Short Report: B+W Filters To GoThe renowned optical filter maker debuts a digital offering of photoshop plug-ins |
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| By Zachary Singer | |||
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seems only natural that legendary optical manufacturer B+W would use
its expertise to develop a set of software filters. Some of the filters
stand in for glass filters you’d use over your camera lens, but many of
the plug-ins go beyond that to provide effects that can be challenging
to produce, even with image-editing software. This arrangement works well, and I found the filters fast, easy to use and effective. The Enhance Colors filter, for example, boosted color-laden areas of my images while leaving more neutral shades  alone. Without
much ado, I got natural-looking, but colorful photos that otherwise
would have taken much longer to enhance and required adjustments with
multiple Photoshop tools.The Outdoor Set is as simple to use as the Portrait & Family Set, and offers two virtual graduated filters (one blue and one neutral-density), a polarizer and other filters. The graduated filters and the polarizer do a good job simulating the glass filters for which they’re named. The graduated blue filter nicely cleaned up an informal portrait that had a dull gray background, quickly adding sparkle to the picture. The polarizer functions just as efficiently, and while it’s not quite a replacement for the real thing, it works when a real polarizer wouldn’t—that is, whenever the sun is far from 90 degrees off your line of sight. The filters in both sets are compatible with Photoshop and many other image-editing programs, and work with 8-bit images—JPEGs and most TIFFs. List Price: $65 per set. Contact: Schneider Optics, (631) 761-5000, www.schneideroptics.com.
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