DigAbstractPhoto-50A 2/9/05 12:15 PM Page ii...this plug-in is to recover shadow detail without increasing shadow noise after you intention-ally underexpose in order to capture detail

DigAbstractPhoto-50A 2/9/05 12:15 PM Page ii

DigAbstractPhoto-50A 2/9/05 12:15 PM Page 1

This appendix includes links to the publishers’ Web sites for the software products mentioned inthis book. These sites are excellent sources for finding far more information about these productsthan I could ever hope to present in a book such as this one.

Following the name of and link to the publisher are the names of all of the products from thatpublisher that are mentioned in this book. I’ve also listed the names of some other products thatmight interest you, even though we didn’t specifically use them to create any of these images.

Alien Skin Softwarehttp://www.alienskin.com

✦ Eye Candy 5 Nature. The second of three upgrades to Eye Candy 4000. This one is a col-lection of ten Photoshop filters, which create fire, smoke, rust, snow, ice, and more.

✦ Eye Candy 5 Textures. An upgrade to Eye Candy 4000 that features ten seamless texturegenerators. Effects include snake and lizard skin, fur, brick, stone, and wood.

✦ Xenofex 2. Simulates spectacular natural phenomena, such as lightning and clouds. Includesdistortions such as Flag, Television, and Rip Open. Photos can be turned into jigsaw puzzles,constellations, and intricate mosaics with a single click.

✦ Image Doctor. Offers the option of selection-based image repair to remove blemishes anddefects, repair over-compressed JPEGs, and seamlessly replace unwanted details and objects.

✦ Splat! Combines frames, textures, edges, borders, and mosaics into your images.

✦ Eye Candy 4000. Combines practical effects like shadows, bevels, and glows with specialeffects like Chrome, Fire, Smoke, and Wood. The effects are not as realistic-looking or ascontrollable as in the three updates, but this still makes a useful introductory collection.

✦ Knoll Light Factory 2. These are lighting filters invented by one of the original creators ofPhotoshop that are now being sold through Alien Skin. Twenty-five individual lens filtersdeliver unprecedented control over lighting effects by combining elements like glows, stars,fans, and spike shapes. Each filter has global controls for the brightness, size, color, andangle of the overall effect.

✦ Optipix 3.0. Filters for sharpening and extending range in order to give digital images theappearance of having been made at higher resolution and with better optics than was actuallythe case. There is also a variety of intriguing range-extension effects.

✦ Focus Magic. Focus Magic differs from most sharpening filters in that it purports to reversethe process by which images become blurred. The latest version even claims to correctmotion blur, though I haven’t personally experimented with it as of this writing.

LINKS TO PRODUCT SITES

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Andromedahttp://www.andromeda.com

Andromeda makes Photoshop-compatible plug-ins that create a wide variety of photographiceffects and corrections. Most of these products are hard-to-beat for performing their specificfunctions.

✦ Three-D. Allows you to wrap your photos around a variety of 3D shapes in a variety of ways.

✦ Three-D Luxe. An advanced version of Three-D…very advanced, in fact. The shapes andsurfaces can be varied in transparency and include stressed, riveted, aged, mesh, and aliensculpted surfaces

✦ Screens. Converts photos into all manner of line art screens, such as mezzotints, sharp-contrast mezzograms, mezzoblends, ellipses, lines, circles, spokes, waves, or any blendedcombination.

✦ Techtures. Infinitely variable texturing effects. You can even invent textures never beforeseen by man.

✦ Shadow. Casts a shadow of your input image onto a Casting Plane that can then be manipu-lated in 3D space behind or in front of the Input Image. You can specify cameras and lightsource. You can operate in expert and novice modes for complete creative control over anyimage shadow. Shadows become more feathered as they are cast further from the subject.

✦ Velociraptor. Arguably the most advanced and versatile motion blur filter. You can even domotion trails, give direction to them, and make them taper off as they move away from thesubject. Stroboscopic motion blur is included, too.

✦ VariFocus. Create focus blurs that are even more controllable than Photoshop’s new LensBlur filter.

✦ Measurement. Lets you draw straight or curved paths that will then automatically measureline profile, histograms, distance, angle, and more—along, under, or within the path.

