Photograph Phriday – Tutorial for Spectacular Photos
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
It’s Photography Phriday again, and I’ve got a fun, but little known resource for you! I’m sure you’ve seen some fabulous layouts in the digital scrapbooking galleries, with beautiful black & white or sepia photos. Ever wonder how they do it? Well, today’s photography resource is a plug in for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro that will help you instantly transform your photos to give them a professionally finished look.
Virtual Photographer by Optik Verve Labs is an amazing tool that will help you apply “professional photographic styles” to your photos. It’s simple to use and install and are you ready for the best part??? It’s FREE!! First, I’ll show you a few things you can do with it, and then I’ll show you were to get it. If you want to get the plug in first to play along, just scroll down to the end of this post for the link.
The first thing you’ll need to do is to make a copy of your original photo so that we don’t make any permanent changes to it. I just duplicate the layer in the original file and play with it here. I’ll drag it into its own file once I have something I think I want to save. I’m using PSE 5.0 for my examples, but you can use PS, PSE, or PSP with this plug in.
Now, we can open Virtual Photographer and PLAY!! In PSE, go to your filters menu, and at the bottom, choose “OptikVerve Labs” and then Virtual Photographer.
The plug in should open up as a pop up box.
Look for the “Presets” drop down box and select any style you want. You can see the effects instantly in the plug in preview box. Click the “Process” button and watch the magic happen! It takes about 15 seconds.
It’s really just that simple – it’s a really fun tool to play with.
Here are some examples using different presets.
Here’s an example of another photo. This time I duplicated the original layer and applied the Reminiscing preset to it. I then changed the blending mode on the new layer to overlay – I think it gives it a very fun look!
You can find Virtual Photographer free, here: http://www.optikvervelabs.com/default.asp (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page and get the additional settings too! To install, you need to unzip the file, and follow installation instructions here: http://www.optikvervelabs.com/vph/help.html#Installing%20and%20Starting%20virtual
** For PSE users (5.0 & higher), here is the path to place the file folder: C:/Program Files/ Adobe/Photoshop Elements 5.0/Plug-ins
Once the file is installed, you can open your software and play!
