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Plugin Guide #3 - Rosenman Filters

by Harald Heim

The plugins collection from Richard Rosenman currently consists of a total of 23 freeware plugins and four commercial plugins. Richard released the first few plugins of this collection in mid 2002 and continued to add a new plugin every few months. He also updated the already released plugins with small enhancements from time to time. Richard Rosenman is working in the computer animation industry and has produced over 50 commercials for both film and broadcast. Richard also co-directed "Plumber", a 5 minute fully computer generated short film, which won various awards and was nominated for a 2004 British Academy award. So we would expect that his plugins are inspired by 3D animations, and indeed a few of them really are. You can recognize the Rosenman plugins by the steel texture that is used for the window background. They have a small but useable preview box and some offer quite a lot of controls for adjusting the effect. A preset feature would be useful for many of them, but only the Superformula plugin has one. You will find a great variety of effects and special tools among these plugins. There are noise effects (Grain Generator, Diffuse), mosaic effects (Halftone, Pixelate), distortions (Pinch, Squarify, Pinocchio), photo enhancement tools (Diffuse Glow, Lens Distortion Corrector, Vignette Corrector, Color Replacer) and many other exotic plugins. Interesting are especially the 3D Sphere Generator, which renders a sphere that is illuminated by a light beam, and the Evaluate plugin, which allows you to create an effect with the help of a formula whose elements can be chosen from some controls. Many of the plugins were designed for very specific tasks, but the most useful plugins in general terms are probably Diffuse Glow, Lens Distortion Corrector and Vignette Corrector.		Info & Download
		www.richardrosenman.com

		Installation
		If you use an Adobe application, please create a sub folder called "Rosenman" in the Plug-Ins folder of your application's folder and copy the unzipped Rosenman plugins into it. If you use Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact or Photo-Paint, you can put the unzipped Rosenman plugins in any folder you like. Afterwards you have to select that folder in the Preferences dialog of your application. After restarting your application, you can find them on the "Richard Rosenman" sub menu of the Filter or Effect menu. For information on installing plugins in other applications see here.

Diffuse Glow

01 Choose An Image Please open a photo that contains some highlight areas. Having many small highlight spots promises a more interesting effect.	02 Adjust the Effect Run the Diffuse Glow plugin. The Threshold slider defines what areas will be affected. The Radius slider adjusts the density of the glow effect. Also use the Intensity slider and for a smoother glow switch to "Gaussian Blur".	03 Variations For more diffuse glows raise the Radius and Intensity sliders. For a colored glow deactivate one or two of the Red, Green and Blue buttons. You can also influence which image areas are affected by using another option from the Selection combo box..

Lens Corrections

01 Choose An Image Use a photo that was done with a wide angle lens and gets darker towards the corners. Close-up photos or portrait photos will mostly benefit from this correction.	02 Vignette Correction Run the Vignette Corrector plugin and increase the Brightness slider as needed. Adjust the Mask Site slider to shift the brightened area towards or away from the center. The Display Mask button lets you view the mask.	03 Lens Correction Run the Lens Distortion Corrector plugin. Make sure that "Lock Vert>Horiz" and "Bicubic" are activated. Now drag the Horiz slider to the left until the image looks more flat and not too distorted. Because of the small preview please have a look at the full image and redo the correction if necessary.

Pinocchio Syndrome

01 Choose An Image Open a photo of someone or something that you want to make fun of. But don't get caught when doing this with a photo of your boss!	02 Mutating Execute the Pinocchio plugin, click on the body part that you want to elongate, hold down the mouse button and drag until it is long enough. Adjust the Radius and Zoom sliders to improve the effect. In this example I applied Pinocchio five times: 1 time for the beak and 4 times for the feet.	03 Variation A lot of fun is to distort the silhouettes of buildings. In this example the Pinocchio plugin was applied six times to the arcs. The plugin produced a distortion artifact in the sky area, which needed to be retouched manually.

This article was published in Issue 27 of the Digital Photo Effects Magazine. It was updated for The Plugin Site in February 2006.