One onOne with Mike Wong

Here's a quick tutorial for improving a senior portrait using PhotoTools Professional Edition. For those of you new to this blog, PhotoTools Professional Edition is one of our most popular plugins for Photoshop CS2 or CS3. This photo is courtesy of our very own Dan Harlacher and is great for this tutorial.

Here's the original photo as captured, straight out of the camera. I like

We'll start out by applying the onOne Auto Skin Smoother at 50%. This will give us a nice soft, glamour style look without making the skin look plastic.

Next, we're going to use the Turbo Boost effect to enhance the colors in the photo.

In the next two steps, we're going to use two techniques to focus the viewer's attention on our senior. The first is to use the Selective Focus Gaussian Blur effect followed by the Jack Davis Darken Edges vignette effect in PhotoTools.

Selective Focus added.

Vignette added.

So far, I've stayed in PhotoTools the entire time. But now I'm going to go ahead and click the Apply button. I want to enhance the eyes still but I'm going to go back into PhotoTools and do that with a Layer Mask. All of this processing so far has darkened things a bit there and we want people to connect with this photo, so brightening the eyes is a great way to do this.

So after going back into PhotoTools, I'm going to add the Kubota Soft Wash effect combined with a Black Layer Mask so the effect doesn't show up at all in Photoshop until I grab my Brush tool and then make sure that I'm painting with white. In PhotoTools, you can automatically add this mask by checking the check box(es) in the bottom middle of the user interface window. Once I have my brush selected, I just adjust the brush size, lower my brush opacity to 50% (just press the number 5 after you select the Brush tool) and then paint over the eyes.

So there you have it, a very nice senior portrait enhancement with just a few clicks and a layer mask. Not much too it really which is the key benefit of using PhotoTools. Otherwise, we would have had to make several adjustment layers, groups and blending modes but with PhotoTools, it's just about 5 clicks!

Posted by Mike Wong at 3:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

PC-Review Online has just posted their review of PhotoTools 1.0 Professional Edition.

Here's a excerpt from the review.

"I am quite impressed with PhotoTools Pro, the interface is clean and easy to use. It comes with a very wide range of useful effects, the ability to stack effects to create totally new custom effects is really nice. The batch processing capability is great for not only batch applying a stack of effects but for batch processing without applying effects."

"If you own a digital camera or a film or flatbed scanner and you have Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3 this is a must have plug-in package. The effects are very nice and most importantly they are practical and useful."

Learn more about PhotoTools Professional Edition.

Posted by Mike Wong at 2:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was just looking at the landscape shot of the Three Sisters mountains that I talked about in the last entry on PhotoTools (see PhotoTools - Landscape Enhance with Glow) and realized that I stopped a little short with that picture. So, in my effort to procrastinate yet again on my big project, I'd like to offer up a quick tip on how you can use PhotoTools to clean up an image like this that has an area that is under exposed that you want to, well, expose.

To correct this, I'm going to use the Digital Fill Flash effect in PhotoTools. This is something that you would normally do with a flash or reflector to increase the brightness in dark areas of your subject matter. This is a great technique to use if you exposed your image for the sky for example and under exposed the foreground. You can click on most of the screenshots for a larger version.

Open your image in Photoshop and then launch PhotoTools or PhotoTools Professional Edition (this effect is in both versions).

Next, go to the Image Optimize section and choose onOne Digital Fill Flash.

Double click on the Digital Fill Flash effect and it will be added to your stack. You can see that we will get some improvement in the middle of the photo where it is too dark.

It is still a little dark for my preference so the next thing I did was to adjust the Fade slider to increase the strength of the Digital Fill Flash effect. By default it is set to 50% but I'll move it all the way up to 100%.

It's still just a little too dark for me. Not much, but enough that it will bug me if I don't fix it. I can't move the slider up past 100 but one of the cool things about PhotoTools is that it lets me stack multiple effects together. In this case, I'm just going to stack the Digital Fill Flash effect again to deal with those pesky dark areas of my photo. So just double click the Digital Fill Flash again and you'll see that by default it sets the strength to 50% which I will leave alone this time.

