Plug-Ins for Digital Imaging
- SF Maskerade
- The filter SF Maskerade serves for creating luminance masks, color masks, saturation masks, edge masks and contrast masks. You can also extract channels, select colors very precisely in consideration of saturation and lightness, select only the black, white and gray tones of an image, transform photos into outline drawings and much more. Finally you get the result (optionally inverted or blurred) as gray tone mask or converted into layer's transparency channel. The filter works in 16 bit color depth per channel and supports automatization functions like Photoshop Actions. In addition to the full version a freeware version with fewer functions is available. New version 3.5!
- SF TransluSense
- With SF TransluSense you can decrease or completly remove the existing transparency of an image or - in opposition - transform selected colors or the lightness of the pixels into transparency. Likewise it is possible to transform the transparency of pixels in a gray tone mask. This will separate the color information and transparency of the image and has much advantages for later image processing.
The new version 3.5 works with background layers. - SF ColorMixer
- This "somehow different" channel mixer is not only useful if your imaging software is missing a channel mixer, but tops the channel mixers of some professional imaging programs too. The built-in auto balance guarantees in every case a well-balanced mixing ratio of the channels and avoids the clipping of shadows or highlights. You can easily reach fine or extreme color changes without heeding for the 100% sum of the channels. In addition you can fix a selected color with the ColorFix option and therefore protect this color for later alteration. New version 3.5!
- SF GrayMixer
- The GrayMixer converts color images into amazing gray tone images. You can fully control the lightness of the colors in the resulting gray tone image and for example darken a lightblue sky dramatically. Likewise, in the ColorMixer, the built-in ColorFix option avoids alteration of the lightness of a selected color, if you want. New version 3.5!
- SF Color Space Converter
- The Color Space Converter is a "beta version" but works fine if you wish to convert a RGB image into HSL or HSB color space and vice versa. You get the special "Photoshop saturation" and luminance by selecting "HsY" color space. The other color space options are for experimental purposes because they ignore the color profile and gamma of the image
Operating Instructions
All SimpelFilters beginning with version 2.0 have a distinctly improved user interface with many new and comfortable functions. For details please see the following pages:
Tutorials
You can find hints and examples for the application of filters and downloadable SimpelFilter parameter files on the tutorial pages. The first tutorial page is for the filter SF Maskerade. Other pages will follow.
Installing filters
Filters or plugins are little programs that perform special, singular tasks - mostly in a better way than a big imaging application could. Even Photoshop is not perfect and has gaps that can be filled with the appropriate plugins.
Plugins do not work on their own, though. They extend the capabilities of imaging applications and therefore have to be "plugged" into them. Mostly all that is to be done is to put them into the designated plugin folder and restart the application. Then one or more new items appear in the "Filters" or "Effects" menu. In our case, the new menu items are called SimpelFilter and SF Analyse.
System requirements
The SimpelFilter plugins are supposed to work with any imaging application that is compatible with Photoshop plugins. This plugin standard has been developed by Adobe in the beginning of the 90s and is supported by all popular imaging applications (although not always entirely). The plugins have been tested with Photoshop, Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, PhotoLine32 and GIMP in their Windows versions.
Currently, the filters do not work on other operating systems. The reason for this is that the development tool used for creating them (FilterMeister) merely produces Windows code.
Exception: The calibration tools and some of the analysis helpers work independently from the operating system, so they can be used on Mac OS and Linux, too.