Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugin Newsletter - May 2012
CONTENTS
COLORSTYLER 1.0 FOR WINDOWS RELEASED: Check
out its 20+ effect types and 600 presets
COLORSTYLER INTRODUCTION VIDEO: See the main features of ColorStyler in action
COLORSTYLER CHALLENGE: Send in your ColorStyler presets and win prizes
PLUGIN REVIEW: DFT Rays reviewed by
Kay M Kuhnlein
POLL RESULTS: What is the pixel size of the screen that you use for image processing?
NEW POLL: Photoshop plugins
of which companies do you regularly use?
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Name
of Spotlight Plugin, Wacom Plugins, Mezzoforce Ice Lite 2
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS: Perfect Effects/Layers
Free, Luce 2, Nikon ViewNX 2, PhotoFiltre 6.5, Instant Tools
GRAPHICS NEWS: Photoshop CS6, Launch Box, Neutralhazer, Urban Lightscape
Dear Reader,
Finally, our new ColorStyler product is available! It lets you apply most effects known from B/W Styler to color photos and contains many additional effects, presets and options. It also includes a lot of new features that are not available in our previous plugins yet. Many of these will be added in future updates of our other plugins. Also do not miss the introduction video to ColorStyler as well as the ColorStyler Challenge that was just started.
There is a new solution called LaunchBox for running Photoshop plugin directly in Lightroom, Aperture and iPhoto under MacOS X. As we do not support Lightroom and Aperture on the Mac yet, we recommend LaunchBox for our own Mac plugins. See the Graphic News section below for more information.
I hope you like the new poll feature. It offers more options for voting as well as analyzing the results. This months you can vote for the plugin companies that produce your favorite plugins. See below for more details.
Sincerely Yours,
Harald Heim
COLORSTYLER 1.0 FOR WINDOWS RELEASED
Check out its 20+ effect types and 600 presets
The Windows version of our latest product called ColorStyler is finally ready. ColorStyler provides impressive photo effects, recreates traditional film effects and allows you to enhance and stylize your photos. It features more than 20 effect types, 600 presets and plenty of masking options, including a masking brush for affecting specific image areas only. ColorStyler is available as a Photoshop-compatible plugin as well as a standalone application and Lightroom external editor.
ColorStyler reproduces the whole workflow of color film photography from shooting a photo to processing it in the lab and framing the end result. It recreates the look of color films, lens filters, lab effects and photo papers that are popular in traditional color photography, but it goes even further. With the help of more than 600 built-in presets you can transform dull photos into interesting color pictures. ColorStyler lets you enrich images by colorizing them, manipulating brightness, contrast, color and saturation, masking certain image areas, adding soft focus and glow effects, simulating film grain, adding special effects, framing the image and more.
For more information and downloading
a free demo version visit the
ColorStyler
product page
COLORSTYLER INTRODUCTION VIDEO
See the main features of ColorStyler in action
We offer an introduction video about the new ColorStyler plugin. It demonstrates the various modes of ColorStyler and shows how to work with presets, the curve tool, selective features, fade controls and the masking brush. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful!
This is our first instructional video ever. The production time of this 10-minute video was seven days. The zoom effects were created with our own Plugin Galaxy AE product, by the way.
For the best watching experience switch the video to 720p (if your connection allows that) to see the UI elements clearly and activate full screen mode.
You can watch the video on the
ColorStyler
Videos page
COLORSTYLER CHALLENGE
Send in your ColorStyler presets and win prizes
As ColorStyler offers so many effect options allowing millions of combinations and variations, we decided to start a challenge that asks you to present your own ColorStyler effects. All you need to do is to download the ColorStyler demo (or use the full version if you own it), play a bit with it, save your favorite effects or effect combinations as presets and send them to us.
The five people with the highest quality presets will win one of five software prizes ranging from the PhotoWiz Bundle to a copy of a PhotoWiz product of your choice. The contest deadline is June 28, 2012.
For more information and for registering for the contest
visit the
ColorStyler
Challenge page
PLUGIN REVIEW
DFT Rays reviewed by Kay M Kuhnlein
Kay thinks that the DFT Rays plugin guarantees a positive
feedback from the spectators of your photos. But this plugin requires
a very specific type of photo to do its light magic. In this case it is
a shopping center in Las Vegas that looks like a cathedral, which Kay
visited on his last trip to Vegas. Surprisingly the photo was taken by
his wife who does not seem to have spent her whole time shopping within
these halls. Kay also found it necessary to enhance the photo with ContrastMaster
afterwards.
But better convince yourself on the
DFT Rays Review
page
POLL RESULTS
What is the pixel size of the screen that you use for image processing?
229 people participated in the last poll about their screen size. Here are the results:
| 800x600 1024x600 1024x768 1152x864 1280x720 1280x768 1280x800 1280x960 1280x1024 1366x768 1440x900 1600x900 1600x1200 1680x1050 1920x1080 1920x1200 2560x1440 3840x2160 Other |
3% |
Almost one quarter of all voters use a Full HD screen for editing images. Striking two thirds own a screen that has a pixel resolution of 1680x1050, 1600x1200 or higher. Among lower resolution screens 1024x768 and 1280x1024 pixel seem to be most popular, both with 8%. Still, 5% of all voters use screens with a height of less than 768 pixels, which can be found among mobile devices like netbooks and tablet pcs.
