peter_rowe

Hi, yes, all of this can be carried out on PS but I do believe there is a place for plug-ins especially for those who are not PS experts but want to get expert looking results quickly. So I wrote a Photoshop plug-in to do just that. Someone has already mentioned it here. It's absolutely free and you can find it at http://www.optikvervelabs.com/. It's called "virtualPhotographer" and I expecially made it for you -- photographers on Photo.net. The objective is to get artistic results in just one click. To do this it uses a variety of settings of channel shifting, layers and blend modes, gaussian grain algorithms, histogram adjustment, color shifts, saturation and curve adjustment, blurring, and many more tweaks. You get the results in one click and then you can adjust from there. I hope you will give it a try.

--Peter

optikVerve Labs

Hi all,

Thanks a bunch, you are all very kind.

Rodolfo -- you will certainly have this for Windows, no problems there.

Beau -- thank you, I hope you an use this to get some good results with your photographs, let me know what you think

Gary -- Great questions. A little background might explain. I started out mostly focused on film grain which uses a multiplicative Gaussian noise transform. The ASA ratings are tied to how much of this film grain is applied to the image. It is scaled to the image preview size though so if you are looking at a small Preview you won't see it, try Zooming when other effects are off and you should see the film grain. A friend of mine is a great photographer so I showed it to him and he liked it. He got out a lot of Kodak Photo CD's that he had to get the grain effect right for the different ASA settings (although we had to average since different film behaves quite differently with grain). The focus was to provide subtle photographic effects (attempting to make digital shoots look more like film) -- nothing too overpowering, so my find suggested we have a film emulsion and a slide emulsion. The only difference is that the slide setting is slightly more clear. You can see this if you have everything default and then switch between them. We then added the emulsions (warm, cool, etc) which are also quite subtle (they slightly adjust the color and saturation). We wanted B/W and so put in simple conversion for that. Then we really added a lot more functionality since to get good B/W effects we needed to simulate colored filters in front of the camera lens (that's what the top area of the "Style" section does in B/W). We added "Effects" to get blurring, and things like rotating the colors (the "Shifts" rotate the RGB channels for example which are useful in B/W). As it turns out all of these effects have much more impression than the original ones which kind of get overwhelmed by them now. Yes, the sliders below the Film and Slide are for Brightness and Contrast (the brightness is with film, and the contrast with slide). We did not have these originally and did not think we needed them but when we tested lots of pictures we found that we did, especially if the image was not exposed exactly right, they were the last features we added. This also is what's driving our next idea of features to improve problems with exposures beforehand. My friend, the photographer, is also a great graphic artist and he did the graphics, I knew it had to be something that looked good before anyone would try it, and I think he did a great job on that. The main thing is to try and provide good tools for photographers without having to spend lots of time digitally editing. -- Thanks again for your feedback

--Peter

Hi all,

Thank you all very much for the encourging feedback. To be honest I thought I might get flamed!

I like the idea of a Histogram. Next I was thinking of a stand-alone hosting application for plug-ins (any plug-in) so that users did not need any photo-editing software at all. Anyone got thoughts on that?

Or perhaps on the plug-in side I was thinking of new features that get the image in good shape (color correcting, noise removal, white balance, dark-background fixing, poor-focus correction, image tone optimization, contast/sat/bright balance and so on). Would this be useful or are these features too widely available already? I'd like to be able to offer these with one click too so little technical knowledge would be needed.

Another direction might be 16-bit image support and Macintosh platform support. Anyway have advice on this?

Also, thanks for the shareware suggestion.

--Peter

Hi all,

Photo.net inspired me to create a plug-in you can get freely at

http://www.optikvervelabs.com/ (that's me). I've been a member of

photo.net for some time and am continually amazed at the quality of

posted photographs which are truly world-class. Many of the "styles"

are amazing and it inspired me to create this PhotoShop plug-in

filter for photographers to achieve these effects easily in their

photo-editing software (with one click).

I hope it is appropriate to post this, there is no cost, no agenda,

but if you want your shot looking like Ansel Adams in one click then

give it a try (Note: the Preset "Anvil" is the Ansel effect but there

are 50 others and you can tweak each one and create more). Any

feature recommendatios or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!