Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
Plugin Newsletter - September 2011
CONTENTS
PHOTOFREEBIES 2.02 FOR WINDOWS:
Various bug fixes
THE PLUGIN SITE PANEL 1.07: Support for NoiseControl for Mac and PhotoFreebies 2.02
THE PLUGIN SITE UPDATES: Polls 2011 Page Added
POLL RESULTS: Which of the following applications
do you use for processing photos?
NEW POLLS: What kept you
from buying commercial plugins of The Plugin Site? What convinced you
to buy a commercial plugin of The Plugin Site?
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS: Animation
Shop Replacement, Reconstruction Tool
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS: Autointerlace,
Easyfilters, MaPZone, Microsoft ICE & Pro Photo Tools, Inverted Image
GRAPHICS NEWS: Photoshop CS5 Fix, Kenebec Plugins, FX Photo Studio
Dear Reader,
We would like to get an idea about the positive and negative aspects of our commercial Photoshop plugins. So we decided to conduct two polls to get some feedback from you. So if you purchased one of our plugins or decided against it, please participate at least in one of the two polls. It is greatly appreciated by us. Please scroll down for more information and the poll link.
In the Free Plugin and Tools section of this newsletter you will find the namesuppressed Autointerlace plugin. Recently I met its Australian author Kohan Ilkin, who was visiting Germany. I offered him to create 64-bit versions of his FilterMeister-based plugins, which he gladly accepted. The free Autointerlace plugin is the first result of this cooperation. I hope you will like it as it is greatly improved compared to the previous FilterFactory version.
Even more plugin problems with Paint Shop Pro X3 have surfaced. Some plugins do not seem to work correctly with service pack 3 & 4, so you may be able to avoid this problem by reinstalling PSP X3 without the service packs. See here.
Additionally there are preview problems with
many FilterMeister plugins if you apply them on a layer in PSP X3 (version
13.2.1 and higher). Our own plugins (except ColorWasher) had this problem
too. We already updated them on the web site, but we have not emailed
the updates yet. So if you use one of our commercial plugins and experience
the mentioned problem, please contact us to get a fixed version.
Sincerely Yours,
Harald Heim
PHOTOFREEBIES 2.02 FOR WINDOWS
Various bug fixes
PhotoFreebies consist of 12 freeware plugins (for Win/Mac) with useful effects and operations, e.g. sepia effects, saturation gradients, b/w conversion, color space transformations and much more.
Version 2.02 of PhotoFreebies contains smaller enhancements and bug fixes. For example, a Window resizing bug and problems with PSP X3 were fixed. The plugins now appear on "The Plugin Site" sub menu of the Filters menu and not on the "PhotoWiz" sub menu anymore. The Plugin Installer now detects PSP X2 Ultimate, ArcSoft PhotoStudio, Paint.NET, Imagelys Picture Styles and FixFoto.
For more information and downloading this freeware
please go to the
PhotoFreebies
page
THE PLUGIN SITE PANEL 1.07
Support for NoiseControl for Mac and PhotoFreebies 2.02
ThePluginSite Panel is a flash panel for Photoshop CS4/CS5 (for Win/Mac). It allows you to apply all Photoshop plugins created by The Plugin Site in various ways. It lets you use the brush tool to add or remove a plugin effect, applies the last plugin effect without displaying a dialog and runs a plugin on the current layer, a duplicated version of it or a layer that is a merged copy of all visible layers. It can also flatten all layers before applying a plugin.
Version 1.07 of the TPS Panel for Photoshop CS4 and CS5 offers support for NoiseControl for MacOS X. Additionally it now requires the Windows version 1.0, 1.01 or 2.02 of PhotoFreebies. PhotoFreebies 2.0 and 2.01 for Windows do not work with version 1.07 of the panel.
For more information and downloading the free TPS
panel visit the
TPS
Panel page
THE PLUGIN SITE UPDATES
Polls 2011 Page Added
A new "Polls 2011" page was added to the Resource section of
The Plugin Site. The results of all polls that were conducted this year
can be viewed there. There are poll results about HDR Photography, favorite
plugin types, popular operating systems as well as CPUs and about the
popularity of Photoshop plugins.
See here:
Resources
section
POLL RESULTS
Which of the following application(s) do you use for processing photos?
1323 votes were collected in the latest poll about photo processing applications. Here are the results:
1. Photoshop 30.1%
2. Lightroom 11.6%
3. Paint Shop Pro 10.3%
4. Photoshop Elements 9.9%
5. Other 7.3%
6. IrfanView 5.2%
7. Photo-Paint 2.8%
8.ACDSee 2.6%
GIMP 2.6%
9. DxO Optics 2.5%
10. XnView 2.3%
11. Nikon Capture 2.2%
12. PhotoImpact 2.1%
13. Paint.NET 2.0%
14. PhotoFiltre 1.6%
15. Aperture 1.4%
16. PhotoPlus 1.3%
17. CaptureOne 0.8%
18. GraphicConverter 0.7%
19. Photoline 0.5%
Photoshop is still used by three times more people than LR, PSP and PSE, which seem to be similarly popular. IrfanView is only used by half as many people, but it is still surprising that so many people use it for photo processing as it does not offer many such features. So either these people are not very demanding or they use Photoshop plugins in IrfanView. These six top applications collected 2/3 of all votes. The next bunch of applications is only used by half as many people as IrfanView and only by 1/10 as many people as the Photoshop users. These eight applications together still scored 20% of all votes. Compared to a similar poll in 2008 Photoshop gained 5% and PSP lost 10% while PSE remained the same.
