One of the things I love about Perfect Effects inside of the new onOne Perfect Photo Suite 9 is the ability to stack more than one filter, blend them together, and ultimately create my very own unique combination of effects. Their new slogan says it all: Your Photo. Your Look. And it couldn’t be more true. This software gives each of use the ability to completely customize the processing from start to finish.
Because I’ve been using onOne’s products for several years, I have found myself gravitating to some of the same filters over and over. So I thought, why not share them here! This list consists of my top-ten favorite filters in onOne Software’s Perfect Effects 9:
Color Enhancer: Fall Enhancer
Whether it’s a photo of autumn leaves, a standard landscape image with some warm tones, or a completely different photograph altogether, the Fall Enhancer filter can really make the reddish-orange colors pop. The filter can be pretty intense, depending on the photograph, so I oftentimes find myself reducing the Layer Opacity slightly to balance the effect.
Color Enhancer: Green Enhancer
If you have any greens in your image, this is an excellent filter to use. Just like with the Fall Enhancer filter, the Green Enhancer can be strong. You may want to bring the Layer Opacity down slightly to make your greens look realistic, especially in a landscape photo with a LOT of greenery. For some instances, like with this photo of a bunch of carrots, you won’t need any adjusting at all.
Color Enhancer: Sky Enhancer
The Sky Enhancer filter is great for any photo with blue sky that needs a little bit of a boost. It brings out the blues in your photo, so it works on other types of images, too.
Color Enhancer: Warmer
Sometimes a photo just needs a little bit of warmth. This is a great go-to filter to add a beautiful warming effect to any photograph.
Dynamic Contrast: Natural
I oftentimes like to add some “crispness” to my images, and the Natural filter in the Dynamic Contrast folder is one of my all-time favorites. It adds crispness without making things look “crunchy”.
Lens Blur: Tilt Shift
When I want to add blur to the background of my scene, typically with landscape images, then I use the Tilt Shift filter. It adds a gradient blur that can be adjusted, and you can even mask out parts of the scene using the brand-new integrated masking tools.
Sharpening: Amazing Detail Finder
This filter really is amazing at finding and sharpening just the details in a photo. It is great for image with a blurry background, since it will only sharpen what is already in-focus, and leave the rest of the blur untouched.
Sunshine: Radiance
The Sunshine filters in general are all fun to play with. They add a light, contrasty, and sometimes warm or glowing effect. My particular favorite is the Radiance filter, which adds a nice warm brightness and subtle contrast to my images.
Tone Enhancer: Auto Contrast
Auto Contrast is a good filter to start with, and can really make a photo go from “blah” to “beautiful”.
Tone Enhancer: Tonal Contrast
Last, but definitely not least, is Tonal Contrast. This filter is a wonderful “finishing touches” effect that pulls out the details, adds a touch of sharpening, and intensifies the contrast.
The OnOne filters are great. I’m really liking the HDR Look – Subtle preset and finding it enhances many landscape photos with lots of detail.
All well and good, but since OnOne decided to not support Intel Graphics cards in v9, I can’t upgrade… the application freezes whenever you try to open a photo rendering it useless.
So, for all of us who have a less than 2-year-old Windows tablet or laptop with Intel graphics, we’re SOL and stuck with v8.5 and its own set of problems.
Intel cards are supported… Just make sure yo update drivers
OpenGL 2.0 compatible video card with 256 MB dedicated video RAM, 1280×720 resolution (OpenGL 4.0 compatible video card with 1GB dedicated video RAM, 1920×1080 resolution is recommended)
The folks at onOne have an excellent customer service team. You might want to email them to see if they can help troubleshoot your problem:
http://www.ononesoftware.com/contact-ts/
I am using Dynamic Contrast/Natural, Color Enhancer/Fall (with some fallback in opacity), but what I really like is Vignette/Big Softy :-)
Big Softy is one of my favorites, too! I didn’t have room for the vignettes … rounded it off at 10 :D
great blog. check out my take on filters. http://bit.ly/1uG22Wd
I use NIK filters and consider buying this Perfect Photo Suite 9. I wonder if any of you have used them as well or combine them with Perfect Photo Effects or Suite. What is your experience?
I have been sing onOne software for the last 6 years and being relatively new to computers and of a mature age must say the support staff at onOne cannot with their patience and understanding even on what i now know to be trivial questions.