REVIEW: Vertus Fluid Mask 3 and Imagenomic’s Noiseware, Portraiture and RealGrain (Page 2)

Noiseware Professional: Excellent noise reduction technology

Noiseware, like all Imagenomic plug-ins, has a split-pane preview mode that is versatile and helpful. Click the image for a larger view.

Ironically, photography guru John Paul Caponigro recently said on Dave Cross’ blog that Noiseware is the Photoshop plug-in he uses the most. That is high praise, and I think it’s deserved. Noiseware Professional, now up to version 4, is a robust plug-in for suppressing image noise. It’s very specialized: every slider is set to reduce either luminance noise, color noise or both, which is very important. There are also panels that allow for detail protection and enhancement (these work very well) and noise reduction based on frequency, tonal range or color range. It almost seems like overkill to be able to reduce noise with so many methods, but that is the hallmark of a very robust application.

Noiseware also trumps Photoshop’s filters when it comes to previewing. All three Imagenomic plug-ins can increase or decrease the preview magnification, but you can also create multiple previews, tile previews, and use different settings on each preview to compare. The plug-in can even create bracketed previews and apply similar settings, like a camera brackets shots to capture different exposure settings. Noiseware also can profile an image (or a selection of an image) and chart the noise based on frequency and color channel. This may not sound necessary to your work, but if you shoot with a digital camera the plug-in can actually use its “self-learning” feature to analyze the noise in your images and create a profile to be analyzed for future images coming from the same camera. This feature requires EXIF metadata to tag your images with the camera information.

Noiseware runs very well, though it will take more time with large images and doesn’t work at all with RGB images (none of the three Imagenomic plug-ins covered here work with CMYK images). However, digital photographers will definitely want Noiseware to fine-tune the noise in their images. I can see why John Paul uses it so much!

Rating: 10/10

Portraiture: Portrait effects made easy

Normally, I find that third-party plug-ins feel “cheap”—their interfaces usually relatively weak and as a whole they don’t mesh with Photoshop. Imagenomic’s plug-ins also suffer a little from this, but they work anyway because the usability is so solid. Portraiture, a plug-in that creates photographic effects for portraits, has a masking module that is a good example: you can tweak masks with hue, saturation, luminance or latitude sliders but there’s also a Skin Tone Range monitor where you can drag to pick the values and colors to mask. Portraiture also offers auto-masking, which is another example of offering more than one way to achieve results.

Portraiture’s strength is in easily making some popular portrait adjustments, such as enhancing tones or making glamour shots. Click the image for a larger view.

Portraiture can enhance a picture’s sharpness, softness, warmth, brightness and contrast, and also add detail smoothing to preserve skin and hair details while smoothing other parts of the image. There aren’t a whole lot of presets like there are with the other plug-ins, but Portraiture doesn’t have a huge array of image adjustments so this makes sense. As with Fluid Mask 3, Portraiture offers some important tools to a specific segment of the Photoshop market—portrait photographers—and Photoshop can already do some of Portraiture’s moves such as brightness/contrast and softness/sharpness. Portraiture is worth a look if you’re a portrait photographer and its specific features are worth the money.

Rating: 8/10

RealGrain: Shoot with “film” again!

If you used to shoot with film, then you remember the subtle handling of values, colors and textures that your favorite color or black-and-white film provided your photographs. Digital photography has created a whole new look for photography and some young photographers don’t even know what film photography looked like, but the RealGrain plug-in can recreate a vast array of film effects and also a variety of effects for grain, split toning and special effects such as infrared, old photo tricks and digital noise additions (I’m not sure why you would use the last one).

If you miss the look of film photography, you’ll enjoy RealGrain. Click the image for a larger view.

RealGrain is quite robust, more so than Portraiture. The settings allow for changes in grain, tone, color, black/white conversions and tint/toning. This is on top of the numerous presets mentioned above, which alone can recreate several films:

• Fujicolor and Fujichrome films including Provia and Velvla
• Kodak, Ektachrome and Kodachrome films
• Fujifilm Neopan
• Ilford films including Delta
• Kodak T-Max, Tri-X and other Kodak black-and-white films

I hate to admit, but I am one of those photographers I mentioned above who has never shot with (professional) film. My main exposure to film photography was in college, where others were shooting and I saw their work in the gallery. The thing about film photography is that it has an element of material to it—you can tell the image was created by chemicals and a piece of paper, not pixels and Photoshop—and RealGrain does capture some of that alchemy. I can’t say whether or not the presets recreate the exact grain for those films but the settings alone allow for great creativity and allow anyone to create impressive “film” images. It’s a great addition for Photoshop artists.

Portraiture had a relatively narrow focus on portrait photographers, but RealGrain is an asset to photographers of all kinds, especially landscape photographers who have a long history with film, and the plug-in is easy enough to use that it’s accessible to both experts and novices. This one is certainly worth the money if you have the time to play with the controls and the desire to create truly artistic images.

Rating: 9/10