Virtual Photographer – One Click to Perfect Photos

Let’s take a step back and pull out some of our old photos. We can give these old things a new look, polish them up and turn them into something else you never thought of before.

 VirtualStudio

To do this you can use the plug-in virtualStudio from OptikVerve Labs , which is a full-featured photo editor that can run VirtualPhotographer and other plug-in filters. With virtualStudio you have high-quality editing software, a selection of picture frames and you can add title and copyright information. The image above is a before an after turning a color photo into a spectacular black and white image.

VirtualStudio features 30 file formats including jpg, jpeg2000, png, bmp, gif, tiff, psd and some RAW files (see link at the end if you forgot what these are). Layered effects are easily applied with ‘Blend’ mode and there is an image browser with full-screen slideshow, you can also open multiple photos.

As you would expect, you have auto expose, enhance, sharpen, equalize and white balance, shadows and highlights. The plug-in adds picture frames, copyright and titles. You can adjust brightness or contrast, gamma, hue and color and you can flip and rotate to 1/10^th of a degree, which if you’ve tried rotating to tiny degrees with other programmes then this is something to get happy about.

VirtualPhotographer

With one click virtualPhotographer 1.5.6 will instantly apply high quality, professional photographic styles to your digital images. You have 200 preset effects to choose from!

Other features include AmFull Curves functionality, histograms, selection with a feather tool and the usual red-eye removal. You can resize using Lanczos, Mitchell, Bicubic algorithms.

You can edit International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) information, so you can add to or correct any photo info and you can view (Exchangeable image file format) ExIF. You can easily print with Print Preview, connect to your scanner or camera and have enable, disable or drag toolbars. In seconds you can adjust film grain, color, B/W, soft focus, high contrast and obtain many other effects.

Effects include Polarize, infrared, gradient and Cross Process, which used to be when you deliberately used the wrong developer to process your photos. Now of course you can do all of this with one click.

The updated virtualPhotographer handles larger images and has new tabbed controls. Effects are easier to navigate and there is split-screen preview. You get a large resizable preview window and get to save your favorite filters in the effects folders.

This plug-in is only available for Windows, but Photoshop Creative Magazine cites it as being one of the best plugins around and Extreme Tech writes “virtual Photographer offers so many features and options to edit and apply effects that it can almost be considered its own standalone program.”

To finish, sometimes we deal with so many abbreviations, we know what they are but do we really know the details?

So, if you if you want to know about IPTC go here and if you want a good explanation about ExIF data then read this  !!!

Then, of course, there are RAW files, and you can remind yourself about these here

-Val Cameron/Dreamlight

PS: Want to make your photos and renders POP? Master Photoshop and become a 2D Postwork Master HERE. 

Val Cameron