Bacardi

The following pic was taken in the Museum of Avignon. No flash allowed, difficult light situation, and a Kodak Gold 400 film set at 1600. Result: grain. But it's either that or no pic at all.

I did not sharpen here. Only CW with Sample Area.
I didn't even remember all this richess...

Bacardi

This is a difficult one. It was taken in the church of the Palais des Papes in Avignon by candle light and a few awkward spots. No tripod, the camera fixed on a chair with both hands.

Here, the auto buttons couldn't do the job. The Sample Area came close, but I had to switch to expert mode to get access to the refinement sliders. (lucky me, feeling needed) This is what I came up with. Again: I could obtain something acceptable in PS without CW, but is is a/quicker and b/more handy as all tools are there on one interface.

Bacardi

What can it not do? Remove flash area's. But herefore, we have the Median filter in PS.

What would I like to see changed? One extra button that allows people with faster puters and larger monitors to choose for a larger preview. Say 640x480.

Are these plugins worth their money? In my opinion: yes. These are no (solely) eye candy plugins. You can get effects with them (I'll try that out for you next) but for me I finally get the feeling that I will use these. Many plugins lose their attraction once you've seen their effects. But these add to the available tools, and make this kind of work easier and more fun. And it is difficult to get the same quality in PS without them.

Are they only for photographers? Well, no. Everyone who read my chautauqua on sharpening knows that the Unsharp Mask is very limited, and that there are other options. FocalBlade offers results that would ask much more time and a lot of tweaking in PS itself.
And the colour settings in ColorWasher are much better and offer more that ColorBalance, ChannelMixer and Hue/Sat in PS, even more than using curves on the separate channels.

For people who start with photoshop, they are a must have, most certainly when they want to use PS for photography. I know: one day they will have to learn curves (up to working with numbers), adjustment layers and many more commands, but if it is for correcting photographs they won't have to wait for six months of intensive use (or even more) to be able to start doing what they spent so much money on.
For people who do know how to work with PS to correct files (it does always stay a personal imterpretation as it is in the end an aesthetic experience, not a scientific one), it is, as said, an enormous time saver, and a pleasure to have so many tools available in one interface, many who surpass PS's own.

No doubt: these are my favourite plugins. I know that I will have to learn a lot as too much tweaking is tempting, but I can learn a lot from this duo. And that alone makes them worth their money.

Final verdict: Highly recommended.

(I will go on on some special effects)

Bacardi

This is very personal work. A professional photographer made this 4x5inch slide of my drawing Eurydike. I tried to get the colurs as exact as possible by scanning with Silverfast and adjusting everything in the scannersoft as this allowed for the necessary tweaking. I then saved as LAB 48 bit to be able to make further corrections in PS. I never got what I wanted.

This was scanned with all settings in the scanner soft set to off, RGB, 8bit.
Instead of hours of tweaking and frustration, I ran Colorwasher and sampled the white from the paper. Adjusting a few settings (mostly mild instead of normal, no more than that) I got the best result I ever got.

You cannot verify this as I have the original. But believe me: it is *very* close!

John1

Erik, I've tried to correct several of your images and not one of them could be corrected with just one click using the default PS tools. Colorwasher is indeed a real timesaver! [righton]

FocalBlade is a very good tool, has a lot of options, but luckily it also has a novice setting. You mentioned FocalBlade a few times in this thread, but I assume that you go into more detail later on?

I always used highpass sharpening, but I wanted something quicker and now I'm very happy with FocusMagic, which does better sharpening than highpass in my opinion.

I'm looking forward to hear what your experiences are with FocalBlade and then above all the advanced options.
I've always been interested in that plugin.

Thanks for all the hard work and beautiful drawing btw!

Bacardi

It is a bit frustrating that everytime I open CW I already see such a good result. I want to do more myself!
Anyways: here is a pic of rocs at Ploumanac'h. The first one is the original scan (from a photograph, the negatives will follow later) and the default correction CW offers. The second one is a manipulation using LAB setting, heat map and glow in CW and then playing with the sliders of FB. This is only one of the options: I wanted to save every tweak.