Winsor Crosby wrote:
>......... All the Fred Miranda stuff is essentially recipes for making
>settings in Photoshop,
>
Certainly true, as all are PS plug-ins and actions.
>most of which are pretty simple.
>
Some are pretty simple, and some are pretty sophisticated, at least to
me. Even if I worked out how to do some of what he has put in a couple
of his PUs that I like, it would take me a long time and the interface
probably wouldn't be as good. I find his pricing pretty fair generally,
with the simple things priced low and the more complex ones pricier, but
still reasonable.
>It is pretty well establish now that Genuine Fractals does not work any
>better than bicubic interpolation in Photoshop. Claims and performance
>are two different things.
>
A couple of my favorite FM plug-ins are Stair Interpolation and Web
Presenter. In my limited tests, SI did a better job than straight,
single step, bicubic interpolation. I've never used GF, but FM's
examples sure look like his SI is better. I'm not sure if that "should"
be the case, but seeing is believing. Sure, he is just using BCI in
multiple little steps, but it is so quick and easy to use, and he has
worked out what kind of steps to use. Worth $20 to me.
And WP Pro works the same thing in the other direction, with the
addition of sharpening options. WP works better than the PS 'Save for
Web' process AND doesn't lose the EXIF data in the process. I use WP all
the time in my own actions that reduce and save images for the web. At
$20, it has paid for itself many times over.
The one that has really underwhelmed me so far is IntelliSharpen II. It
has a lot more controls than the earlier IS, but only works on single
level, 8 bit images. I use IS I with the Opacity Tweak a great deal.
With the sharpened layer on top, one may easily adjust the opacity
slider to find that special point where fuzziness diminishes, but things
don't start getting weird.
IF anybody 'gets' IS II, I would like to be illuminated.
Some of his stuff a little off, but the examples make that pretty clear.
Digital Soft Focus, for example, looks too powerful even at its lower
setting, but I seldom want to soften anyway. I suppose one could soften
a duplicate layer, then adjust the opacity to get a more subtle effect.
Some of his stuff is no longer useful where later versions of PS include
the same feature, Warm-Cool, for example.
As a matter of personal taste, Velvia is in the same category for me as
Velveeta, outside the range of the acceptable, so I have no idea about
that sort of FM.
I wonder if Fred got in this business because of his inititals. In
networks, at least a few years ago, FM stood for a certain type of magic
when doing something unrelated, something counterintuitive or sometimes
nothing at all but puzzle and wonder somehow resolved an intractable,
mysterious and/or just plain ununderstandable or apparently impossible
network problem.
Moose
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|