The nice folks over at Lookfilter.com want to promote their yet to be finished collection of fresh Photoshop actions. Of the announced four actions only one is already available by now. Good for all of us, they give it away for free. Who wouldn’t appreciate a professional photography effect? And that’s exactly what you get for giving away your email address.

Photoshop Action: The Wise Watson adds Drama to your Photos

Lookfilter gave some interesting names to their collection of photographic effect filters. We have “The Wise Watson”, “The Loaded Leibovitz”, “The Awesome Avedon” and “The Early Eggleston”. People with a little knowledge in photography will probably notice that these all relate to the names of famous photographers. What Lookfilter tries to replicate with each action set is nothing less than the atmosphere that was typical for these photographers. Several different images shown for each action let you judge for yourself how well you think the goal has been met.

An impressive example taken off the Lookfilter website

It’s easy to show impressive imagery on a website. As it’s a wicked world out there, I was not sure whether the promised effects would really be achieved. So I went ahead and traded off my email address against a download of “The Wise Watson”. The installation ist simple. After having signed up for the newsletter, Lookfilter will send you an email in which you are asked to confirm the subscription. Clicking on that link will take you back to the website, where your download is initiated. You’ll notice the download of a zip-file. Unzip the contained Lookfilter.com.atn and drag and drop it into the actions window of your open Photoshop installation. Not open? Okay, then. Start Photoshop, from the top navigation choose Window, then click Actions. In the Actions window click on the down-arrow situated right under the x-symbol for closing the window on the top right corner. A dropdown opens, where you’ll want to choose “Load Actions”. Your file system opens and you navigate to the folder you unzipped the action to. Choose it, click load, that’s it.

An original photography by Albert Watson (Source: Official Website)

Now you’ll find The Wise Watson at the end of the actions list. All you have to do now, is open an image, open the actions window, highlight The Wise Watson with a single click and press the play button located in the status bar of the actions window. A lot of steps will now automatically be initiated and finally you’ll be presented with the new look of your original.

The Wise Watson is named after photographer Albert Watson who is best known for his dramatic use of colors and lighting. I’m not a professional know-it-all in contemporary photography, but in my humble opinion, Lookfilter’s action does indeed catch the atmosphere of a might-be Watson very well. Again, judge for yourself.

To give you an idea of how the action changes the look of an ordinary photo. I took one of the images of my sadly already passed by vacation and fired the Watson-effect at it. Here is what the picture looks like, before and after:

Before: My little pool villa as my camera really saw it

After: My little pool villa as Watson might have seen it

The Wise Watson is offered free of charge as long as the collection has not been officially launched. At the time of this writing that hasn’t been the case, obviously. So better be quick and download while you still can. As the other filters don’t exactly drive you into bankruptcy either – they accumulate to an affordable 19 USD – you might as well stay relaxed and wait for the day. I’m glad I took The Wise Watson while it was hot, though, and so should you…

Related Links:

• The Best Photoshop® Effects Period. – Lookfilter.com
• Portfolio-Website – Albert Watson Inc.

tiltShift.js is nothing short of a little sensation. Using the new CSS3 Image Filters, developer Noel Tock realized a tiltshift-effect for any image you’d want to apply one to. It has of course to be said, that at the time of this writing only Chrome and Safari 6 are able to visualize the effect. Furthermore the pictures have to be generally qualified for the use of tiltshift. But this proves true for all possible fake tiltshifts, as can be achieved by Photoshop and others.

tiltShift.js: Very Clever Use of CSS3 Image Filters

To be absolutely honest, Noel Tock’s jQuery-plugin is more or less a wireframe. The effects applied only work in Chrome and Safari 6 and are generally dependent on being invoked on suitable photos. These should be taken from quite a distance and a higher angle of a subject that is best to be found in the middle of the photo. Of course you could apply tiltshift.js to any other photo, but wouldn’t achieve a visible tiltshift-effect in these cases.

That said in advance, Tock’s little javascript can be steered rather finely by using several parameters. Parameters are passed through the use of the new HTML5 data-attributes. Using data-position you define the position of the image section that should stay in focus. Valid values range from 0 to 100. A value of 50 would center the focus in the middle of the image. Combine that with data-focus, also ranging from 0 to 100, to set the size of the focus. Setting a value of 10 would mean, that 10 percent of the image would stay focussed, while the rest would appear blurred.

Having set that, data-blur is there to define the radius, while data-falloff will control the size of the area between full focus and full blur. You see, there’s nothing left to chance. For invoking the effect you fire it on a div-wrapper, that should be styled via CSS to avoid unwanted behaviour designwise.

tiltShift.js is made available under the GNU GPL license. Thus it is freely usable for any legal purpose. The project has just been setup on Github and shows a glimpse of the bright future, we as web developers are moving to with accelerating velocity.

Related Links:

• CSS3 Filters: Altering HTML and Images with just CSS – inserthtml
• tiltShift.js – noeltock.com
• noeltock / tiltShift.js – Github