Fractalius...another Photoshop plugin

Everyone is going to organize their favorite Photoshop plug-ins but I think all of use are always on the lookout for some new styles/effects to try out. Redfield is a name that has become synonymous with nice plug-ins like Water Ripples and Jama 3D so by all means, go to their website and see the variety of great effects plug-ins they offer for manipulating pics. I decided to touch the surface by looking at Fractalius, a great add-on that creates unusual effects based on what they call 'extraction of hidden fractal texture' within your image. It converts photos rather easy with very little adjustments to create effective illustrative qualities to an image (see the above sample) and allows you to take original artwork and add an airbrush quality to it similar to the type work you used to see painted on vans, with vibrant linear highlights and sparkles of light overlaying the image. Redfield even offers a few free plug-ins so stop by and take advantage of these handy additions to your Photoshop plug-in repertoire.

Squirlz Morph 2.1

animated gif morph

created with Squirlzmorph

Every now and then I get the urge or the need for a morph and when you need a good, easy to use morph program you don't want to pay a lot for it. So how does free sound? Squirlz Morph 2.1 by Xiberpix is a handy to use morphing tool that is easy and very useful when creating morphs or blended images or warps. You can really do a lot with this useful tool and the learning curve is so easy. I made the above animated gif in 11 minutes. Squirlz gives you reference dots which show point-to-point registration of an image area and where it will morph to, but also allows you to create your own points. So often morph programs have a preset grid of dots which leave you battling a template within the program. Other functions within the interface include single click adjustment of images to equalize size of your pics, basic hue, contrast and brightness adjustments and a few more minor functions. I guess what I really appreciate about Squirlz Morph (aside from the great price) is an easy to use interface. No one wants to lose time learning how to operate something as simple as a morphing program.

Multimedia Builder

 

Interface of Mediachance

Multimedia Builder

For those of you interested in making an interactive, self executing standalone application, my suggestion is to check out Multimedia Builder by Mediachance. When I first viewed this program I was making a comparative analysis between programs like Authorware and Director to see which would be the easiest to learn with enough functionality and flexibility to meet my intended program. Now Director and Authorware are powerful programs that allow you to create a lot of fantastic self running programs, however, they also come with a hefty learning curve. MMB (Multimedia Builder) had me clicking and creating in a matter of moments with an easy to use, WYSIWYG layout format to your items, simplistic parameter adjustment and support to most major formats of visual, audio and electronic coding to help you make great presentations, games...I was amazed at just what all you could create with this wonderful program. The program allows you to gather all your elements on screen and test drive your application before finalizing it. MMB supports text, text buttons, images, rollover images, animation, HTML, Flash, scripting and various little effects to make your presentation come alive-it even allows you to create your own custom GUI (Graphic User Interface). The combination of versatility and ease of use-along with a very reasonable price tag-makes Multimedia Builder a must have. You may want to check out some of the other fine software programs Mediachance offers at their website.

Comic Life

 

interface of Comic Life 1.5

For those of you out there who have always wanted to make your own comic book, Comic Life by Plasq is a fun, easy way to make nice looking comics in no time. You can certainly spend the time to set up templates in various programs like CorelDraw (retail CorelDraw Suite cost: $429) or Illustrator (retail cost $599) to pull this off, but (taking it from personal experience) the time involved to set up something like that usually leaves one bored with the whole process. Comic Life takes the grunt work out of creating page after page of comics by using their easy drag and drop interface to structure pages, add your own images, create sidebar text or text balloons, then save the whole project for print or email. The preloaded style boxes and font options are customizable, or you can rely on the pre-made shapes, colors and fonts provided. I was amazed at how fast you can stick something together and at a price of $29.95 ($24.95) Standard Edition) you won't be wasting your money. If you want to try it before you buy it, visit their website and download a 30 day trial version. This is so low-end to use, I would suggest it for almost any age user.

Silver Efex Pro; True Power for Black and White

 

The problem a lot of projects have when trying to use black and white images is the lack of control over the contrast within an image. Most of the standard settings to desaturate an image in popular photo editing programs, like Photoshop, give you very little control over your contrast without having to venture into the channel settings, creating a lot of feathered masks and taking more time than you had anticipated.  Nik Software has come up with an ingenius little plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture called Silver Efex. This, like all plugins from Nik, offers a variety of presets to change a color image into a dramatic black and white composition, or, allows you to create your own customized settings. You can set control points within an image, adjust the radius of the area affected, work directly on color channels and have the output placed on its own layer so as not to disrupt the original image. This plugin is not so much a time saver (although it does work fast, if all you want to do is change a pic from color to black and white, the standard filters can do that just as quick) but more for fine adjustments to photography. I have taken images and greatly enhanced specific areas within the image while leaving the secondary subject matter untouched. You can download a demo of this great plugin at their website.