✦ Cutline. Creates hand-engraved and woodcut effects. Specific tools allow for positioningand adjustment of directional screen lines.

✦ LensDoc. Very accurately corrects barrel and pincushion lens distortion, making this tool aninvaluable asset for owners of wide-angle lenses. Incidentally, you can also do correctiverotation and perspective without having to leave the filter’s interface.

✦ Perspective. Corrects perspective distortion—though I find it easier to simply use theTransform command in Photoshop.

✦ EtchTone. Allows you to create etched textures on both color and monochrome photos. Youget a much better idea of how this works from the illustration on the site.

✦ ScatterLight Lenses. My very favorite filter for a huge variety of glamour-diffusion effects.There are four major categories of diffusion types and each of these offers a wide variety ofsettings. There’s even a star highlight effect.


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✦ RedEye Pro. Removes red-eye by allowing you to drag a rectangle around the spot and makethe correction automatically while preserving glint highlights and eye color.

✦ Photography Filters. This is a whole group of plug-ins designed to recreate the specialeffects produced by analog special effects filters. You can get the idea of what each does fromits name, but you’ll learn a lot more by visiting the site. The individual filters are cMulti,sMulti, Design Filter, Mezzo Line-Screen Filter, Diffract, Prism and Rainbow, Halo,Reflection, Star, and Velocity.

Auto-FXhttp://www.autofx.com

This company claims to be the world’s largest developer of Photoshop-compatible plug-ins. That istheir specialty. Furthermore, their plug-ins are also compatible with most competing image-editingsoftware as well.

✦ AutoEye 2.0. Automatically improves digital images by rebuilding color detail, sharpness,and image vibrancy. Similar to Photoshop’s one-click auto-correction, but it seems to do amore dynamic interpretation of the image.

✦ DreamSuite Series One. A wide variety of visual and edge effects.

✦ DreamSuite Series Two. More of the above.

✦ DreamSuite Gel Series. Adds a variety of translucent depth effects to images and selections.Makes it easy to make Mac-type buttons.

✦ Mystical Lighting. Goes way beyond the effects of Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filters. Youcan cast patterns, diffuse the lighting, and create a wide variety of atmospheric effects.

✦ Mystical Tint Tone and Color. Thirty-eight tinting and coloring effects that can totallytransform an image into a dream world.

✦ Photo/Graphic Edges 6.0. Creates very quick, easy, and useful border edges.

Corelhttp://www.corel.com

Corel publishes a huge variety of powerful office and graphics software.

✦ Corel KPT Collection. One of the world’s favorite and most powerful collections of special-effects plug-ins for Photoshop. This is a mixture of the best of Kai’s Power Tools plug-in fil-ters 5, 6, and Effects. We could never cover the power and variety of these filters in the spaceallocated here. Check them out on the Web site.


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✦ Corel Painter 9. The most widely known, best established, and most versatile of all naturalmedia painting programs. Fully compatible with Photoshop files and layers. The user inter-face has been re-designed to make it feel more familiar to Photoshop users.

✦ Corel PaintShop Pro. A powerful entry-level image-editing program with a few unique fea-tures of its own.

✦ Corel Knockout2. A knockout program originally created by Ultimatte Corporation. Aprofessional program for removing images from both blue/green screen and natural back-grounds.

Casio (Digital Cameras)http://www.casio.com

Fo2Pixhttp://www.fo2pix.com

✦ Buzz Pro. A very sophisticated watercolor filter that can really make your digital photoslook like hand-painted watercolors in a variety of styles…including outlined edges. You canget a very good instant start by simply experimenting with the pre-saved “stacks” of effects.

Flaming Pearhttp://www.flamingpear.com

✦ SuperBlade Pro. One of the best packages for text and object edge effects.

✦ Creative Pack. A collection of filters that creates a variety of combinations of edge effectson images.

✦ Polymerge. Merges image components into bizarre abstracts. You’d better look at the Website to get an idea of the strange possibilities.

✦ LunarCell. All sorts of texture-mapped globes that look like fictitious planets.

