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We spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to
acquire the sharpest lenses possible.
But photographic tradition holds that "romantic"
effects are best made with lenses that are less than sharp. Old
timer "romantic" soft-focus tricks include nylon stockings
stretched across the lens or a crumpled cellophane wiggled under
an enlarger during exposure.
Cokin and other manufacturers have sold
specialty filters for years: fog, star, haze, etc. Filters to
decrease the sharpness of your lens.
Andromeda has introduced a plug-in that will
accomplish many of the same effects in Photoshop. Called
ScatterLight Lenses™, the plug-in consists of five effects that
add a number of soft-focus, haze, diffusion and star effects to
images.
Portrait photographers will like the SoftFocus
lens which approximates the results from an expensive specialty
optic. I ran a medium halo optic on this portrait of a girl and
her kitties on a separate layer, then used a soft eraser brush
to bring out the detail in her eyes and those of the cats. In
the darkroom, this would've been done with crumpled cellophane
with a hole burned in it.
DreamOptic lenses added a soft glow to this
still life of flowers. In a future column, I'll detail a
technique for the same effect using only Photoshop 7 tools.
The StarLight lens works on highlight selections
and is ideal for adding the star effects to night photos or
special effects, such as the colored stars I've added to the
bouquet.
One criticism I have of ScatterLight, it is
extremely slow to show the effect in the preview window of the
dialog box. Each time a setting is altered, the preview starts
again from the top and plods its agonizing way to the bottom.
Image processing is relatively quick once an effect has been
selected.
ScatterLight lenses are available from
www.andromeda.com for
$98.00. |