Those of you who know me, in the writing / teaching sense, know I’m no lover of plug-ins. To take it a step further, I’m adamantly against the “do-it-for-you” plug-ins for photo restoration! No plug-in will do anything but the most elementary restoration for you, especially not in any way I’d want my work done. I’ve heard many say they like that plug-ins take some of the work out of the restoration process, but, frankly, I’d rather spend the time and do it right! Digital photo restoration is detail work. Period. I do think certain plug-ins may be worthy of notice, though. The ones that do help you in little ways, after the main detail work, without doing that work for you. The “helper” plug-ins, as opposed to the “do-it-for-you” variety. Those in the know are aware that I use one plug-in and love it more than chocolate! The one plug-in I can’t do without, won’t do without, is Genuine Fractals by OnOne Software. I’ll even go so far as to say that anyone with a photo restoration business must have this plug-in! I guarantee that close to 50% of your clientele will want their photos enlarged. The majority of that percentage will want the 1×2 photo of Granny enlarged to an astronomical 16×20! I promise you, this will happen. Photoshop alone can not do this for you! Okay, actually, nothing can do this for you. But I digress…

I thought Genuine Fractals was all that and a lollypop when all it handled was a 400% enlargement (200% in G.F., 200% in PS)! Now, in Genuine Fractals 6, if you’ve got a nice, clear image, Genuine Fractals alone can give you an amazing 1000% enlargement! Yikes! The mind simply boggles! Keep in mind, the 1×2 of Granny will still look like poo at 1000%, because 1×2 photos are rarely, if ever, stellar quality, but I doubt many people are going to want Granny life-size. However, the very best thing about Genuine Fractals 6 is that it enlarges layers, and all! Sounds like no big deal to you? Well, it is to me! The last version I had was 4, and you had to flatten the image to enlarge it! So for me, that meant remembering to enlarge it before I started the work – which didn’t always happen, or having to complete the work, leave all my layers and filters intact in one version, make a duplicate of that file, flatten it, then enlarge it. Not only did that make for more files to take up room on my hard drives, but more often than not I’d look at the work a few days later, see something I wanted to tweak, tweak that tweak on one file while the other remained tweak-less…so being able to enlarge a whole file, layers and all, means a much easier, cleaner process for me, all the way around! One word of advice, though: don’t try to enlarge a HUGE file all at once! Files that are, oh, say, 1200 dpi and have 20 or 30 (or more) layers don’t enlarge by 800% all at once! You’ll more than likely get error code #18004 which means, basically, that if you think there’s enough memory on your sad little 32 bit PC for this, you’re NUTS! Not that this happened to me, you understand, but by it not happening to me, I learned that the enlargement process goes basically layer by layer and takes an amazing amount of time and resources. I also learned if you have a file like this that you need enlarged 800%, take it in increments, like 25 or 50% until you get the size you want. The result will be the same and it’ll be amazing!

So, I got to thinking – scary, I know – but if OnOne Genuine Fractals is such a must-have plug-in for my Restoration Toolkit, could any of the other OnOne plug-ins have Toolkit potential?

Thus I began my month long experimentation with OnOne Plug-in Suite. The month was for research purposes for this article. My use of these plug-ins will continue, indefinitely!

The OnOne Plug-in Suite 4.5 consists of Genuine Fractals 6 Professional, MaskPro 4, PhotoFrame 4, PhotoTools 2, PhotoTune 2.2 and Focal Point. I can honestly say that the only plug-in I didn’t find a use for is Focal Point. That’s not to say I won’t sometime in the future, I just haven’t as of this writing. Since I’ve already expounded upon Genuine Fractals 6, let’s have a look at what’s left.

MaskPro 4: Here’s my big confession of the day. I totally suck at masking with the pen tool. I suck at the pen tool and paths, period. All those wonkie dots turning into lines with handles…when I do background extractions, I generally use a layer mask – just turn it on and paint away the back ground. Lately, though, I’ve become quite attached to Calculations as a masking tool, also. But I believe this plug-in may prove to be just as valuable! I used photos with various background types for my learning curve samples, from plain backgrounds – mainly to familiarize myself with the interface – all the way to massively scratched and damaged. I found that by working with the plug-in the same way I do practically all my restoration work, that is zoomed in very tight and working on small areas at a time, I could get a great result no matter how bad the background was! For example, I removed the background of the photo below that had a great example of 20′s era “rats nest” hair (they actually used sugar water to stiffen their hair, if you can believe it! Pre-hairspray helmet head!). I wanted to keep the hairs, especially in the front, because I believe that adds a lot to the feel of the photo and the era it was taken in – as much as you may hate stray hairs, if they’re this important to the composition of the photo, they should remain! The hairs at the back of the head were harder to keep and would have been for any masking medium, because they were so close in color to the background itself. I’d decided, as matter of course, to add my own, if need be. As you can see by this closeup of the mask and the actual photo, MaskPro did an exemplary job!

Nice work masking flyaway hairs, one of the toughest masking challenges!

PhotoTune 2.2: This plug-in actually contains two plug-ins; ColorTune 2 and SkinTune 2:

ColorTune does a fairly decent job at color correction, but not enough for me. At best, I’d say it might be a good color correction starter – giving a decent base for you to continue tweaking until it’s perfect. The corrected tones just never came out clear and vibrant enough for me. Yes, I could have kept tweaking and tweaking and, eventually ended up with something better, but it will soon be Christmas, too. My point being that if it’s going to be that much work and take that much time, I’d rather do it another way. I’m looking for a helper, here, not a ball and chain. For the most part, I’ll stick with my regular methods and continue to come up with new ones, but I will keep this in my toolkit to work with in combination with other filters and masks.

