Power Retouche Plugins
Danish artist Jan Esman has developed this range of plugins that are among the most highly regarded in the industry. They are:
- Black & White Studio, "Digital darkroom" to convert color images to black-and-white, in 8- or 16-bits/channel
- Illumination Editor, for editing the illumination and shade in a photo, with "set light direction" feature
- Dynamic Range Compressor, for full control over all aspects of dynamic range
- Anti-Aliasing, gets rid of edge roughness and "jaggies"
- Black Definition, lets you adjust black as though it were a color channel
- Contrast, lets you control black-white contrast independently of color-contrast, without changing color or saturation
- Saturation, edits saturation without splitting the image up into primary colors
- Color Corrector, removes color casts from images
- Posterizer, independently posterizes color hues and values and applies blending modes
- Edgeliner, can turn photos into line drawings, with toneline lithfilm emulation
- Transparency Editor, for making the background or other parts of the image transparent
- Soft Filter, imitates traditional lens soft-filters, by controlling strength and spread of the softness without blurring
- Brightness Editor, edits brightness while preserving color
- Sharpness Editor, unsharp masking with optional anti-aliasing
- Lens Corrector, for correcting common lens distortions, including barreling and pincushion
- White-Balance Corrector, to cure any color temperature imbalance, even mixed neon + halogen
- Noise Corrector, with five different methods to filter noise, plus detail-preservation masking
- Film Grain, emulates traditional film grain and lets you add it to your photos
- Graduated Color, lets you apply one or two graduated colors when retouching
- Toned Photos, adds color tones such as sepia, kallitype, silver gelatin, cyanotype, etc.
- Golden Section, draws golden sections, golden spiral, golden triangles, rule of thirds and harmonic triangles
- Exposure Corrector, to correct under- or overexposure in the whole photo or selected areas
- Histogram Repair, uses interpolation to fill in missing values caused by processing
- Radial Density Corrector, for total vignetting control over radial exposure and brightness
Comment
Priced individually, the Power Retouche plugins are very expensive and not especially good value. However, it you purchase the entire Pro Pack containing all of them you'll find them reasonably economical. Most of them support images that are 8- or 16-bit in RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, or Lab color spaces.
Some are much more fully featured than others, the most highly praised being Black & White Studio (see that separate entry). Some are reinventions of the wheel, whereas others have useful, and indeed unique features.
Golden Section is a particularly clever implementation of the classical rules of proportion: great if you have sufficient resolution for heavy cropping. All of them will plug into an extensive range of editors, listed in full on the vendor's website.
Tech info
- Plugs into: Paintshop Pro, Elements, Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Draw and many other editors
- OS: Windows (any version that can run the host program); Mac Classic and OS X
- Price level: (Complete set) approx. $175; (individually) $32-$75
Power Retouche
Jan Esman's PowerRetouche plugins need little introduction to experienced digital photographers. Esman, a native of Copenhagen, Denmark, is primarily a figurative artist, prominent in the European art scene.
From the same vendor:
- Tutorials on how to use the Power Retouche Plugins
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