Friday, May 3, 2013

Power Retouche Photoshop Plugins - an Introduction

By Sarah Hansson


Power Retouche has developed 27 Photoshop plugins for photo retouching. The flagships are the sharpener and the Black & White Studio. The sharpness plugin is the first and only sharpening tool on the market that does not create the negative fringes regular unsharp mask creates. It lets you sharpen surfaces and edges separately. The BW Studio converts color to black and white with a full set of professional films to select from, as well as traditional multigrade. It also includes exposure correction and contrast editing. The BW conversion can be controlled with seven sliders representing how the colors of the spectrum are converted to grayscale.

Other popular Photoshop plugins include the Golden Section filter that draws the golden sections, golden spiral and other harmonic divisions on an empty layer for editing and composing your image. The white balance corrector uses unique ways to automatically calculate the color of the light in the image and correct for it. It also offers options for the most popular gray-cards and color checkers like WhiBal, Gretag, etc. The plugin: Ansel Adams Zone System for Digital divides the image into ten zones that can be edited for exposure, contrast and color.

The plugin Toned Photos is for toning your photo like a traditional toned photo. There are presets for Sepia, Van Dyck, Kalitype, Silver Gelatin, Palladium, Platinum, Cyanotype and Silver. The plugin emulates the was the pigment is distributed in light and shade in the traditional prints. The preset tones can be changed or one can create one's own. The conversions from color to BW can be altered with the likes of traditional lens color filters (yellow, range, etc.). Two other plugins are directed at solving a special kind of problem: Chromatic Aberration and Color Fringes. The Chromatic Aberration plugin solves longitudinal as well as transverse chromatic aberration. The Color Fringe plugin solves all other kinds of color fringes, in particular the dreaded purple fringe, but also other kinds of fringes can be removed. The purple fringe is a special wide purple area that appears at high contrast edges where the light area invades the dark.

The lens corrector corrects symmetrical pincushion and barreling as well as asymmetrical ditto if you have a cropped image. It even corrects panorama photos. Symmetric distortion can be corrected in the later versions of Photoshop, but not panorama. The plugins correction algorithm is unique in that it does not explode the corners. The soft filter is the digital equivalent of a traditional lens soft filter. You can control the strength of the softening as well as its radius.

Power Retouche offers a plugin for generating realistic film grain; both black-white and color. The plugin uses fractal technology to generate the grain. Other film grain tool use either noise or images of film grain to impress grain onto the image; neither looks very convincing. Power Retouche lets you adjust the size as well as the hardness of the grain

Camera lenses create vignetting in photos. Power Retouche offers a plugins to fix this. Not only can the plugin fix the dark corners, but it can also adjust radial exposure and brightness. The hot spot has a special control to set its radius and contrast. Finally we should mention the Black Definition plugin. It gives you control over the black content of colors as if it were a separate color channel like R, G and B. The suite contains more plugins than can be mentioned here.




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