Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
■ PhotoKit (Pixel Genius): A photographer’s plug-in toolkit comprising 141 effects that offer
accurate digital replications of analog photographic effects. PC or Mac.
■ buZZ (Fo2PiX): Image-editor plug-ins for adding painterly filter effects to images. Can
be stacked to combine effects. PC or Mac. “It’s seldom that I fall so totally in love with a
plug-in filter as I have with buZZ filters,” says digital artist SkyDancer (www.skydancers.com),
who is also an independent buZZ dealer. “The ability to remove unwanted
and distracting detail from an image without distortion, loss of focus, color, or edges is
wondrous in itself. To be able to then save all of my individual settings and filter stacks as
a recallable parameter file is frosting on the cake. This filter can turn even a so-so photograph
into a work of art.”
■ Photo/Graphic Edges (Auto FX Software): Version 6.0 includes a suite of 14 artistic effects
for photographs, including the flagship “10,000 edges” (that’s right; 10,000!). Plug-in for
Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and CorelDRAW, or stand-alone application.
PC or Mac.
■ Filters Unlimited (I.C.NET): 350 filter effects combined into one single Photoshopcompatible
plug-in. Combines with Photoshop Actions to create almost unlimited effects.
Says photographer Keith Krebs (www.p-o-v-image.com), “Filters Unlimited is ‘raw cocoa’
for the hearts of filter-addict ‘chocoholics.’ Not only does it allow me to organize and archive
all the FilterFactory based filters that would otherwise make for an unwieldy menu in
Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but it comes with a bunch of truly useful filters of its own.
And Filters Unlimited provides an interface that allows you to interactively edit pre-existing
plug-ins and create new ones, seeing the results of edits in the live preview window.”
Sizing with Image-Editing
So what do you do with all that great image-editing software? With digital technology, images
can be tweaked and improved to an infinite degree. Almost anything you can imagine, you
can do with digital image editing. This is not a guide to image-editing (there are plenty of
good ones available), and I will illustrate the key steps in creating, processing, and printing an
Figure 3.18 Elliott Landy’s famous
Nashville Skyline album cover photo of
Bob Dylan (1968). Before Digital ROC
corrections (left) and after (right).
©Elliott Landy
Landyvision.com