✦ Flexify. Simulates all sorts of wide-angle lenses.


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Fred Mirandahttp://www.fredmiranda.com

Fred Miranda is an accomplished Los Angeles pro photographer with a Web site that has lots ofvaluable information on it. Fred is also a real scientist when it comes to creating actions and plug-ins that work to solve problems often faced by photographers. I’ve listed some of my favoritesbelow.

✦ Velvia Vision (PC/Mac plug-in). Makes your digital image look like it was shot onFujichrome Velvia film—at least where contrast and color saturation are concerned. Theintensity of the effect, color contrast, and warmth of the colors (among other things) are alluser-controlled.

✦ Intellisharpen II (PC/Mac plug-in). Provides halo-less sharpening, edge sharpening, lumi-nance sharpening, mode sharpening, and more with just the press of a button. With thisplug-in, you can choose from low or high ISO settings. Other options allow you to sharpenfine detail. Photographers can choose from 100 Intellisharpen intensity levels and 100sharpen fine detail levels. You can even reduce color noise from high ISO files. You can saveand load your own Intellisharpen settings. In addition, you have the ability to preview set-tings and tweak intensity results for maximum control over your work.

✦ BW Workflow Pro (PC/Mac plug-in). Moves you along through your own choice of work-flow in a very versatile way. You get eight preset filter selections, 32 duotone presets, 18 tri-tone presets, six quadtone presets, three film grain presets, and four dynamic range presets.Everything you do can be easily previewed as you work on your image.

✦ ISOx Pro v1.1 (PC/Mac plug-in). The main objective of the new ISOx Pro Plugin is toreduce noise while keeping most of the detail intact. It provides options to reduce the colornoise (chroma noise) only, as well as other options that reduce the luma and chroma noisesimultaneously based on ten intensity levels. The interface makes it easy to apply the settingsthat are most appropriate to particular cameras and ISO settings.

✦ SR Professional v1.1 (PC/Mac plug-in). SR stands for Shadow Recovery. The purpose ofthis plug-in is to recover shadow detail without increasing shadow noise after you intention-ally underexpose in order to capture detail in the highlights. The program can automaticallyremember previous settings so that you can correct an entire series of photos automatically.

✦ Stair Interpolation Pro v1.1 (PC/Mac plug-in). This is a 16-bit version of the highlyregarded plug-in that allows you to make enlarged versions of images that still have sharpand smooth edges, thus creating the impression that they were shot at much higher resolu-tion. Can be applied to a series of images using Batch mode.

✦ Web Presenter Pro v1.1 (PC/Mac plug-in). Allows automatic downsizing of 16-bit filesaccording to any number of presets that you choose.

✦ DRI Pro v1.1 (PC/Mac plug-in). Perhaps the most famous Miranda plug-in, this one allowsyou to combine two different images of the same subject that have been shot at two differentexposures. Either the camera must be on a tripod and the subject must remain still for bothexposures or you can use two different interpretations of the same RAW file.


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✦ FM Frames (action). Automatically makes custom frames for Web images. It works with anyimage orientation (Portrait or Landscape), including severely cropped images and panoramas.You simply have to choose your custom colors for matte and frame and then sit back and letthe action do the rest. Within five seconds, you’ll have a custom frame that is worthy ofenhancing your artwork. This action makes the most professional-looking frames and mattesof any program I’ve yet seen. It’s also a great way to preview matte and frame choices beforeyou go to the time and expense of actually creating and matting the images.

✦ Digital Warm-Cool (action). Actually, a whole series of actions that you can choose forwarming and cooling filters that correspond to those frequently used in analog photography.You can get the feeling of sunset earlier in the afternoon or that of dawn at ten in the morn-ing.

✦ FM EdgeSharpen Pro v3.0 (action). Edge-sharpening specifically designed for images thatare extra noisy due to high ISO settings or extra long exposures.

✦ Moire Reducer (action). Meant to take moiré patterns out of scanned images.

✦ Digital Soft Focus (action). Creates an effect similar to that of a soft-focus portrait filter. Itcan be used on any digital image after the fact and costs much less than a good portrait filter.You can also batch-process an entire portrait shoot.

