Let’s Focus on OnOne’s Focus Point 2 – Nice Little Plug-in!
These beautiful pink and white orchids were captured at the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden on the Big Island in Hawaii – they had a huge assortment of orchids in their Orchid Island exhibit, many varieties I had never seen before! If you look closely, you will see a tiny white spider web connecting the blossoms.
On this image I used OnOne’s Focal Point 2 – a really wonderful plug-in that is part of the OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 6.0 (see sidebar for website link). I had not used it before but after listening to OnOne’s short video called “Selectively Draw the Viewer’s Eyes Where You Want It To Go” (scroll down to 1/9/12), it proved to be very easy to apply and quite effective. It uses the Focus Bug technology like its other products, and the effect can be painted in or out with the Focus Brush. A soft blurred vignette can easily be added also. ShadowHouse Creations Pseudo Film Scratches Texture Heavily Scratched 2 was added with the layer set to Divide which gave the bright splotches of color throughout the image. The Sharpen Tool was used to selectively sharpen the forward edges of the flowers, and a composite layer (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E) was created on top to add a Layer Style. In this case, an oldie but goodie layer style from a book I bought years ago called “Adobe Photoshop 7 One-Click Wow!” by Jack Davis and Linnea Dayton was added using Wow Frame 09. The cool thing about this little book is that is shows what all the styles look like when applied. These styles are also included on the accompanying DVD to my favorite Photoshop Book “Photoshop CS3/CS4 WOW! Book” by Linnea Dayton and Christen Gillespie, where the original book is basically reproduced in the Appendices. Give Focal Point a try if you like this type of effect – very easy to use and gives very dramatic portrait or landscape effects also…..Digital Lady Syd
