Why Plug-Ins
Why Plug-Ins: Photographic Effects
We all understand that Photoshop is a powerful application when in the right hands. However it can take years to master. Especially to create the professional, artistic looks that you see from the pros. This is one of the reasons that we all read books and magazines as well as attend classes and seminars to improve our skills. If you have ever been to a Photoshop seminar you know that it is often like a cooking class. As the instructor gives you the "recipe" you feverishly attempt to write it down so you can try it at home. Invariably when you return to your home or studio and try to reproduce what you wrote down you miss a step. It could be a blending mode here or an opacity change there but it makes the difference between getting the results you saw and the results you get.
There may be no better example of how a plug-in can help you maximize the power of Photoshop than the photographic effects category here. Just take a quick look and you will find high-quality effects plug-ins from well respected developers like Alien Skin and Nik Software. As a developer of Photoshop plug-ins, we were approached on a daily basis by existing and new customers to provide another solution to this problem - after all, photographers don't have just one lens in their bag and Photoshop users never have just one effects plug-in.
At onOne Software, we took a slightly different approach to helping solve the problem of getting "the professional look" that everyone is looking for. We teamed up with professional image makers Jack Davis and Kevin Kubota to build a library of effects that can be thought of as building blocks in Photoshop. It allows you to take out the tedious part of remembering all the steps in things that you commonly do in Photoshop. It creates a more creative, outcome driven approach.
Here is an example. To create a bright diffusion effect, similar to a soft focus filter on a camera, in Photoshop you could duplicate the layer, adjust the levels to brighten it, add a gaussian blur and then change the blending mode to lighten and adjust the opacity. That's five steps plus you have to remember which dialogs to use and what settings work best. In PhotoTools this is reduced to a single effect, yet you maintain the ability to control the overall diffusion effect. Now imagine having a library of hundreds of such building blocks that you could stack on top of each other just like filters over the lens of a camera, plus the ability to create presets so you can use the same stack of effects again and again.
For example if you are a portrait photographer you could combine a skin smoothing effect with a midtone contrast boost, portrait sharpening and vignette as a preset stack of effects to use as the starting place for all your images. Now imagine being able to apply a preset to a group of images at once by using a smart batch processing engine. You have a recipe for professional looking images in less time so you can spend more time behind the camera.
Just another way that plug-ins can help you maximize the power of Photoshop. Learn more about PhotoTools.