Digital Darkroom

Model Kimberly Thea Goetz uses this image on her zed cards; it showcases her style and beauty while providing a different look to catch the eye of casting directors.

You can build a house with hand tools but it'll go much faster if you use more power. I believe in using power tools for digital imaging, and, for me, the digital equivalent is Photoshop plug-ins. You don't need to own a copy of Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com) to use plug-ins. Adobe Systems defined the standard, but compatible plug-ins can be used with many other image-editing programs including Ulead's PhotoImpact (www.ulead.com), Corel's Painter, Dabbler, and PHOTO-PAINT (www.corel.com), Jasc's Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com), and MicroFrontier's Color It!, Enhance, and Digital Darkroom (www.microfrontier.com). Other graphics programs, such as Adobe's PageMaker, Deneba's Canvas (www.deneba.com), and Macromedia's Director and FreeHand (www.macromedia.com) accept compatible plug-ins as well.

There are eight types of plug-ins: Color Picker, Import, Export, Filter, Format, Selection, Extension, and Parser but for us real-world users there are really only four kinds--Acquire, Enhance, Manipulate, and Output. What plug-ins let us do is accomplish effects that Photoshop either cannot do by itself or may require many more additional steps. That's why plug-ins make you more productive while allowing you to experiment with ways to enhance your digital images. Here are a few new ones that I've found useful or just a lot of fun.

Give Digital That Film Look
Digital photographers appear obsessed with making their images look like "real" film-based images. One of the most interesting power tools I've found for creating this effect is Auto FX Software's DreamSuite (www.autofx.com). Since their first series of plug-ins were introduced, the company has launched Series Two and the Gel Series. Series One contains frames that provide a film-like look, including everything from Polaroid prints to slide mounts, but Series Two lets you separate an image into multiple bits of film--even different film formats--and individually move them around!

Who says you can only use one plug-in at a time? Although shot at the Canon EOS D60's fluorescent setting, there was still some cyan color in the image, so I used Pictographics' iCorrect Professional (www.picto.com) color correction plug-in to tweak the color to be more neutral before applying noise reduction. Photos © 2002, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved

Like all Auto FX plug-ins there's an almost infinite number of controls allowing you to tweak effects, but first time users can choose from one of many presets and use the slider controls to fine-tune the finished image. Be advised that recent Auto FX plug-ins require more modern operating systems and CPUs to extract the maximum performance and minimum annoyance. For Mac OS users, one trick is to reduce the amount of memory that Adobe Photoshop uses. Auto FX claims that Photoshop can operate efficiently on 50MB of memory while you work in DreamSuite, which then uses all of the rest of your memory. Like all plug-ins, play with the controls and watch what happens!

Clean Up The Noise
Digital noise creeps into an image from many different sources including high ISO settings, slow shutter speeds, CCD color noise, JPEG color artifacts, and even color fringing. While there are a growing number of noise reduction products available, the two that seem to do the best job of eliminating noise without turning the image into mush are both available from The Imaging Factory (www.theimagingfactory.com). The Noise Reduction plug-in takes care of all of the common factors that create digital noise and costs less than $40. The $99.95 Noise Reduction Pro does all of the same things the non-Pro version does and includes additional sliders for correcting luminance noise as well as color noise, but I gotta tell you I use it at the default setting most of the time.

This image of an elegant Talbot automobile was made at Clive Cussler's private car collection. The lighting was thin fluorescent tubes and I had to kick up the ISO setting on my Canon EOS D60 camera to 1000, plus add 2/3 of a stop of exposure compensation to get a proper exposure. Noise was neatly handled by applying The Imaging Factory's Noise Reduction Pro plug-in.

Both plug-ins are available for Mac OS and Windows and the Pro version supports Mac OS Classic and OS X. Which one is best for you? You can download fully operational (for 30 days, anyway) versions of both plug-ins from the company's web site and use them on your own images to see which one delivers the best deal penny for pixel. While visiting the site be sure to check out all of the other practical and creative plug-ins available from The Imaging Factory.

Making Waves
Without a doubt the one single plug-in that gets the most "oohs and ahs" during my plug-in presentation at Shutterbug's Digital Photo Workshop Series is Flaming Pear's Flood (www.flamingpear.com). What this inexpensive plug-in does is inundate the landscape and submerge your friends with digital water, creating lakes, ponds, rivers, and even oceans where there was none before--think of it as digital terraforming. In addition to adding quantities of water, sliders give you control over watery reflections, wave height, ripples, and even perspective.