Okay, now that you have Virtual Photographer installed, we are going to do some fun stuff with it.
I’ll just continue on with the same photo. You have already done the defog and screen, and flattened the layers, so now you just have one layer.
Duplicate the layer again, and when you are on the top layer, open up Virtual Photographer.
Filters -> Optikverve Labs (should be at the bottom) -> Virtual Photographer
It will now bring up a window box with a preview of your photo. Look where it says Presets, and it should say default. Open that up and see all the choices of what you can do. Play with them! Every one of them will make a change to that photo and it will show up in the preview. Remember that if it is too much of a change, but you still like the effect, you can change the opacity of this layer so it won’t be quite as severe.
For my picture I chose Landscape, since I wanted to bring out the greens of the grass and trees. I adjusted the opacity to what I wanted and then Flattened the layers.
Next, I cropped my picture using the rule of thirds. This is an important rule that most photographers use, so catch that link and check it out. Another thing I did when I cropped my picture was to make it straight. In the original I could see the pole behind Kai wasn’t exactly vertical. When you make your crop in Photoshop, before you click on the check mark, go to the corner of the cropped area and move the cursor until you see a rounded arrow. This will allow you to move the box up or down.
Lastly I did one more sharpen.
Filter -> Unsharpen Mask -> Enter 80,1,4
Finished!
Original
Finished Picture
Now this may seem like a lot of steps, but the more you play in Photoshop, the faster you will get. It really didn’t take me long at all to this…maybe 5 minutes. Most of that time was spent in VP figuring out which effect I liked for my photo.
Here’s a few more photos that I used the VP effects:
This one, I’m pretty sure I used Photocopy and it was taken with my crappy P&S camera. So…you can make good images with a non-DSLR camera.
This one I think I did either Ambiance or Glamour.
So just have fun playing with it! Remember to do in the layers so you can adjust the effects.
oh this is quite hard. i downloaded both but when i unzipped them i cannot find them in photoshop. also, when i try to reopen my photo from the last tutorial i can’t even access the filters. they aren’t clickable.
if you don’t have time for all my questions please ignore. i will continue to poke around. maybe i’ll discover something accidentally.
When you unzip the files, you need to place the folder in the following drive path:
C: program file/ adobe/ photoshop elements/ plugins
Now if you have Photoshop open when you are doing this, you need to close it since they won’t appear until you restart the program.
With your second comment, about not being able to access the filters, you can’t run them on a background image. You need to run them on a duplicate image to get them to work.