It’s easy to get shallow depth of field with a camera. You just need a camera with a large sensor, and a lens with a large maximum aperture and the laws of physics do the rest. But adding depth of field digitally is trickier, so let’s see if a filter designed specifically to do this […]
ON1 Perfect Suite
This is the predecessor to ON1 Photo RAW, which replaces it. The ON1 Perfect Suite was a collection of plug-ins organised within a single interface, but the tools, technologies and features have now been merged into a single all-in-one program.
What’s missing from this picture? Actually, it’s seven things, all removed with the Perfect Layers 8 Perfect Eraser…
Adobe’s content-aware technology, as found in Photoshop and Elements, has a rival. Perfect Photo Suite 8 now has a Perfect Eraser tool in its Perfect Layers module. It works just like its Adobe equivalent – you paint over the object you want to remove and it magically vanishes, replaced by surrounding details and textures. Adobe’s […]
Who needs Photoshop when you can use Perfect Layers 8 with Aperture and Lightroom?
Aperture and Lightroom fans will need an external image-editor for more advanced image enhancement and manipulation – particularly if it involves combining multiple images as layers. But your external editor doesn’t have to be Photoshop, or even Elements. Perfect Photo Suite 8, just out, has a new version of its Perfect Layers plug-in which makes […]
Perfect Photo Suite 8 and its new Enhance filter
OnOne Software has worked hard to promote its new Perfect Photo Suite 8 product, and it’s finally been launched officially. You can take a look for yourself at the OnOne website, and download a 30-day trial while you’re there – click the ‘Try now’ link at the top of the page. I’m going to take […]
Do you sharpen on export? It makes more difference than you might think!
If you use Aperture or Lightroom, it’s so easy to export pictures at specific sizes for web use or emailing that you probably don’t give the settings a second thought. But in order to reduce your pictures to the required size, your software has to carry out a resampling process that can leave fine details […]
How to combine Focal Point Focus Bugs and Vignettes
Focal Point 2 is part of OnOne Perfect Photo Suite. It’s designed to replicate the shallow depth of field effects associated with wide lens apertures and the changing focus planes of tilt shift lenses, using one or more ‘Focus Bugs’ and manual ‘focus painting’ brush tools. More than that, though, it’s designed to help you […]
How to combine Perfect Effects frames and blend modes
OnOne Software’s Perfect Effects is just like Nik (Google) Color Efex Pro, offering a range of different filter effects from a single interface. Where Color Efex Pro lets you ‘stack’ filter effects, Perfect Effects lets you do even more, with a Photoshop-style system of layers, complete with different blend modes. This means you can combine […]
Create a miniature effect with this Focal Point 2 tilt shift technique
Tilt shift effects are all the rage right now, either as tools within image-editing programs or built directly into the camera. They deliberately defocus parts of the image to create the look of old-fashioned lenses, highly-controllable studio or architectural lenses or, in the case of this Focal Point 2 tilt shift technique, they make a […]
How to adjust curves with the Perfect Effects Tone Enhancer
OnOne Software Perfect Effects isn’t just for image effects – you can also carry out everyday image-editing adjustments, thanks to the Perfect Effects Tone Enhancer. This is used for some of the effects in the presets panel on the left of the window, but if you want to access it directly it’s best to go […]
Create new effects with Perfect Effects blending modes
OnOne Software’s Perfect Effects plug-in adds effects to your images as new layers, and these work just like the layers in Photoshop. And, like Photoshop, Perfect Effects offers a variety of blend modes to control how these effects interact with the original image. If leave the blend mode set to Normal, the image effect layer […]