Template Manager and Prefab Templates:

• alpha comes with over 50 ready-to-go professionally designed templates that make short work of routine designs. Better yet, you can convert your own designs into templates at the touch of a button.

• alpha has gained new 'killer' functionality in the form of smart objects. These objects mostly behave like images in earlier versions of alpha, except much more so. New Objects include:
• Smart Images: The image objects of old have gained interactive functionality and now can receive new images via drag & drop - without forgetting any f/x, blend or property assigned to them.
• Smart Text: Text objects that behave just like images - you can add f/x to them, add blends, and alter properties. Furthermore, they support 'wildcard' autotext for real-time updates like output date, image name etc.
• Geometric Objects: A host of different objects that you now can create in-App with almost limitless variety. Objects include lines, panels, triangles, frames, polygons etc.
• Light Objects: three different classes of fully configurable light objects allow you to quickly add lighting effects to your compositions: Flashes, Lens Flares, Star Bursts.
• Generators & Gradients: Two- and three-color gradients (fully configurable), both linear and radial, plus checkerboard and stripes pattern generators.

• With the addition of smart text objects, the 'grid' generator of old has gained a bigger brother (something that's very difficult in the real world): Contact Sheet. This purpose-built generator takes any amount of images, lays them out, and adds a real-text smart legend in a matter of seconds.

• We added 15 new high-quality effects, some of them unique - just try the 'BRT point' effect and tell us that you are not impressed. Since f/x can be applied to all objects (not just images), they are now on equal footing with alpha's other signature feature, blends.

• Of course we have added new blends to alpha. Only two have made the cut, but these two stand out because they are of the 'Special' blend category: Perspective project and Photo Curl. Use the Photo Curl on text, and you'll see what we mean. Try that in any other app.

• We updated the whole documentation. All 400+ pages. For you, we have included a 'Version 2' section to quickly get you started, and of course beefed up the tutorial/recipe section.

• There's a lot of other stuff that has been going on under the hood. Stability enhancements.
• Compatibility enhancements (Lion anyone?). Most of it is arcane, and, honestly, by the time you read this you could already have downloaded and tried it out for yourself. Go head - make your day!

Template Manager and Prefab Templates:

• alpha comes with over 50 ready-to-go professionally designed templates that make short work of routine designs. Better yet, you can convert your own designs into templates at the touch of a button.

• alpha has gained new 'killer' functionality in the form of smart objects. These objects mostly more...