For more poll results please visit the
Resources section
NEW POLLS
What kept you from buying commercial
plugins of The Plugin Site?
What convinced you to buy a commercial plugin of The Plugin Site?
We would like to get some feedback from you about our
commercial plugins in order to improve them in future. So we have set
up two polls which provide reasons for purchasing or not purchasing our
plugins. We added a broad range of options to make sure that every thinkable
reason is available. There are similar items on the pro and con polls,
but hopefully the final results of both polls will not have the same items
in top positions, otherwise we would be quite confused.
Thanks a lot for voting at voting here...
THE DISCUSSION FORUMS
Animation Shop Replacement, Reconstruction Tool
Here are the latest posts on The Plugin Site Forum:
Animation Shop Replacement
Aletha wrote: "I am running Windows 7 64-bits PSP X3. There
to me is nothen easer then Animation Shop, but it just doesn't do a good
job on some stuff. I know it will never be up dated since they sold it
& the owner don't care to do anything with it. Has someone came up
with anything like it but up to date, it is one that most people use,
through out Tag'n boards Blogs etc. that I know of..."
Read
More...
Reconstruction Tool
TikvaShalom wrote: "I am working on a room for a web site
that I reconstructed piece by piece. I need to add the wood floor without
it being too large, or not matching. I just found out Photoshop elements
8 has tools to recompose an image/photo, protecting what is to be kept
and discarding what is to be discarded. Is there any kind of plug in for
this or am I going to need to upgrade to another version of photoshop."
Read
More...
Please feel free to post suggestions or start a discussion
topic at
The Plugin Site Forum
FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS
Autointerlace, Easyfilters, MaPZone,
Microsoft ICE & Pro Photo Tools, Inverted Image
The namesuppressed Autointerlace 1.30 plugin (for Windows) creates old TV style effects by making every second line darker, but you can also use it to draw horizontal lines in an image.
This update includes a 64-bit
Windows version, an enhanced UI, 16-bit image support and finally an installer.
A simple image editor, which also runs the AutoInterlace plugin, is included,
so you do not even need to have an image application installed, which
supports Photoshop plugins.
Visit website...
The Easy Filters web site offers several plugins
(for Windows) which have not been mentioned yet. The Sharpen plugin lets
you apply Unsharp mask and displacement sharpening. The Local Contrast
plugin lets ou increase the contrast in small image details as well as
blur them away without removing the edges. Additionally there are four
plugins that use a Gaussian blur algorithm for various effects, e.g. edge
detection, blurring and sharpening. To download these plugins you need
to click on the links which contain ".8bf".
Main
Page...
Local Contrast
Page...
Gaussian
Page...
MaPZone (for Windows) is a freeware tool for
creating textures with the help of a procedural editor. The textures are
resolution independent and can be rendered at a desired resolution. There
is a real-time 3D previewer, which allows to view the texture on a loadable
3d object. A large library of preset textures is included.
Visit website...
Microsoft Image Composite Editor (for
Windows) is a panoramic image stitcher, which combines multiple shots
of the same scene to a hi-res panorama image. The stitched panorama can
be saved in a wide variety of image formats, e.g. JPEG and TIFF as well
as a multi-resolution tiled format.
Visit
website...
The Microsoft Pro Photo
Tools (for Windows) let you add, change and delete metadata properties
for photos. You can also add GPS information to them by choosing a location
on a Live Earth map. Additionally it can be seen where photos, which already
have GPS meta data, were taken.
Visit
website...
The Inverted Image tool (for Windows) adds
an inverted reflection effect to your photos including a water-like wave
effect.
You can control the reflection's position, size, transparency and color.
It also supports alpha masks.
Visit
website...
For more free plugins and tool, please visit the
Resources section
GRAPHICS NEWS
Photoshop CS5 Fix, Kenebec Plugins, FX Photo Studio
Malicious code hidden in GIF
files is able to crash Photoshop CS5. Adobe now provides a fix
for this, but recommends that you update to the latest version from the
Help > Updates menu in Photoshop CS5 before you install the fix.
MacOS
Download Page ...
Win32
Download Page...
Win64
Download Page...
Kenebec Filters is a set of 17 plugins (for
Windows 32-bit), which were created with FilterMeister and include sharpening,
noise reduction and monochrome conversion effects among others. The plugin
UI is a bit unusual.
Visit website...
FX Photo Studio is an image effects application
(for MacOS X), which was previously only available on the iPhone and iPad.
It allows users to add filter effects to photos by combining up to 172
effects. You can preview each effect before applying it, compare original
and resulting images, label favorites and save combinations of effects
as presets. The effects include cross processing, sketches and textures,
color fantasy and glow, vintage and grunge, tilt-shift and blur as well
as color strokes. The Pro version supports image resolution up to 32 megapixels,
additional file formats and 15 editing options and color adjustments.
Visit website...