For more poll results please visit the
Resources section
NEW POLL
Photoshop plugins of which companies do you regularly use?
The new poll asks you about the companies whose Photoshop
plugins you regularly use. It will be interesting to see which companies
produce the most useful plugins. You can choose among 49 items and vote
for more than one company if you wish. There is also an Other item, which
offers a text box for entering the name of a company that is not mentioned
in the poll. You can also leave a comment if you click on the Comments
link in the poll results view.
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS
Name of Spotlight Plugin, Wacom Plugins, Mezzoforce Ice Lite 2
Here are the latest posts on the forums:
Name of Spotlight Plugin
Cyna wrote: "years ago i had a plugin that like 3 or 4 little spotlights
that you could angle at different places. I know I still have that plugin
but for the life of me I can't remember the name. was wondering if anyone
new it. it isn't called spotlight I have that one and it is just one big
circle."
Read
More...
Wacom Plugins
FuzzyPete wrote: "Some years ago I had a Wacom tablet which came
with some free plugins. With one of them I could apply metallic and other
finishes using the pen ... the plugin got lost when the tablet expired
and was replaced. I now have a need for that plugin but cannot remember
its name and don't know if it would work with W7 and CS5 if I found it."
Read
More...
Mezzoforce Ice Lite 2
Carmen Teles wrote: "Where can I find a valid link or site to download
Mezzoforce Ice Lite 2? The ones I found don't work (Windows Seven 64 bit).
Thanks, Carmen"
Read
More...
Feel free to post comments or start a discussion topic
at
The Plugin Site Forum
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS
Perfect Effects/Layers Free, Luce
2, Nikon ViewNX 2, PhotoFiltre 6.5, Instant Tools
OnOne Perfect Effects 3 Free
(for Win/Mac) is a limited edition of the commercial product with
the same name. It also includes the Perfect Layers 2 module for
creating and editing multi-layered files from Lightroom or Aperture. Perfect
Layers 2 (for Win/Mac) can also be downloaded separately for free.
Visit website...
Version 2 of Luce (for Windows) was released
as a 32-bit and 64-bit Photoshop plugin and as an After Effects plugin.
It produces volumetric and directional light effects. The poor developer
lost its source code, so he reprogrammed it from scratch. Luce 2 now also
supports 16-bit and 32-bit image depth and multi-core CPUs. Unfortunately
the preview is still very small and the contrast of the effect is quite
low, so you need to postprocess the effect in Photoshop.
Visit website...
Nikon ViewNX 2 (for Win/Mac) is a free tool for
managing, storing, browsing, editing and sharing digital photos and videos.
It lets you resize, crop, straighten, enhance and print images. It processes
Nikon RAW files, TIFF and JPEG files and edits videos.
Visit
website...
PhotoFiltre 6.5 (for Windows) is a free image
editing application with standard features. There are various plugins
for PhotoFiltre including one called "8bf
Filters" that makes it support Photoshop plugins. It is mentioned
that it does not support all Photoshop plugins, but we successfully tested
our own plugins. There is also a commercial version of it available called
PhotoFiltre Studio. On
its web site you can also discover various free image effect tools.
Visit website...
Clipping Path Studio offers freeware versions of their
commercial tools (for Wind/Mac). InstantPhotoColor lets you colorize
b&w photos with a brush, InstantPhotoSketch is a simple photo
sketching tool and InstantMask (Windows only) is meant for cutting
out the background in a photo by drawing two lines. There are also commercial
versions of these tools.
Visit
website...
For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
Resources section
GRAPHICS NEWS
Photoshop CS6, Launch Box, Neutralhazer, Urban Lightscape
Adobe announced Photoshop
CS6 and CS6 Extended (for Win/Mac). New features include e.g. content-aware
move, video editing, new blur effects, Adobe Camera Raw 7 with revised
controls, an oil paint filter, speed improvements and many smaller enhancements.
Photoshop CS6 can be purchased regularly or used as part of the new Creative
Cloud service by paying a monthly subscription fee. Unfortunately CS3
and CS4 users can only upgrade to CS6 until the end of the year. And it
looks as if Adobe will make each upgrade mandatory in future by forcing
users to pay the full price again if they missed one. This will certainly
make Photoshop too expensive for many people in the design and photo business
who do not use several other Adobe CS applications.
Visit website...
Alpha Plugin's LaunchBox (for Mac) makes it easy
to use Photoshop plugins directly in Lightroom, Aperture and iPhoto. It
provides a Filters menu with the plugins similar to the one that you know
from Photoshop. This saves you the extra step of opening the images in
Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and speeds up your workflow. It may also
save you money if you do not need Photoshop anymore. LaunchBox also supports
the PhotoWiz plugins. A Windows version of LaunchBox is under development.
Visit
website...
Kolor Neutralhazer (for Win/Mac) is a Photoshop
plugin that removes the haze from landscape photos and reveals its colors.
It lets you define background and foreground areas that can be processed
with different settings.
Visit
website...
The maker of the free Tintii tool released a commercial
plugin called Urban Lightscape (for Win/Mac). It provides localized
brightness adjustments and exposure corrections. By placing control points,
it lets you soften harsh shadows, fix overexposed skies and lighten backlit
foregrounds.
Visit
website...
