Digital Innovations

Power Workflow Presets
Here’s what you will find in Seim Effects’ (prophotoshow.net/seim_effects/) Power Workflow 3. The Super Series II is a group of six automatic presets that lets you correct one or thousands of images at once. There are also three Light Magic presets designed to cope with situations such as harsh sunlight or reception halls that produce poor light and color. Gavin Seim told me that “there’s no way to make something that will fix every bad situation but I wanted corrections that would get the most common ones.” You should start with essential tonal and exposure settings using the Super Series of presets, then apply a Magic preset to problem images and watch the magic happen. All presets can be applied sequentially and mixed and matched to achieve the desired look. You can batch correct images, then add color effects or try some vignettes. Seim Effects’ new Xi presets work independently of basic tonal settings, including White Balance, Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. Power Workflow 3 includes more than 70 presets, including automated corrections, black and white, cross processing, color tones, and detail enhancement, and all it costs is $54.

© 2010, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved

PostworkShop Pro
When it comes to enhancing photographs, there are two kinds of photographers: the first (that’s me) like simple tools such as plug-ins that get you in and out of any image manipulation fast, and the second (that includes those of you with natural artistic ability) like to work in an immersive, hands-on environment. Users of Corel’s Painter come to mind for the latter, but instead of working with the kinds of hands-on brushes and tools as Painter, Xycod’s Postworkshop Pro
(http://postworkshop.net) works with natural-looking artistic filters and layers to produce their kind of “artistic” results. You can give your photo the look of an oil painting, watercolor, pastel drawing, pencil sketch, abstract, or just an old-timey looking photograph using 350+ built-in styles. You can blend and chain these effects together in a layered composite and create and reuse your own styles with the node-based filter graph editor, or you can just blend and tweak a few existing styles and save your layered composition as a new style. And you can always tweak all the parameters. This Mac OS or Windows application will exchange data with your other graphic applications using standard file formats, including layered Adobe Photoshop PSD images. The Basic Edition is free, the Artist Edition is $49, and the Pro Edition is $99.

© 2010, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved

Kiss Me You Fool
Pixel Gear Suite from PSKiss (http://pskiss.com/pskiss-pixel-gear-suite) includes three major components, all of which are .jsx (JSX serializes Java objects to XML) preset scripts, making them inexpensive with scripts varying in price from $1 to $6. Geek alert: the JSX file type is primarily associated with “After Effects” by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Script files for After Effects are in this format. Back to the Pixel Gear Suite, the Edge Gear package enhances your image file’s edges with full control of edge width and overall intensity. S/H Tone Gear is a contrast manipulation filter that’s available in both Basic and Pro versions. Skin Gear is a retouch filter that’s also available in Basic and Pro versions. A unique workflow panel is included with all filters so you can switch back and forth between each enhancement mode. Pixel Gear Suite works in 32-bit color depth for superb image quality and is fully compatible with Photoshop CS5, supporting 64-bit Mac OS and Windows versions.

Courtesy of PSKiss