Power Retouche Photoshop Plugins - an Introduction

By Sarah Hansson

Power Retouche is a suite of 27 Photoshop plugins for photo retouching. The flagships are the sharpener and the Black & White Studio. The sharpener is the first and only sharpening tool on the market that does not create the negative fringes regular unsharp mask creates. It lets you sharpen surfaces and edges separately. The BW Studio converts color to black and white with a full set of professional films to select from, as well as traditional multigrade. It also includes exposure correction and contrast editing. The BW conversion can be controlled with seven sliders representing how the colors of the spectrum are converted to grayscale.

The Golden Section plugins is another popular plugin. It draws the golden sections, the golden spiral and other harmonic divisions on an empty Photoshop layer as an aid in composing and cropping. Another plugin is the White Balance Corrector. The plugin automatically scans the image for the color of the light and then corrects the color of the light to white. The White Balance plugin lets you use common gray-cards for correction, such as WhiBal, Gretag, etc. There is also a new plugin: The Ansel Adams Zone System for Digital. It divides the photo into ten zones, that can be edited individually for exposure, contrast and color.

The Toned Photos Photoshop plugin tones your photo sepia or like any other traditional toned print. There are nine preset tones: Sepia, Van Dyck, Kallitype, Silver Gelatin, Palladium, Platinum, Cyanotype, Light Cyanotype and Silver. Adjust the preset tones, or create your own. It has colored lens-filters for the B/W conversion. The plug-in copies the pigmentation distribution of the traditional toned photos. There is also a nifty plugin for correction of transverse and longitudinal chromatic aberration. In addition there is a special filter for removal of color fringes, in particular the dreaded purple fringe, but all fringe colors can be removed. The purple fringe is different from chromatic aberration in that it is a wide purple fringe that appears along dark edges against a strongly lit background.

The Lens Corrector plugin corrects barreling, pincushion and panorama photos. The plugin can correct both symmetric as well as asymmetric distortions. Asymmetric distortion come if you crop a distorted image. Symmetric distortion can be corrected in the later versions of Photoshop, but not asymmetric or panorama. The plugin differs from other similar distortion correction tools in that it does not explode the corners. Another plugin worth mentioning is the Soft Filter. It is a digital equivalent of a traditional lens soft filter. You can adjust the strength and the spread of the softening effect.

Power Retouche offers a plugin for generating realistic film grain; both black-white and color. The plugin uses fractal technology to generate the grain. Other film grain tool use either noise or images of film grain to impress grain onto the image; neither looks very convincing. Power Retouche lets you adjust the size as well as the hardness of the grain

The vignetting Photoshop plugin was formerly called the radial density plugin. It removes vignetting caused by camera lenses, but also lets you edit radial exposure and brightness. There is a slider to control the hot-spot size and also its decay speed or contrast. One Photoshop plugin should have been mentioned at the top of the page. It is the Black Definition plugin. It lets you control and edit the black content of colors as if it were a color channel. There are too many plugins to describe here.

About the Author:

Find out more about this suite of plugins here: Photoshop plugins