Today I want to review VirtualPhotographer, from OptikVerve Lab, a useful and easy plug-in to enhance the drama effects in your photos. It is fully Photoshop compatible and completely FREE and speeds up editing time.
The software provides a rich list of presets for both colour and B/W photographic popular effects.
The software provides a rich list of presets for both colour and B/W photographic popular effects.
Experimenting is easy, once you have installed the plug-in you can find a dedicated sub-menu in the Photoshop Filter Menu. Clicking on the filter a new window opens where you find the presets list and sub-list and the large, resizeable, split-screen preview window. The image in the main panel will preview the changes, using the half and half button in the middle the right side of the image out of the processing and shows you the original so you can compare both the original and the filtered photo.
You can change many parameters starting from the presets and customize your work. Saving any changes to the Save to Batch button will allow you to load up an image and the changes will be made to the image straight away.
You can find three tabs:
Main: where you choose the effect that you want apply and how it looks like once applied
Film: you can apply the film grain to your photo choosing between different ASA (ISO) settings
Style: it contains some additional photographic styles such as warming or cooling filters
NOTE: these images are taken by the OptikVerve official site in the Virtual Photographer Help guide
You can apply the effect to the whole picture or just to some selected areas. To do that is enough using the selecting tools provided by Photoshop and then launching the filter.
In order to get a better control I always suggest to apply the effect to a new duplicated layer of the original photo.
PROS
PROS
- easy to use
- fully integrated Photoshop plug-in
- speed up you photo retouching
- many useful default presets
- completely FREE
- Windows only