✦ Digital Infrared (action). Capable of making most any digital color (or scanned color) imagelook as though it were shot with an infrared filter on conventional film. There is a hugeadvantage in that you can combine both effects in a huge variety of ways—something youcould not do with conventional images.

✦ Camera-specific correction tools. Miranda has created tools for correcting problems withseveral pro DSLRs. So far, the list includes the Nikon D70 and all of the Canon modelsfrom the 20D on up.

Fujifilm, Ltd. (Digital Cameras)http://www.fujifilm.com

nik Multimedia, Inc.http://www.nikmultimedia.com

✦ Dfine. A noise reduction filter specifically aimed at correcting the noise characteristics ofyour particular camera, ISO setting, and exposure. You can save your settings or use pre-builtprofiles for individual cameras that are available online at additional cost. Also works withWacom tablets so that you can “brush out” noise in specific areas of the image, such as inshadows or skies.


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✦ Sharpener Pro. The easiest and most no-nonsense tool I’ve found for final (output) sharp-ening. Gives you settings that relate directly to each type of printer. This version lists specsfor virtually all possible output options. There are lower-cost versions dedicated specificallyto the most commonly used output options.

✦ Color Efex Pro 2.0. Hundreds of pre-defined color effects, ranging from standard camerafilters to very bizarre or surreal effects that can be especially suitable for abstracts. You canaccomplish most of these effects using Photoshop alone, but these tools make it very easy toquickly experiment with a variety of effects before settling on one. If you own a Wacomtablet, you can also paint color effects into specific areas of the image.

Neat Imagehttp://www.neatimage.com

Perhaps the most powerful noise reduction plug-in. It seems to be able to remove any amount ofany kind of noise. However, it can also remove too much noise, thereby creating strange artifactsor eliminating textures that are natural to the subject, such as the texture of concrete or of sand onthe beach.

Olympus (Digital Cameras)http://www.olympusamerica.com

PhotoWizhttp://www.thepluginsite.com

✦ Focal Blade Sharpener. Lets you sharpen your photos for screen display and print, as well asproduce great-looking blur, soft focus, and glow effects.

✦ Color Washer. A plug-in for correcting the colors, contrast, exposure, and saturation ofphotos.

✦ Light Machine. Performs shadow/highlight, lighting, and color-based corrections withoutforcing you to stop to make selections and layer stacks.

✦ Photo Freebies. Free plug-ins for Black and White conversion, gradient de-saturation inany of four directions (top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, right-to-left), a fix for“combed” histograms to interpolate existing information to fill in the gaps, a sepia toner (fiveeffects and contrast control), the ability to work in HSL without leaving RGB mode, theability to work in YCC without leaving RGB mode, and converting the image into a negativewithout changing the colors.


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PictureCodehttp://www.picturecode.com

✦ Noise Ninja. Yet another highly regarded tool for noise removal. I have run a beta test onthis software, but cannot yet comment on the final version. Best to check out the Web site.

Pixel Geniushttp://www.pixelgenius.com/

A consortium of leading Photoshop and digital imaging gurus (Martin Evening, Bruce Fraser,Seth Resnick, Andrew Rodney, Jeff Schewe, and Mike Skurski) who came together in order to pro-vide useful and practical workflow enhancement tools for digital photographers.

✦ PhotoKit Sharpener. Provides a complete sharpening workflow. The site also has tutorialsand articles by Bruce Fraser and Seth Resnick.

✦ PhotoKit Color. Works with the Automate sub-menu in Photoshop so that you can apply avariety of powerful analog-type color corrections to a series of images. All effects are createdon layers, leaving the original image untouched. A few of the effects are black and white splittoning, cross processing, making skin tones less red or lighter, darkening blue skies andenhancing cloud contrast, and automatically removing color casts. Very cool, if you don’tmind a wee bit of editorializing on my part.

✦ PhotoKit-EL. For Photoshop Elements. An Automate plug-in that creates digital replica-tions of traditional darkroom effects, such as tone adjustment, color balance adjustment, andconversion to grayscale. But it also offers effects that are difficult or even impossible toachieve in a traditional darkroom, such as sharpening to improve detail and graduated toneadjustments to improve specific areas in an image.