Blue Vertigo

 

home page of Blue Vertigo

Many designers develop a list of their favorite resources and tab them for quick reference. Certain sites are great for stock images, (like IstockPhoto), there are great free resource sites (like Dafont.com for free fonts), or even small utilities online like a color wheel generator to help you choose complimentary colors for website design. You can spend a good deal of time developing a refining your list of favorites on your web browser but sometimes you just feel like parusing the web for great new images to use or different looking textures. One site I have run across that has provided me with numerous resources for graphics is Blue Vertigo. This site has links full of stock photos, commercial photos, video footage, vector clipart, fonts, great corporate logos (when you need to hunt down a good vector copy of Visa/Master Card), sound files, Photoshop brushes, Poser downloads, icons and other goodies. I like to go through and build up new resources to bookmark and believe me, this site has plenty to look and choose from. They even offer a newsletter that will keep you updated when new sites are posted. Some of the photo websites they show are a fresh search for me and allow me to place out of the ordinary images in my projects. Give this website a look and I'm sure you will realize the value of having Blue Vertigo listed among your favorites.

Alien Skin's Bokeh

 

Original Image (top)

Focus changed with Bokeh (bottom)

Alien Skin software has been a favorite of mine for quite some time offering professional plug-in packages for Photoshop, such as Eye Candy and Xenofex (see my past post for a review on Eye Candy 6). Once again they come up with a great little utility to help you enhance your digital images with the plug-in Bokeh. It's one of those don't always need it but when you need it, there's nothing else like it helper tools. In the past whenever I wanted to draw emphasis on the foreground subject matter I would mask off the foreground, feather the selection, invert it and add a gaussian blur. The results would work sometimes, but the control over the depth of field look was rather limited. With Bokeh, you get a great interface that comes with a long list of preset blurs to simulate the look of a Canon or Sony lens, or allow you to adjust and save your own settings for other projects. Caution must be used with Bokeh however, as one tends to be given too much control and before you know it, the foreground subject matter you selected seems to 'pop' off that page a bit too much. This plug-in is great for sports images or food product shots in a natural background setting. You can even add some vignette to the image to help give a more realistic blend to your masked selection. 

Demo copies of Bokeh can be downloaded from their website. The price for Bokeh, when weighed against trying to reshoot an image, may be worth the money to invest in this great tool for electronic photo manipulation.

Bryce-the Ultimate in Landscape Generation

Bryce 6 interface

For over a decade Bryce has provided electronic artists one of the finest landscape/terrain generation programs. The latest version (6.1) allows more flexibility in usage and some of the best quality renderings you could expect from a mid-range program. Within minutes you are able to create stunning landscapes, complete with foliage, imported 3d objects, 2d planes that support aplha channel graphics AND adjust lighting shadows from the alpha channel (a big plus)-there is just so much this package offers. You can rely on the installed textures, objects, lighting and sky settings or advance into any of these areas and give it your own settings. Web support for this program is enormous with literally thousands of sites online to help with tutorials, downloadable models, textures, etc. to give you endless possibilities for your ideas.

In the past Bryce was known pretty much for its terrain generation quality but with the added support of Daz models and animations your ability to make stunning landscapes with animated characters is so much easier.

Other features include real world lighting with IBL (image based lighting) support, MAC Intel compatible (another big plus), image based brushes for advanced terrain editing and mesh export of Boolean objects.

For those interested in test driving this program, both Bryce and Daz are available for free download with limited program capabilities (they want to entice you to buy full versions but allows you to get familiar with the interface) so visit their site and find out more about this truly remarkable program.

Blender

user interface of Blender showing

multiple views

If any one were to ask me to give a one sentence synopsis of Blender, I would have to say 'I can't believe this is a freeware program.' What a package for 3d modeling, rendering, animating, rigging and game creation. Believe it or not, this is a free program. All you need to do is devote a vast amount of time to get used to the interface (navigation was a bit tricky for me having been trained in 3D Max, but after a while it becomes easier) and location of the myriad drop-down menus. Luckily, Blender has a vast support area online and in downloadable files to train you through the basics, up to the more complex operations Blender can provide.

MODELING

Blender comes loaded with 3d mesh primitives for you to build from, polygon mesh, NURBS, bezier and b-spline curves, metaballs and font support. The process of building objects is similar to most popular/conventional packages.

RIGGING

Fast skeletal creation with interactive 3d paint for vertex weighting, fast auto skinning, bone layering for group organization. Overall I feel the rigging works as well as the high end software packages that sell for thousands of dollars.

Additional features include UV unwrapping, shader construction, particle systems and much more. One of the hardest areas I found to delve into was the 3d real-time game creation. This part of the Blender options is not for the weak at heart. The good news still boils down to the fact that you are not paying for this fantastic program so go ahead and visit their website and ive it a try.

Terragen

(A) Terragen interface

(B) sample Terragen image

Planetside software, providers of Terragen bring us a low cost (because it's no cost) landscape and natural environmental creator/renderer. In no time at all you find yourself wading through a variety of options for terrain, water, atmospherics and lighting to create stunning still images or animations. Written for use on MAC or Windows PC systems this small but professional program let's you edit all the same settings you would find in larger, more expensive packages like Bryce, but with the interface is what I would call user-advanced as opposed to user-friendly. It does have a large amount of drag onscreen component capabilities but from my experience, not as easy to navigate a Bryce. The results are something else that always leaves me shaking my head with disbelief that they offer a freeware program this goos. Terragen has been used in a variety of commercial products by letting the artist create near photo-realistic images. For those feeling adventurous, they can continue on to Terragen 2 which gives a much larger scope of options to create landscapes and animations. With a great forum and a few nice plugins to add nice effects, this program is well worth the effort to sit down and explore. You'll be amazed at how good a picture you can make in a short amount of time.