OnOne Perfect Effects 3 — First User Experiences

Posted by bpham on Nov 5, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments

Got the OnOne Perfect Effects 3 Photoshop Demo downloaded last night.  Could not wait to try it out.  I did try out the previous version and was not too impressed and therefore did not use it, however this one makes it very easy to add spices to your pictures, ones that you think might need something to look more interesting.

Some notes about this new plug-in:

• It took a while to install this plug-in compared to other plug-ins that I’ve tried before.  Apparently it had to copy many files and sometimes it seems like it was stuck somewhere and made me want to kill the process, but I did not and eventually it completed.   My computer is a dual-core Intel 3.4 GHtz, with 8Gbytes RAM, so it is no slouched and I’m running Windows 7.  I’ve never seen any plug-in that took that long to install.
• If the picture that you want to open with PE3 has many layers, it also takes a while to bring it into its interface from CS5.  Once the picture is loaded, after playing around with different profiles/templates, I tried to save it, it just hung.  I thought that it was doing its magic, however, I was wrong.  After 15 minutes, I decided to cancel it.  The morale of this is that PE3 does not like layers.  To fix this issue, I basically merged all layers into one, and then open PE3, which works like a charm and the speed is pretty good.  The save button now works great.
• If you try to bring in your already modified picture in TIFF format with layers, the PE3 stand-alone won’t take that and it lets you know that.  So best bet is to do what I told you above, in CS5.

Once these quirks are straighten out, this tool is pretty slick and versatile.  The results that I obtained below basically only took me 5-10 minutes to do on each.  However, make sure that you already have the tonal adjustments already done on your pictures first before bringing it into PE3, and OnOne also recommends that.

Now,  your tastes might vary with the results that I have below for these pictures, but they are just to show you what I was able to come up with in 5-10 minutes.  The good thing is that it will let you change the intensity of the effects to your taste.  Let me know if you have any feedback or questions.  Thanks.

I added the rain to the final picture in a separate layer with 50% grey fill,

so I can control it as I want how much of the effects in the final result.

I used 2 different preset layers, for the one below.