Plug-in compatibility

[greenmorpher]

I notice that some Photoshop plug-ins work well in PL 32.

I have a few compatible with P'shop 4, because that is as far as compatibility goes for the image module of Canvas X. Does the same apply to PL 32? (I think it was after P'shop 4 that Adobe suddenly woke up to the fact that they could make plug-in technology nasty and exclusive.) I tried a couple of other plug-ins I downloaded, which aren't compatible with Canvas and they weren't compatible with PL 32 either.

Incidentally, most of my plug-ins are image correction applications with automatic features not available in Canvas ... but they are redundant with PhotoLine 32 now on board because it provides the same or similar features built in.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Gerhard Huber]

Plugins are a world of it's own.
We tried in the past to make as much as possible plugins avialable.
PL32 supports many newer plugins then version 4, but not all.
If you have special plugins that won't work, tell me about, we will see where the problem is.

Gerhard

[greenmorpher]

Hello Gerhard

I didn’t reply immediately to this because I was checking the (fairly small) plug-in library I have to clarify what works and what doesn't.

Here is what I found works with PhotoLine 32:

-- Alien Skin: Image Doctor - JPEG Repair, Spot Lifter, Scratch Remover, Smart fill. (The menu shows these tools in duplicate, but they all work fine.)
-- Alien Skin: Splat - a bunch of stuff, including borders, frames and texture tools.
-- Fixer Labs: Focus Fixer, Shadow Fixer, Noise Fixer, True Blur. All excellent; but for most shadow lightening jobs, a mask and or CLUT works better than Shadow Fixer. Focus Fixer picks up your camera model and draws on its lens database.
-- nik Color Efex Pro! Some of my v.1 worked and some didn't; I downloaded the v.2 demo of the "Select" collection of 45 filters and all I've tested have worked 100%. Includes a "polarizing filter". I highly recommend people on both platforms have a look at these.
-- Photowiz: Colorwasher 2.1. Probably will never be used again given PL 32's superior (to what I was accustomed to in Canvas) image controls, but nevertheless it does work.
-- PictureCode: Noise Ninja. Superb plug-in for removing noise. Converts photos to something with a water color look if you appoly too much of it, which is really good for some pictures!
-- Pictocolor: iCorrect Edit Lab Pro 4.5.3. Like ColorWasher (above) this has probably been rendered redundant by PL 32's superior image controls.
-- Flaming Pear: a whole heap of freebie filters.

. . . . .

What won't work, but I would like to see work:

-- Digi-element: Aurora 2.1 - The Natural Plug-in... Marvellous sky, water and underwater effects. They appear (duplicated) in the menu but grayed out. In Canvas X, they appear usable in the menu, but actually crash the program.
-- Andromeda: Etch and Series 3 Screens. Excellent screen effects. They don't appear in the menu at all, although Canvas X recognises and uses them.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[lutz]

Digi-element: Aurora 2.1
These plugins are unfortunately designed only for photoshop. AFAIK they use the new plugin-interface that was never made accessible for developers of other editors. Unfortunately, the same is true for CurveMeister.

In my experience photoline has the by far the best plugin suppport of any non-Adobe software.

[greenmorpher]

Digi-element: Aurora 2.1
These plugins are unfortunately designed only for photoshop. AFAIK they use the new plugin-interface that was never made accessible for developers of other editors. Unfortunately, the same is true for CurveMeister.

I note that they say "Photoshop 6". I rather thought/hoped that the new standard did not come in until 7 or CS. Oh well ...

In my experience photoline has the by far the best plugin suppport of any non-Adobe software.[/quote]

It is certainly good -- I don't have really wide experience. It is odd, though, that PL doesn't support Andromeda Etch and Series 3 Screens. As I said, they do run in Canvas X (although you have to jump through hoops to register them; their registration interface doesn't work in Canvas properly) and Canvas X is NOT known for good support of plug-ins.

So I'm hoping Gerhard and Martin can make that one work even if Aurora 2.1 is out of reach.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Gerhard Huber]

Hello,

I had a look on your plugins in the past:
Digi-element: Aurora 2.1
I didn't manage to download a demo version of this plugins. Some emails to the company were not answered

Andromeda: Etch and Series 3 Screens
I couldn't find "Series 3 Screens". Etch was downloadable, but it is not recognized by PL32 because it is an old plugin. PL32 is build for OS 10.x and is not able to load this plugin. This is not a problem of PL32 but of the operating system.

Gerhard

[greenmorpher]

Hello,

I had a look on your plugins in the past:
Digi-element: Aurora 2.1
I didn't manage to download a demo version of this plugins. Some emails to the company were not answered

They are a bit old -- I actually bought them on a CD! Wow!

Andromeda: Etch and Series 3 Screens
I couldn't find "Series 3 Screens". Etch was downloadable, but it is not recognized by PL32 because it is an old plugin. PL32 is build for OS 10.x and is not able to load this plugin. This is not a problem of PL32 but of the operating system.

Good grief, I thought it WOULD work because it was old! I bought that on a CD too. It works in Canvas, but I suspect Canvas' PSD filters haven't been upgraded for a while.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Koyaanis]

Greenmorpher was curious about some plugins that I found but am having problems getting them to work with PL32, so I thought I might post them in this thread.