Posted by Mike Wong at 2:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've got a new Preset for PhotoTools Professional Edition that I'd like to share today. I was going through some pictures for a year end project and found this picture that I took in Central Oregon at a place called Black Butte Ranch. It's a shot of the Three Sisters mountains, part of the Cascade Mountain Range. I love it here. It's absolutely wonderful and we go every summer. Anyway...the original photo was a bit flat with some room for improvement. PhotoTools to the rescue.

I started off with an effect to improve the overall tone and then dropped the Kubota Radiant Landscape effect. I could have stopped there but decided to drop the Kubota Soft Glow effect which added a little more to the clouds. At that point, I stopped. Sometimes it's hard to stop, but that's the secret, knowing when to stop.

Here's the preset if you'd like to download it and use it. You'll need PhotoTools Professional Edition because of the use of Kevin Kubota's effects.

All images copyright Mike Wong 2007.

Posted by Mike Wong at 4:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was recently going through some pictures that I took throughout 2007 as part of a year-end slide show, semi-movie project that I like to do for my family. While cruising through my Lightroom library, I stumbled upon this picture of my son that I took in October at one of his soccer games.

I really liked it for two reasons. First, I really liked the lighting - that late afternoon light in the fall can be really nice. Second, I liked it be because Nathan wasn't pulling a goofy face which is he prone to do at his age in just about every picture I take of him. The goofy faces are nice, but even a parent wants a straight face sometimes. Anyway, I thought it would make a good black and white photo so I quickly opened it up in Photoshop CS3 and the took it into PhotoTools Professional Edition.

I added two effects that Jack Davis created for PhotoTools. The first was a Black and White effect specifically designed for portraits (effect name: Davis-WOW Portrait-B&W). I then added the Davis-Diffuse Glow effect set to the Substantial Large setting because I really wanted to get a nice glow and blow out some of the highlights on the left side of Nathan's face so they would blend into the background. I know Jack would disagree with me about blowing out the highlights but I had almost blown them out in the original photo so I figured I might as well go to town and completely blow the highlights and get a cool effect. Finally, I added a small amount of sharpening with Jack's Davis-Portrait Sharpen effect set to Small. The result...

I really like this final result and when I printed it on my Epson R2400, I liked it even better. I can't wait to get the print home and put it up in my office.

Now if you would like to get this same type of look, you can either repeat those steps in PhotoTools Professional Edition - which will save you about 15 steps in Photoshop, or you can download this preset and import it into PhotoTools Professional Edition and get it with a simple double-click. Hope you enjoy it.

All images copyright Mike Wong 2007.

Posted by Mike Wong at 3:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am happy to be posting today that we have gone GM with PhotoTools and PhotoTools Professional Edition and it is now officially available for download. For those of you who pre-ordered PhotoTools, the CDs are in production and orders should begin shipping by November 29, 2007.

Thank you to everybody who has pre-ordered either PhotoTools or PhotoTools Professional Edtion. You're going to love it when you get your hands on it.

Here's an example of a photo I enhanced with it - and you can even download the preset that I used and add it to PhotoTools Professional Edition.

Here's the original photo.

Here's the PhotoTools enhanced version.

It's a somewhat subtle change, but sometimes subtle is better in my opinion. It all depends on the shot.

If you have PhotoTools Professional Edition, you can download the preset or recipe that I used to create this and use it yourself. Just download this preset file (Skin Smoothner LOTR) then unzip the file and then you'll need to get it into PhotoTools. To do that, launch PhotoTools, then go to the File menu and choose "Show Presets Folder". A new window will show up in the Finder or in Windows Explorer and you can then copy this file into the User Presets folder.

We're going to be creating a place for users to upload their own presets to share with others so stay tuned!

Posted by Mike Wong at 11:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you moving to Leopard, please note that we are still testing our plug-ins with the final, shipping version of this new OS from Apple. For more information, you can click here to go to the onOne Software Knowledge Base.

We'll let everybody know when updates are available.

Posted by Mike Wong at 1:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)