Fritschluft, Phillip Spoeth of Dragonfly fame's new company, has introduced their first commercial plugin venture - the flAIR plugin suite.  We'll be using the Glow plugin to turn a so-so photo into a piece of coloured line art!  You can get flAIR at http://www.frischluft.com/

We'll start with this photo - a badly exposed, badly scanned, but nonetheless important photo of two young girls at their Winter Ball.

 

Brittanie and Tiffany at the Winter Ball

Open your image in your image editor.  If you don't have a suitable image to try ( and this technique works best on dark photos with strong colours) then use the above photo.  Just right click on it, save it to your hard drive and proceed from there!

flAIR Glow plugin user interface

From your Plugins menu, load the flAIR Glow plugin.  You'll see a user interface like this one, as well as a large Preview Pane where your effects will be updated as you apply them.  If this is the first time you've used Glow, you'll need to open the .config file in order to use or save any presets (and there's a preset in the config file you'll need for this!)  So click on Open, navigate to the Frischluft folder, look inside the  configs folder for the Glow.cfg file and click okay.  (If you are familiar with the Sinedots II plugin, the config files work exactly the same way.)

Now you should be able to click on the arrow in the drop down dialog for presents, to the right of the "save" button.  Any presets you have loaded in the Glow .cfg file are now available to you.  Scroll to a preset named sb_GlowLineArt.

If this preset is not available, you can duplicate the settings you see on the interface to the left, to achieve these results.

You may find you need to finetune your settings.  The "low," "high," "soften," and "climax" settings can all affect the look of this effect.  Try to maintain the significant facial details while removing most of the colour. Click Okay when you like the effect you see in the Preview Pane.

 

 If you like the effect, but would like to see the lines appear more prominently, apply a sharpening effect once or twice. (In Paint Shop Pro 7.04, go to Effects/Sharpen/Sharpen More.  I applied it twice in this image.)  However, this may produce some specks and bits you'd like to get rid of.  If this happens, pick up your paint brush Paint Brush tool, set your foreground colour to white and just paint them out, isn't that simple?

Britt and Tiffany Glowing at the Ball

More flAIR projects

 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please join us at LVS Online for the best in online education.  Filter Frenzy classes focus on Photoshop-compatible plugins.  Xara X is taught by Ron Lacey and myself, and the rest of the 45+ classes are terrific, as well.  We add new classes every session, so if we don't yet offer a class in something you want, keep watching, or better yet, email a suggestion to questions@lvsonline.com! 

Email Sally @ sbeacham@dizteq.com

© Sally Beacham and Dizteq.com 1999-2002