One that I really liked a lot was Vivid Details "Test Strip", but their new version 3 won't work with PL32, being PS-ONLY now (earlier v2's work okay in PL32). The only reason I mention this is that a similar feature is now going to be built into PL32! (Gerhard was kind enough to show me a beta of the next PL32.) It works on the age-old principle of printing up a grid of proofs in varying hues and brightness levels to help coordinate printer-color to display-color. Like we used to do in the dark-room using CYM transparency overlays on color print paper during exposure, to see what filter-pack we'd need in the enlarger head. Between various brands of inks and photo papers, trying to get my printers to put out what I see on the monitor has always been a nightmare for me. A feature like this helps me a lot.

***Gerhard, if you are reading this, there's one thing I forgot to mention! In your new Test Strip feature, could you add in 2 options for brightness and contrast in the drop-down menu where you have the color shift options? That would be a great final-touch to an already great addition!

As for others that I like:

Phototune Skintune
http://www.phototune.com/

Gerhard's reply: "it seems that it's PS only. I will look for the exact problem when I have more time."

The reason I like this one is that there's one feature from PSP that I miss having. The "Manual Color Correction" tool. You were able to subtly shift a range of hues in an image without effecting the other colors. This plugin is only meant for skin-tones, so it is limited, but at least I could get back some of the functionality of that "Manual Color Correction" tool in PSP that I miss so much. It can be done if you're very careful when using PL32's really nice Hue/Saturation tool, but it's difficult to match colors to a known sample with that (as can be done with PSP's tool).


Vertus Fluid Mask v2.0
(seems to be PS-ONLY)

http://www.vertustech.com/

or

GML Matting & GML Growcut Mask from
http://research.graphicon.ru/component/ ... lect/id,1/

(The 2 above are because I'm looking for a good masking/cut-out tool that will work with PL32, the PL32 Auto-Eraser is nice for good contrasting areas, but I can't seem to get it quite accurate enough for very fine details.)

Gerhard's reply: "you should not use the "Auto-Erase" but the Auto Mask or Automatic Lasso."

Maybe I need to teach myself some new tricks. I just happen to like the method that some of these knockout tools use, by sampling inner and outer hues/intensities, and then finding the division for you.


Gerhard reports that the following 2 work just fine in PL32 v13.x. I'll have to see what is wrong on my system to get them working again.


Frischluft Lenscare (creates many types of very nice, highly adjustable bokeh/out-of-focus effects)
Works in PL32 v12.x but not v13.x (on my machine only)

http://www.frischluft.com/download/download.php


Twisting Pixels
Works in PL32 v12.x but not v13.x (on my machine only)

http://www.twistingpixels.com/

[Koyaanis]

I've been hunting down a decent plugin that will emulate a star-filter. There's not many out there, but one by Andromeda (http://www.andromeda.com) called "ScatterLight" does a pretty decent job.

Tonight I was trying to make some new presets for it, by using their examples. The program lacked some of the basic 6-point star-filter presets, just some funky tilted and squashed ones. The neat thing was that by using PL32's psd filetype saving, and using its preset Star geometric shape, along with some gaussian blurring, cranking out 6-pointed star masks for this plugin was a breeze. I think I'm going to build a bunch of special lens-filter masks for it now by using PL32. (Now that I see how simple it is to make them.)

All was working well until I actually tried to apply the plugin in PL32. After applying it, it shows the usual progress indicator, Then it re-opens the plugin dialog cancelling out any work it just did. Canceling it out after it opens again doesn't leave a changed image. It's caught in a loop.

This plugin works fine in all my other editors. (And my new 6-pointed star presets that I built by using PL32 work great and look great! Just like having used a star-filter on my lens.) How sad that I can build new stars-filter presets for the plugin in PL32, but I can't actually USE the plugin in PL32.

Any chance that you can see why this one doesn't work right?

Would be much appreciated.

p.s. I tried using it in PL32 v12, 13, & 14, none worked (usually one of them does when testing plugins), I also tried the usual suspect ways to get them to work, by applying to a duplicate layer, with and without transparency enabled, nope, no go. It gets stuck in the same apply plugin, re-opens plugin, loop.

p.p.s. If anyone uses this plugin and would like some extra 6-pointed star presets for it, I can zip them up for sharing. Lemme know.

[greenmorpher]

Twisting Pixels
Works in PL32 v12.x but not v13.x (on my machine only)

http://www.twistingpixels.com/

Hiya all

Twisting Pixels' freebie "Pixel Sampler" works fine with PL32 v.14 (and also with Canvas X) on Mac OS X.4.10.

Just tested it. Not sure how much use I will have for it, though. Still -- there it is. Perhaps other Twisting Pixels plug-ins will work too.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Koyaanis]

v14 seems to be running lots of plugins that I couldn't get to work in the past. I suspect its something in my PL32's config files that got screwed up long ago as I tried each new version of v13 updating in the same folder every time. This time I installed v14 in its own folder. Twisting Pixels works just fine now. As do some others I reported. (Except for the new ones I've reported that don't.)

[lutz]

With Helicon Filter as plug-in, the changes are not transferred to photoline. Everything seems to be working fine; loading, editing, returning to photoline- just not the transfer of the edits.

[Gerhard Huber]

I tested the demo version of the helicon filter right now and see no problem. I changed the contrast of my image and clicked always on "weiter" (German version) until "Speichern" was the last button. I pressed this and PL had the changed image.

Gerhard

[lutz]

Hello Gerhard,

thanks for the test. You are correct - it is working, (again ?).
I have no clue if it did influence the problem. Since I reported the problem I have upgraded to version 14.01 and have registered version 14. Glad that it is working ( I had tried it repeatedly before on two PCs).

I tested the demo version of the helicon filter right now and see no problem. I changed the contrast of my image and clicked always on "weiter" (German version) until "Speichern" was the last button. I pressed this and PL had the changed image.

Gerhard