even if your master images are offline. This means you can do pretty much any type of editing you'd do with online images, and then you simply synchronize those changes when you re-connect to the master images. This means working on airplanes or away from your master file storage is much more efficient. 
   
   An added bonus of the Smart Preview is that it is quicker to switch to Develop mode and apply adjustments since you are reading the preview, not the full RAW file. This is fantastic news for owners of the Nikon D800, D600, or other very high resolution cameras as you can edit those massive files very quickly now! (see this post for a review/comparison of the D800 and D600).
   
   
2.  Advanced Healing Brush – adopting more of Photoshop's functionality, the healing brush in LR5 can now follow lines you draw rather than just circular daubs, as in previous versions. This makes healing lines on faces, telephone wires, etc. much cleaner and more efficient.
   
   
3. Radial Gradient – you can apply adjustments through a radial gradient that you position manually. No longer are you limited to linear gradients. This is particularly useful for vignette effects where you want to specify a certain area of the image as the center of the vignette rather than only being able to vignette from the image center, as it currently works.

You can create your smart previews right away when you import a new set of photos via the import dialog box

For existing images, you can generate the smart previews by selecting them then using the menu option

These are my top 3 new features, although there are more.  I'll post some extensive tips and tricks for using the new features in upcoming blog posts. Have fun with it! What's your favorite new feature? What do you wish they would have added?