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Auto FX Mystical Tint Tone and Color
Review by Jennifer Apple
(Get special pricing, bundles, and free demos at the AutoFX site.)
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Mystical Tint Tone and Color, like its Lighting counterpart, can be used as a stand-alone application or as a plug-in that is fully integrative with Photoshop. It offers 38 color effects that are easily applied to your entire image or brushed onto selective areas. Mystical Tint Tone and Color provides heightened efficiency by combining multiple editing steps into a simple, dynamic interface with unlimited undo and redo capability, layers, visual presets, and tools.
User-friendly Interface Helps You Achieve Precise Results
With its easy to use interface and vast array of effects, Mystical Tint Tone and Color is an incredibly powerful addition to your cache of graphic design resources. The interface offers a large preview window, with the option to view your image in its original state after effects have been applied.
Enhancements like sharpness, detail corrections and color adjustments are just a few of the many options available that will improve the quality of your digital images. With side-by-side comparison of your original and altered images, it is easy to undo, redo or ever so slightly adjust the effects to achieve precise results.
Unique SmartLayers Technology
Even more unique is Mystical Tint Tone and Color's unique SmartLayers technology – any number of enhancements can be combined through interactive layers that share image data with each other and adjust automatically to the new values you have changed. This feature, combined with the straightforward interface, makes Mystical Tint Tone and Color a smart investment over similar programs currently in the graphic design market.
Integrated Support For Photoshop
Mystical features complete support for Adobe Photoshop versions 4.0 and higher (including Photoshop CS) and from within Photoshop Elements 1.0 or higher. Mystical includes integrated support for layers and transparency features, Photoshop Actions, Last Filter Command, Fade Filter Command, works as a Photoshop filter, saves and loads Photoshop .psd files and is easy to access and use as a filter from within Photoshop.
Mystical even saves to the Photoshop .psd file format with layers intact. As you are working on your designs inside the Mystical plug-in or application version you can save out copies of your work as Photoshop .psd native files.
Mystical Tint Tone And Color Includes 38 Effects
Each image contains millions of colors, shades and tones, making it absolutely unique. AutoFX has built Tint Tone and Color with a robust set of filters to explore and enhance images and to provide you with creative options to improve your photos with ease. Here's a quick summary of the 38 effects.
Antique Photo - Provides a rich aged sepia appearance similar to traditional darkroom techniques.
- Hand Tint - Hand Tint simulates the traditional technique of hand painting photos.
- Soft Saturation
Soft Saturation smoothly adds to the image's color saturation. - Black and White - Converts images to a rich black and white with deep tones using separate color conversion filters.
- Hard Posterize - Hard Posterize can give your images a stark, bold appearance.
- Soften Details - Soften Details uses the image's tonal values to soften the details.
- Blue Sky - Gives images a radiant blue sky with gradient darks and fading light.
- Harden Details
Harden Details enhances images that lack sharp detail and depth. - Tonal Contrast - Tonal Contrast gives images a darker, low light appearance.
- Color Bleach - Color Bleach flattens out brighter and darker colors by adding extended highlights.
- HSB Adjust - HSB Adjust changes the hue, saturation or brightness of the image.
- Tonal Detail - Tonal Detail can add dark lustrous values to an image’s tonal range.
- Color Contrast - Color contrast can bring out beautiful tonal contrast through the existing colors found in your images.
- Image Brush - Image Brush is used to reveal the original image through other effects.
- Tonal Sharpen - Tonal Sharpen allows you to brush on razor sharp details.
- Color Mixer - Color Mixer lets you blend the different colors in an image to create some very interesting looks.
- Levels - Adjust the tonal values using highlight, midtone and shadow histograms.
- Tonal Smooth
Tonal Smooth reduces the tonal values in an image to remove shading. - Cool - Cool can literally cool down the colors in your image to give you a more balanced set of color tones.
- Multiply Darks - Multiply Darks compounds the tonal values in images for richer depth.
- Tonal Soften - Tonal Soften can be used to add diffusion type of effects to photos.
- Dark Contrast
Dark Contrast gives your images a deeper, richer contrast that affects the darker areas of the photo. - Over Exposed - Simulates the effect seen when you over expose a photo using bright light.
Under Color - Under Color paints colors under the darker values in your image.
- Darken Color - Darken Colors produces a result that gives you darker, richer colors with deep tonal detail.
- Restore Details - Lightens and extracts details from darker areas of images.
- Under Exposed - Under Exposed simulates photos taken in low light conditions.
- Deepen Tones - Deepen Tones extends and balances the midtones, highlights and dark areas of an image.
- RGB Adjust - RGB Adjust allows you to adjust the overall color balance in your image.
- Vitality - Vitality gives your images new life with increased color vibrancy.
- Enriched Black - Enriched Black takes the black component of your images and makes it darker giving you deeper black.
- Saturate Colors - Saturate Colors blends vibrant bold colors onto your image.
- Warm - Warm introduces a warm color contrast onto images.
- Gradient Tinting - Using Gradient Tinting you can add delicate color changes to your images.
- Sepia - Sepia simulates the traditional photographic darkroom sepia look.
- Washed Out - Washed Out can blow out detail and wash out the color in images.
- Green Foliage - Green Foliage is great for enriching and boosting the green color tones in an image.
- Soft Posterize - This effect adjusts color values to form a smooth, simple palette of colors.
Summary
While Mystical Lighting (see review) and Mystical Tint Tone and Color are remarkable stand-alone programs, the set of Lighting filters works wonderfully in conjunction with the Tint Tone and Color effects. A major shortcoming of the Auto FX experience is that it fails to offer the option of installing all of its programs into a single interface, an alternative that would expand even further the already vast array of creative possibilities it provides. With that said, this is a fabulous plugin set that will give you an endless amount of stunning visual effects.
(Get special pricing, bundles, and free demos at the AutoFX site.)
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SiteGrinder 2 - Photoshop Plugin
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
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Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
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An inspirational and user-friendly guide to creative image editing, Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills provides direction for photographers and designers alike who have ventured into the realm of the 'digital darkroom.' The book offers a progressive curriculum to guide you through Photoshop with a series of clear, step-by-step projects designed to place knowledge into a practical context.
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For a free sample chapter see our How To Sharpen An Image In Photoshop tutorial.
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