Some off-the-peg Photoshop effects

by David Kilpatrick

Kai Krause is not the first to create Photoshop filters for graphic effect, even if his are fast and clever. From the early days of Photoshop, Aldus's Gallery Effects have been around, dating back to times when Image Studio and Color Studio reigned supreme, and a stand-alone DA Gallery Effect application was felt worthwhile.

Gallery Effects even had live previews and slider controls, and the latest releases in this series are amusing and sophisticated. They remain fairly slow, in my opinion, but the non-expert user can provide some instant routes to off-the-peg effects otherwise only available through expensive programs like Painter.

The important term here is off-the-peg. If you are working for the public or for clients who are not digital image literate, the sheer scope of possible variations and the ways in which you can reach them will not be understood. You can end up making endless reworks and variations on effects once the client discovers that these are not fixed routines.

The off-the-peg effects provided by some of Kai's Power Tools, Aldus Effects, Alien Skin, Andromeda and similar packages may not have the creative integrity of 'things you make up yourself' but they are predictable, repeatable and saleable. You can show the client an example of a picture given a canvas texture or a watercolor effect, and if they like it they can ask for it. It will look much the same on their picture and they will be happy.

Here are some very quick, easy treatments of one picture.

This first picture is an unmodified 17mm solo sunflower. Click this to load up a good quality large JPEG image. If you like sunflowers, you can get a bunch of 'em in our specimen photolibrary browser concept.

This one takes you to a JPEG showing Aldus Gallery Effects Volume 1, GE Watercolor Effect, Level 3. It doesn't work on very dark or finely detailed images but it's fine for portraits, animals, flowers etc.

This one's a Kai's Power Tools Version 2.1 manipulation! The center of the sunflower has been bulged using KPT Glass Lens Bright 2.0, and the sky has been subjected to subtle color shifts using KPT Fractal Designer.

Kai can work with Aldus! This image uses two off-the-shelf, unmodified special effect filters. The entire image was treated using Aldus Gallery Effects Volume 3 'Plastic Wrap', which was a wonderful filter for Aldus to have given away as a demo on many CDs, BBBs etc. It does great things with lettering. The corners have been done using KPT's Page Curl, another brilliantly effective plug-in which does one thing only but does it well. Needless to say, we now show Page Curl to designers doing ads, and it's frequently used to roll back the image and reveal a coupon, etc. If you really want to see this pic at its best, use Netscape 1.0 or set the background color of your browser pages to 192:192:192 RGB.

Mono effects

My final two variations imitate black and white technique. Most people, when converting a color image to mono, forget that the Channels in Photoshop provide the equivalent of a full set of color filters for panchromatic film. Still, I remember we once gave two American girl students at the Arles Rencontres workshops a lift back from photographing white limestone hillocks near Les Baux in France. They had FP4 sheet film provided by Ilford, and neat wooden Calumet 4 x 5 field cameras. It was a lovely evening, with subtle blue skies behind the limestone formations. I asked them whether they had gone for a yellow filter, orange or maybe red. 'Filter?', said one of the girls. 'What's one of those?'. I explained how these filters darkened the blue sky and brought out the pale rocks against it. 'We've never used filters', one of them said. They were third-year photography course students at a major US university - were they just winding us up?

Anyway, click this thumbnail to get a big mono JPEG showing how copying from an RGB color file's RED channel gives the same effect as shooting panchromatic film thru an 8X red filter. When you convert color images to mono, consider whether you would have used a filter in the situation. Try Red and Green channels blended for an effect similar to a 2.5X yellow-green. The Green channel alone can be useful for studio portraits (a 3X green filter used to be standard recommendation for tungsten studio portraits on panchromatic film, as it deepens lip color and enhances skin detail).

This final example is based on the red-filter conversion. It is an imitation of a grain-enhanced pseudosolarization, the kind of thing you can do in the darkroom using a 35mm neg, a contact frame and Kodalith film. Two KPT filters were used - first, Find Edges, then Hue Protected Noise - Maximum. The standard Photoshop equivalents will do just as well. Finally, Sharpen More was applied to boost the graininess, then Sharpn Edges to enhance the fake sabbatier effect without changing the graininess.

Back in 1990, before we had Photoshop, I produced a magazine spread of similar monochrome effects imitating traditional darkroom methods, using Image Studio. The computer simulation of line/tone, sola- and poster-ization effects was so accurate that the article actually described how these could be done in the darkroom, while admitting we had done them on the Mac.

Even so I guess I would prefer a real Jerry Uelsmann print on the wall rather than a 1.4 meg floppy...