✦ PhotoKit. Similar to Photoshop EL, but for Photoshop and with 16-bit per channel capa-bilities.

Power Retouchehttp://www.powerretouche.com

This company makes one of the largest selections of plug-ins aimed directly at correcting theproblems most commonly found in digital photos. Most, if not all, of these filters work in 8- and16-bit RGB or CMYK.

✦ Black and White Studio. Lets you convert to black and white using the parameters used inanalog photography. You can specify film type, zone range, colored filters, and haveshadow/highlight control.


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✦ Dynamic Range Compression. Gives the user full control over all aspects of dynamic rangecorrection—black point, offset, shadow depth with adjustable threshold, saturation, and soon. Also claims to perform shadow reduction without creating noise artifacts.

✦ Sharpness. This is one of my favorite tools for sharpening, especially extreme effects sharp-ening. It doesn’t create edgelines or artifacts like Unsharp Mask does. Restrict sharpening toedges only or blur selected colors, hues, or shades in order to manipulate focus and makeareas unfocussed. Optional anti-aliasing to avoid edge roughness.

✦ Lens. Removes pincushion and barrel lens distortion.

✦ Toned Photos. Does traditional darkroom print toning effects (B/W, Sepia, Van Dyck,Kallitype, Silver Gelatin, Palladium, Platinum, Cyanotype, Light Cyanotype, Silver). You canadjust the preset tones or create your own. The plug-in copies the pigmentation distributionof the traditional toned photo-printing techniques.

✦ Noise Filter. Features five different noise removal methods.

✦ Golden Section. A great compositional aid. Instantly adds a transparent layer and draws thegolden sections, golden spiral, golden triangles, spiral sections, rule of thirds, and harmonictriangles. Handles any proportions.

✦ Exposure. Automatically corrects for over or under exposure. It is also meant to complimentthe Dynamic Range Compression plug-in mentioned previously.

✦ Radial Density. Corrects for lens vignetting or lets you create vignettes.

✦ Anti-Aliasing. Looks for over-sharpened or stairstepped edges and smoothes them by alias-ing them.

✦ White Balance. Allows you to correct color balance automatically or use sliders to set thecolor balance according to your own emotional preferences. Claim is made that auto caneven correct for mixed color balance lighting.

✦ Black Definition. Allows you to intensify or reduce the amount of black in the photo’s colormix. The plastic 3D sense in a photo is greatly enhanced when the black definition is raised.Reducing black definition makes colors more vivid without raising their saturation. You canalso use this tool to brighten sullied photos without actually altering brightness.

✦ Contras. Allows you to control black-white contrast independent of color-contrast andwithout changing color, hue, or saturation. Control the midtones by setting how much theyshould be preserved or lost.

✦ Saturation. Preserves all colors, hues, tonal variations, and shades when manipulating satu-ration and doesn’t alter brightness when you’re increasing saturation.

✦ Color Correction. Lets you shift the color spectrum of the entire image or a selected hue orbrightness-range by rotating the color wheel.

✦ Posterize. Lets you posterize color hues and values independently and freely select any num-ber of levels for either.

✦ Edgeline. Much more versatile than Photoshop Edge Detection. Lets you increase width,eliminate noise (small details), automatically create background transparency, and operate ineither color or black and white.


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✦ Transparency. Lets you make the colors within a given range transparent. Must be used onan unlocked image layer. The controls are fairly versatile.

✦ Soft Filter. Separate sliders control blur and glow, so this tool works well as a portrait filter.

✦ Brightness. Allows you to preserve or reduce color as you change brightness intensity.There’s also a glow slider.

The Imaging Factoryhttp://www.theimagingfactory.com

Another plug-in company that has (so far, at least) dedicated itself to plug-ins for the digital pho-tographer. The selection of these plug-ins is almost as large as those of Photo Retouche, and thesefilters also work in 16-bit mode. You can download fully-functional demos that work for 30 days.There is no package price for a full kit and prices are somewhat higher than Photo Retouche, butthere’s little direct competition when it comes to the purpose of individual filters.

