Virtual Photographer

Photoshop can be at times be intimidating, the learning curve can be steep and yet within this powerful program there is so much that can be achieved.

Are you a photographer looking to create different effects without spending hours wondering how to change a photograph from colour to Black & White, or create that old sepia tone look? Want to change an already great image into something weird by changing the colour ingredients so it looks fantastically creepy.

There is a free Photoshop plug-in that does all this for you and more! Once you have used the already available presets then you can go on to create your own.

Vitual Photographer is compatible with Photoshop®, Photoshop® Elements, Paint Shop™ Pro®, Photo-Paint and other popular imaging applications.

I use it and love it and so apparently do the guys who created and made this free plug-in available. The statement from the guys at Optikverve Labs say’s it all; our mission is simple – to foster creativity in digital photography through passion. We also believe in sharing one's discoveries with others.

We love photography. So much so that we decided to combine it with our second love – programming – to create the types of digital photography tools that we ourselves would want to play with. We want to help photographers concentrate on taking pictures instead of worrying a whole lot about RGB, Alpha-channels, Gaussian blurs, layers, or software licenses. We offer simple tools that speak in the language of the photographer. Easy-to-use tools. Mostly needing just one click. To read more and download this plug-in click here

Some examples of the creativity that can be very easliy achieved Images © Amelie Jacob

Original Image

Diffused Colour

B & W Diffused

The original image was taken by my niece Amelie Jacob on a Minolta Dimage Xt Digital Camera.

As Colin Jones relates; it all started with an idea. Wouldn't it be great to make a Photoshop plug-in? And so it began.

Cool Dude Kelly

Cool Blue Dude Kelly

After some brainstorming with my friend Peter, we decided it would be cool to create a plug-in that allowed photographers coming from the world of film to be able to recreate the look of film using a digital camera. So work was started on a plug-in to create the look of film from a digital original. Noise algorithms were found along with algorithms for blend modes and gaussian blur. Now the fun was about to start. "What do we want this plug-in to do?" Let's start with film grain was the initial response. So after a few attempts to get the best film grain, Peter said, "We need more features!", so we came up with emulsion types. Using a combination of the grain and blend modes we came up with some pretty cool looking film grain that mimicked print film and slide film. "We need more features!" "Different films have different looks, let's make warm and cool versions and add more grain as if it was a faster film." So I spent a little time in Photoshop and came up with some numbers and gave them to Peter to add to the code. We now had some cool looking film effects. This is what we wanted from the start. Suddenly digital images didn't look so digital. We decided that we were going to make this plug-in available to everybody for free.

Abbaye de Fontfroide. Les Corbières, France.

Having fun and being creative is what it's all about right? Here are some more examples and the possiblities are endless