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.