✦ Convert to B&W Pro or Standard Edition. Can imitate analog color filter effects, thecolor response of different black and white emulsions, and interactively control colorresponse with the use of sliders. You can also select between two types of sepia tone. TheStandard edition is less powerful.

✦ Noise Reduction Pro or Standard Separate controls for luminance and color noise. Muchfaster than most noise reduction tools, but may lack the control present in some. Excellentquick tool for de-noising selected areas very quickly.

✦ Unsharp Mask Pro or Standard. Excellent control over the Unsharp Masking characteris-tics and instant previewing at 100%. Very fast operation. Certainly an excellent tool for ini-tial sharpening or for corrective sharpening after noise removal.

✦ Gaussian Blur. Appears to do the same thing as Photoshop’s Gaussian Blur, but with lessblur for a given number of pixels.

✦ Debarrelizer. Corrects chromatic aberration as well as barrel distortion. Distortion is cor-rected with a slider, which doesn’t give precise control, but at least it’s fast.

✦ Perspective. Lets you rotate, and then tilt the image vertically or horizontally in 3D by usingsliders.

✦ Vignette. Allows you to add or remove vignetting effects caused by lighting or non-digitallenses.

✦ Squeeze. Compresses the size of objects at the outer edges of the image.

✦ White Balance. You can visually correct the color balance of the image with sliders and canlock the original white point.

✦ White Point. Lets you choose the white point by picking its color in the Photoshop ColorPicker.


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✦ Color Equalizer. Lets you change saturation and brightness at different color hue ranges bymoving audio equalizer-type sliders. The effect is very different from that in the KPTEqualizer.

✦ Color Correction. Meant to give you more complex and exacting color correction controlsthan the Color Balance command in Photoshop.

✦ Simulated DOF. Moves the point-of-focus as a horizontal line up or down the photo. Imageblur increases with distance from the point-of-focus line.

✦ Soft-Focus. Provides sliders for radiation, intensity, and mist. Can be useful for providingan atmospheric softness, as well as for portrait softening.

✦ Graduated Color. Graduates any single color that you pick from the Color Picker andallows you to control the center of gradation, intensity, and rotation with sliders.

✦ Graduated Fog. Graduates a glowing blur or mist. You can control the color and density ofthe mist and the rotation of the graduation.

✦ Ultimatte AdvantEdge. The fastest and cleanest way to knock out the background fromaround objects with very complex edges. However, you must use a blue or green screen for thebackground. All you have to do to select the background (except in unusually complex sub-jects or where there is an excessive amount of background color contained in the foregroundsubject), drag a brush across the background color, and click OK. Expensive, but a hugetime-saver if you have to do complex compositing or need to place portrait subjects against avariety of backgrounds.

Visual Infinityhttp://www.visinf.com

✦ Grain Surgery. A powerful grain/noise control tool that lets you either remove or add grainand noise. You can sample the grain that you want to remove so that you can target exactlythe kind of noise you want to remove. You can also match the grain in another image. VisualInfinity has also announced a new product, not yet shipping at the time of this writing, thatis especially targeted for removing the noise in digital photographs.

✦ Genuine Fractals 3.5. Probably the best known and most widely-used tool for upsampling(enlarging) images without increasing noise or losing edge sharpness. It’s now facing toughcompetition from the Fred Miranda plug-in.


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Xaos Toolshttp://www.xaostools.com

This company’s products are available as a single unit called Total Xaos (yes, it’s pronouncedchaos).

✦ Paint Alchemy. An amazingly capable tool for creating filter effects that automatically cre-ate the look of many styles of natural media painting.

✦ Terrazzo. Creates a huge variety of symmetrical patterns and backgrounds from selectionswithin a photo.

WACOM, Inc.http://www.wacom.com

Wacom was the originator of digital tablets with pressure-sensitive pens that gave natural mediabrush-strokes a truly natural look by making the strokes thicker and/or more opaque when pres-sure was increased on the pen tip.


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Documents

DigAbstractPhoto-50A 2/9/05 12:15 PM Page ii...this plug-in is to recover shadow detail without increasing shadow noise after you intention-ally underexpose in order to capture detail