Roger Cavanagh Reviews Shadow Illuminator Plugin
Roger Cavanagh has reviewed a plugin for Photoshop CS and PhotoShop Elements 3(Windows-only I’m afraid) that aims to brighten up the shadows in your images without causing too many unwanted side-effects.
“Unlike Photoshop Shadow and Highlight Adjustment, SI will only work on 8-bit RGB images. It is also very slow, which given what the manual says, is understandable:
“From the original image the software estimates the illumination field that illuminated the scene when the picture was taken. Then it corrects every pixel to produce a result that would have been seen if the scene were more uniformly illuminated. “
Not the most elegant or grammatical of phrasing, but it does describe what the plug-in does, and it does indicate that bigger files and more pixels means slower performance. The FAQ page does suggest users could experience memory problems, but all my tests have so far been on full-size 10D images, which have been processed successfully.”