Black Diamond Productions

The Fractalius plugin creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lightings and high realistic pencil sketches.

This is definitely one of the more fun plugins for photoshop – and I even paid for it because the results can be so cool and fun to play with… Sometimes a plugin should just really mess with pixels and this one does just that.

No details of what has changed yet – but there seems to have been a few fixes lately:

Version 2.12, July 2009

• No Changes listed yet

Version 2.11, 4th July 2009

• The export was being disabled unnecessarily when the watermark height field was empty, even though watermark resizing option was not turned on.

Version 2.00, 2th July 2009

• New JPEG compression option will compress JPEGs to the highest quality that’ll be smaller than the requested file size.
• Text annotations can now include accented characters and other such things.
• Unnecessary punctuation resulting from empty tokens in a text annotation is now removed.
• Text can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so that it’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Watermarks can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so they’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Estoteric errors that resulted from leaving width and height fields blank are now trapped.

For those that use lightroom here are the details of this great export plugin – actually something worth donating money to the author for:

LR2/Mogrify is a Lightroom 2 post-process plug-in that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It’s flexible interface allows you to add borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images.

It’s also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

LR2/Mogrify uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

In contrast to the original LR/Mogrify for Lightroom 1.3 and above, LR2/Mogrify is implemented as a "post-process" plug-in (new to Lightroom 2.0), allowing it to work in tandem with any export plug-in. This allows you to process your images using LR2/Mogrify and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plug-in of your choice.

LR/Mogrify and LR2/Mogrify are donationware plug-ins and are distributed via the Photograper’s Toolbox. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards one of the projects removes this restriction and will give you a serial number that works with both.

You may also be interested in my LR/Enfuse plug-in to blend multiple exposures together.

I have not been a major user of Presets for Lightroom and i have to say that was a point of contention with me and Lightroom. I have a pretty decent amount of experience with Photoshop and both actions and plug-in applications yet I never investigated the world of presets for lightroom.

That all said I was given an opportunity to test the latest set of soon to be released presets from www.CameraDojo.com – The latest set is for B&W work and really produces some great results. Here are a couple examples:

Now you say – Wait a minute that’s a color photo – Well here is where presets become very interesting… Much like those plug-in’s and actions in Photoshop, presets can be combined or stacked to deliver literally 1000’s of combinations and the beauty of Lightroom is the History palette actually lets you understand what you have done and allows for immediate undo’s if you mess up your masterpiece.

I have also (because of the kindness of Kerry Garrison of CameraDojo.com) been provided their other set of presets to test out. You should see more shots and testing and impressions posted about those in the next few weeks.

Highly recommended for those that want to more easily experiment in B&W work in Adobe Lightroom.

Please feel free to post up or email me with any questions.