Congratulations Scott & Perfect Effects 8 download

Thanks to +Scott Davenport for the heads up on the offer for a free download of OnOne’s Perfect Effect’s 8 (which is part of their perfect photo suite). It will only be for a limited time. You have probably gathered I’m not a fan of zanny presets and wacky/cool/auto fix filters but I do have a few OneOne Presets and Perfect Effects 8, and I use them. (I did run into a weird memory issue using perfect effects in the standalone browser mode, but it was easily fixed). I guess the big difference I noticed was the OnOne stuff can the “stacked”, one effect can be built on another. The Layers in Perfect Effects don’t give you all the layering tools that are in Perfect Layers but they are wonderfully powerful and easy to use (and reuse). As Scott suggests in his video the really wonderful thing about OnOne stuff are the videos and on-line training (available even if you are just using the trial or free downloads). It is Perfect Inspiration.

Also congratulations Scott for his first contribution to perfect inspirations “creating a memory”” (shown below)

Rain on the Duco

Created with OnOne Cross Process Blue preset in Lightroom followed by Comic Book Vignette in Picasa 

PhotoProject :: One Colour at a Time

Those that know me may realize I tend to stay away from the latest trendy filters, those zany pre-sets or must-have, over the top plug-ins. My reasoning is that everyone's fashionably filtered photos then tend to look the same-ish and I’d much rather work out my own post processing style and look a bit different. However there is one technique that a lot of folk ask me about and that is taking an image back to black and white but only highlighting one colour (or maybe a couple) there are actually a number of ways to do this so I though It might make a good series of  photoprojects to follow through a couple of examples. The first and easiest way, is actually to recommend that you  look at some presets in Lightroom, onOne offer a number of lightroom, photoshop and aperture plug-ins and presets. Their prefects effect 4, set of lightroom presets are free to download and includes a neat single click set of “hand tinting” functions. See a few of these hand tints below.

This is all extremely easy (and fun) but it is actually pretty easy to make your own colour filers using the HSL,Colour, B&W group on the develop menu in lightroom. In this case I’m using the HSL (Hue, Saturation & Luminace panel) and I have destaturated all but the colours green, yellow,aqua & blue, So these desaturated colours are greyed but the colours I selected remain. Time to have some fun with colour, one colour at a time.