Usually this column’s concept of software “find” is a nifty bit of shareware (try-before-you-buy programs from small vendors) that offer a helpful function for small dollars. Alien Skin Software’s products are nifty enough, but not small dollar items. But they are so nifty, they are worth a look if you are at all serious about digital photography.
In recent months, the North Carolina-based company has rolled out three new releases of key products that have impressed me a lot:
- Image Doctor 2
- Blow Up 2
- Snap Art 2
These all are “filter” software that plug into Adobe Photoshop and also Photoshop Elements, both for PCs and Macs. Unfortunately they have list prices of $200-$250 each because they are aimed at graphics professionals, which puts them out of reach for most consumers. An Internet search for better deals will help you save some. But I don’t want anyone to think that this is an inexpensive undertaking.
Nevertheless, what the programs do is so helpful – in pretty much the order of priority shown above – that consumers might want to consider them.
Image Doctor (which I have seen priced a low as $125) is an invaluable retouching tool, which has a number of components that let you retouch old, scratchy photos (really, any physical print you have digitized) and cover-up blemishes and defects. Two functions I use the most are “JPEG Repair” and “Smart Fill.”
The former deals with the fact that to reduce file size, the JPEG format discards some picture information and as a result when you look at a highly compressed picture there will be visible defects in the form of visual “noise” – pixels that are the wrong color or are grainy. The repair tool extrapolates the JPEG data and produces a smooth image.
Smart Fill, which I use all the time, lets you select an offending part of your picture and make it disappear by covering it over with the adjacent background. For example, I came back from a trip to Arizona with a pretty landscape of the signature red hills of Sedona – with power lines cutting across the sky. To make it something I wanted to print and put on my wall, I used Smart Fill to hide the power lines and show only clear blue sky.
Blow Up, as you would guess, lets you scale up a picture to a larger size. It is not as essential a tool as Image Doctor, but if you are fond of buying poster-sized prints from your photo vendor, Blow Up helps a lot. If you only want to print a section of the original photo, you can very easily wind up with a cropped photo that does not have sufficient resolution to sustain acceptable quality for oversized prints. Blow Up 2 lets you crop and increase the resolution to fix the problem.
Snap Art, I must confess, is not a “must;” it’s just fun. Basically it takes a photo and converts it to look like artwork: oil painting, watercolor, pencil sketch, even impressionist painting. The new version 2 adds a much wider range of presets than the original and also produces much more convincing results. Turn your family picture into a family portrait. Make the landscape photos from your last trip into landscape paintings.
Maybe not the most essential thing on Earth, but it will transform mundane snapshots into something with more visual impact.
