onOne Plug-in Suite 5
One of the frustrations of moving to 64-bit operation has been the lack of
drivers and loss of certain pieces of well-loved software. Until now this
has been true of the onOne Plug-in suite. The greatest change in this
upgrade, therefore, is the ability of the suite to operate in 64-bit mode
meaning that users of this bit depth for their Photoshop application can now
perform all the operations without having to temporarily migrate back to
32-bit. From within the suite, our favourites are Genuine Fractals, MaskPro,
PhotoTune and PhotoFrame, in that order. Generally we have found little to
excite us in FocalPoint and PhotoTools is an acquired taste. However, we
recognise that a great many photographers swear by them. Such is the pricing
policy that as soon as you need more than a couple of the applications you
might as well buy the entire suite.
The installed plug-ins are made available via Window>Extensions>onOne, which
brings up a new dialogue box with subsets of the available effects and
utilities. With an image open you can use the list in the palette to select
your effect or an action of your choosing. We sometimes found the response
to be slow (unusual for a 64-bit operation) to the extent that we thought
the systems was hanging. This is currently being de-bugged by onOne.
Genuine Fractals 6.0
This has changed only a little over the years and remains a favourite of
both photographers and (in particular) stock photo libraries. We reviewed
the previous version in Aug–Sept 2008. The 64-bit version was quick and
opened in about 2 seconds. It linear doubled a 60MB file to 240MB in 7.3
seconds and it took the same starting file up to almost 1GB in just 24
seconds. Examining the system showed that all eight processors were being
used, along with 7GB of RAM, ie the new version is truly multithreaded and
using the capabilities of 64-bit operation.
Genuine Fractals also has the ability to extend an image for canvas wrapping
with a number of options for adding the additional image area. The software
also allows scaling and cropping as a simultaneous operation (to all the
regular 'photographic' defaults such as 10x8 inch and 16x20 inch).
Photo Tools 2.5
This software allows both simple and complex image effects to be applied to
your photographs. There are over 300 effects available, 20 of which are
brand new and one of the problems confronting the first-time user is the
sheer scale of opportunity. The slick interface helps in that you can
ratchet through the options quite quickly, and create stacks and pre-sets of
your favourites. Applying effects took between 2 and 14 seconds. Starting
the plug-in sometimes required a couple of attempts and this bug is also
being worked on.
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