My favorite Photoshop plugins

MY FAVORITE PHOTOSHOP Plug-ins

During my last photo workshop for snowy owls, a client asked me what my favorite plug-ins are for Photoshop. This article is the answer to that question along with examples of what the various plugins can do.

1. FLOOD. Flood is made by flamingpear.com, and it is my favorite plug-in of all. It makes realistic reflections to simulate water. In the easyto-navigate dialog box, you first establish the water line by moving the ‘horizon’ slider, and then you can control the types of waves and water patterns needed for a realistic image. If you don’t want to mess with the various sliders, there is a die icon (singular of dice) that is a randomizer. Click that repeatedly and you will see the wave pattern in the water change.

I also have the upgraded version, Flood 2, because it offers more complex wave patterns. Both versions are essential for creative work in Photoshop.

The elephant seen below was walking in front of the sun in the Masai Mara National Park in

2. TOPAZ SIMPLIFY. If you like to create painterly images from your photographs, you will love Simplify. You can take any type of image -- landscapes, portraits, wildlife, abstracts, macro, sports -- and turn it into what looks like a painting. Printed on paper or canvas, it will be suitable for framing as home decor. The software smooths and blends the colors in the original image, eliminating the fine, photographic detail, and the result is consistently beautiful.

Simplify is packaged with other Topaz filters. When I want to think outside the box with my images, I usuallly go to Topaz first because they have such unique and creative filters.

The horses running through snow, below, and

the birch forest, above, were both created with Topaz Simply.

3. TOPAZ REMASK 5. This is the best tool we have for selecting a subjec with hair. For composite work with animals, birds, or people, Remask 5 is essential. Photoshop is a brilliant program, but it doesn’t have the ability to separate hair from the background. This is particularly

true if the contrast between the hairy subject and the background doesn’t have a lot of contrast. If you photograph a blonde model against black velvet, Photoshop has tools that allow you to select and paste the model into a different background and retain most of the detail in the hair. The same is true if you photograph a brunette against a white background. There is enough contrast between subject and background for Photoshop to distinguish between them and to select only the model and the model’s hair.

Remask 5 is the plug-in you need to select a subject where contrast with the background isn’t delineated well. For example, the picture of the arctic wolf (taken at my winter wildlife workshop in Montana) is a composite. I replaced the background so the landscape in the distance was sharply defined. I captured the original image with a 400mm focal length, and the mountain range was therefore rendered out of focus.

I used Remask 5 because the hair standing up on the wolf ’s neck and shoulder blended with a very light background. The software was able to retain 95% of the detail in the animal’s hair along that edge, making this image quite believable.

4. FILTER FORGE. Filter Forge isn’t a single filter. It is a huge suite of filters that offers remarkable effects bypassed by other software manufacturers. Version 9.0 was just released, and it consists of almost 13,000 different filter effects. This is not an exaggeration. Effects such as chrome, kaleidoscope, watercolor, peeling paint, cracked glass, exotic textures, and so much more are all available with a single purchase. The images on the next page are just two examples.

website where you can browse the thousands of filters available to you. You can see a small thumbnail of each filter showing the effect it applies to your images. When you select the filter, it is added to your list favorites that you see every time you load the software.

Once you open a particular filter, there are several presets available as well as the option of tweaking the filter effects with various sliders. It is impossible to know what the sliders do based on how they are named, so it’s a matter of experimentation. If you don’t want to spend time with this, simply use the presets to see if you like the results. filters have been very slow. The 64 bit version addresses that issue.

5. NEAT IMAGE SOFTWARE. This is the best noise-reducing, or noise-eliminating, software I’ve seen. I consider this an essential tool for a photographer. It is true for some images that are impossibly noisy, it doesn’t work well because the digital files are composed mostly of noise as opposed to fine detail. I had this prob-

You can use Filter Forge as a stand-alone program or as a plug-in under the filter pull down tab in Photoshop. The 9.0 verson is 64 bit which makes it faster than previous versions. My one complaint about this program was that some

lem when I was shooting for a short time with the Canon 7D Mark II. ISO settings above 800 were just too noisy. I applied Neat Image to a bird in flight shot taken at 3200 ISO, and the result was usuable. However, for most images where noise can be seen but it’s not overwhelming, this software is amazing.

For example, I took the picture of the snowy owl, below, during my annual snowy owl workshop in Canada. It was late in the day and we were losing light. I was shooting on manual exposure mode so I could specifically choose my shutter speed and aperture settings (1/3200 and f/11 in this instance), and the ISO was set to auto. As a result, I hadn’t noticed the ISO had crept up to 12,800. If you look at the dark background where noise shows up the most, you won’t see any noise at all. In fact, this image looks like I used 100 ISO. That’s pretty amazing! The dialog box of the software seems a bit complicated, but I only use two options for most of my images. I first hit ‘Auto Profile’, then I click ‘Apply’. Sometimes I might use ‘Auto FineTune’ as well. It’s as easy as that.

6. TOPAZ GLOW. I love most genres of photography. In fact, I don’t know any other photographer who embraces the range of imagery that I do. What drew me to photography in the beginning of my career in 1968 was surrealism, and I still love it.

The two images on the next page are examples. I did these with the remarkable plug-in, Topaz Glow. If you also like wild, surrealistic, and artistic images, you have to try this filter. The presets Topaz gives you are extensive with many to choose from, and you can then tweak each preset to your own liking. The permutations are endless. §

White Horses of the Camargue A photo workshop in France

April 15 - 20, 2021