Not a stellar improvement, but still an improvement...

SkinTune…now this I love! My photo restoration weak link is colorization, skin colorization, to be exact. For me, it has to be as close to perfect as I can get it – I’m not going to be satisfied making faces orange, or pink, or white or gray or funky yellow! Therefore, I usually end up making four to five layers, in various skin tone color combinations using different layer blend modes to get the closest I can to real, and am still not satisfied! I get the color about right, but not the tone. It’s usually missing that little touch of…I don’t know…health? Enter SkinTune. I took four different colorization experiments I’d done and put them in the SkinTune plug-in. You use an eyedropper tool to select a color area in your photo that you want the plug-in to work from, then tell it what tone you want, Caucasian, African, Asian, etc., then the plug-in gives you a very good selection of skin tones based on your choices. You can try different tones, on either end of the tone scale, or more in the mid-range. It really added an element to my colorization skin tones I was missing!

SkinTune gave the skin that little extra touch of "real"

PhotoTools 2: This is actually the plug-in I’ve used the most out of the entire suite! It’s packed full of filter galleries like Image Optimize, Portrait Enhance, Camera Tricks, Film & Darkroom, Photo Filters…just really fun and useful stuff! In fact, I took a photo I was messing with in ColorTune for color correction, with fairly weak results, and put it in the Auto Tone and Color filter in the Image Optimize gallery and it did, as my friend Pat likes to say, a Boffo job!

Very nice color correction, this time...

I was pretty darn impressed! I’d still want to do a bit of masking and tweaking to bring out some tones and punch up others, but the result is nothing to sneeze at! A couple of other PhotoTools experiments worth mentioning: I was working with a badly damages photo in my collection, thinking I’d like to try to find a filter to lesson the hideous noise. I found the Descreen filter in the Image Optimize menu worked much better than Reduce Noise or Surface Blur in Photoshop.

The last filter I’ll show you is from the Film & Darkroom menu in PhotoTools. It’s the HDR Look filter and before you start turning my words back on me (“You’ve said you hate HDR!”), it’s not HDR I hate, per se, it’s the excessive use of heavy HDR that I’m pretty much despising! A light application of just about anything can enhance, not take over and consume the entire world…

Image on left: regular color. Image on right: low opacity HDR Look. I'll admit, it really brings out some detail!

A word of caution: I’ve had a couple incidents of funkiness when coming back into Photoshop CS4 from the PhotoTools interface. Sometimes the photo I’m working on will appear as almost a split screen image: the way the photo looked pre-PhotoTools is on the right and to the left will be a smaller image of the post-PhotoTools version. The only way to get rid of this phenomenon seems to be to save the file as a psd, and then reopen it. It opens normally. One other oddity has only happened once, but since it fairly freaked me out, I thought I might mention it! When coming back into the PS interface from PhotoTools, the photo file appeared to be corrupt: that lovely mess of brightly colored lines ans pixels that usually spell “screwed”. I admit, I panicked! I was being a complete bubblehead that day and hadn’t saved a bit of the image for well over an hour, so I figured I was, literally, screwed. But I’m not one to give up easily! So, in case this should happen to you, try this: First, save the psd file! Close the image and shut down Photoshop. When you open it back up and open the image, it should be fine. I figured this out because after I saved the file, I tried opening it right back up again with no joy. I then decided to have a look at it in Bridge. It was perfectly fine, which told me it was Photoshop itself that was the culprit here. The bottom line, here, is to not panic. Other than that little bit of education, though, PhotoTools has been a wonderful addition to my Toolkit!

Screen shot of my "anomaly"

PhotoFrame 4: Now, this one is just FUN! Yet it also has some very viable uses in the restoration Toolkit! Mainly, I think, for family history book work. In the vast amount of frame selections available in this plug-in, you’re sure to find just the right ones that will be the perfect way to showcase your family photos in your family history book presentation! This is just one, albeit a pretty huge, area I think this plug in would be useful! Scrapbooks – major useful!! Family reunion fliers and brochures – huge! Online family sites – big potential! The possibilities abound!

A few ways to use PhotoFrames!

One draw back to the OnOne Plug-in Suite has been that it isn’t 64-bit compatible. That hasn’t affected me, yet, since I’m still in 32-bit mode, but it has impacted lots of folks I know. I started thinking about it when I realized I’ll be moving to 64-bit by mid-2010. I didn’t want to have two copies of Photoshop on my PC, one 32-bit so I could use the OnOne Suite, and one 64-bit so I could do everything else. Fortunately, no worries! According to OnOne’s Mike Wong, they expect to have the 64-bit version up and running sometime in early 2010. Good news, indeed!

And speaking of good news: How would you like to win a license for my very favorite plug-in, ever? That’s right! The folks at OnOne are maiking it possible for you to win your very own copy of Genuine Fractals 6 Professional! All you have to do is leave a message in the comments section of this post! Tell me how much you’d like Genuine Fractals 6 Professional! More than chocolate? (Please see and follow rules, below!)

You’ll have until 12:00 midnight, Tuesday, September 29 to enter. I’ll pick a commenter number at random on Wednesday, September 30 and announce the winner In Issue #5 of The Frib on October 1! Only one entry per person will be counted! Good luck to all!