Flaming Pear Freebies Manual

What they are

How to Install

Effects

Other Plug-in Filters

Questions

Freebies

What they are

The Freebies are plug-in filters for Photoshop and other paint programs. They change colors in simple ways and you can use them free of charge.

How to install

To use this software, you need a paint program which accepts standard Photoshop 3.0 plugins.

Just put the plug-in filters into the folder where your paint program expects to find them. If you have Photoshop, the folder is Photoshop:Plugins:Filters or Photoshop:Plug-ins. You must restart Photoshop before it will notice the new plug-ins. They will appear in the menus under Filters->Flaming Pear.

Most other paint programs follow a similar scheme.

If you have Paint Shop Pro: you have to create a new folder, put the plug-in filter into it, and then tell PSP to look there. In PSP 5 or PSP 6: choose the menu File-> Preferences->General Program Preferences... and choose the Plug-in Filters tab. In PSP 7: choose the menu File-> Preferences->File Locations... and choose the Plug-in Filters tab.
Use one of the "Browse" buttons to choose the folder mentioned above.

From PSP's menus, choose the plugin. For example, choose Image->Plug-in Filters->Flaming Pear->Tachyon. If you have PSP 7, look in Effects->Plug-in Filters->Flaming Pear->Tachyon.

Effects

These filters only do one effect apiece, so they have no controls.

Here are some example effects that you can do. Open a favorite picture for these examples -- you won't see anything if you start with a blank canvas. Select part of the picture, and invoke a filter.

|  | Original image

|  | Tachyon Tachyon ("Tak-ee-on," a faster-than-light particle) inverts the the bright and dark areas of your picture, but does not change the hues. Ordinary inversion would change blue to yellow, for example.

|  | ChromaSolarize ChromaSolarize combines the Tachyon effect with solarization, which produces attractive surreal effects.

Swap Red & Blue

Swap Red & Green

Swap Green & Blue

These filters work on RGB images – those with three channels of color: red, green, and blue. By swapping data between channels, they transform color, changing the picture’s chromatic harmonies in useful ways.

RGB->HSL and HSL->RGB

RGB->HSL takes a normal image with its red, green, and blue color channels and replaces these with hue, saturation, and luminance respectively. Your paint program will think the image is still in RGB form, so the colors will look bizarre. HSL->RGB changes the image back.

The HSL color system is a way of representing colors. Hue is the property of a color that classifies it as red, yellow, blue or green, or a blend of these. Saturation is the vividness of the color; and luminance is the total amount of light it throws off.

If you use these filters and your paint program lets you paint into individual color channels, you can change the image in a way difficult to do in RGB mode.

Vitriol

Vitriol changes colors’ contrast as if viewed through colored glass, but without tinting the image.

Imagine you want to use black-and-white film to take a spooky picture of a landscape. You could make the sky unnaturally dark by placing a yellow glass filter over the lens; this will make the blue sky very dark, while the appearance of the green landscape is affected very little.

It would be fun to do the same effect in color. But the yellow filter would of course make the picture yellowish. But Vitriol will get the contrast effect without the colorization. Just set the foreground color to the color of the imaginary colored glass, and choose Vitriol from the Filter menu.

Vitriol automatically provides density correction, so you can use a strongly colored filter without making your picture go dark. The effect is most vivid on areas of strongly saturated color; apply repeatedly to intensify the result.

The next two filters only operate on layers with a transparency channel.

|  | Make Opaque Make Opaque turns an image layer entirely 100% opaque. It reveals partially transparent areas, and can even help repair the corrupted transparency channel that some paint programs occasionally produce. In this example, the strawberry was in a different layer from the background.

|  | Ghost Ghost turns an image layer into a semitransparent picture made entirely of black pixels. It produces a smoked-glass effect that's hard to produce by hand. In this example, the strawberry was in a different layer from the background.

Other Plug-in Filters

Another free filter is Ornament, which lets you make full-sphere panoramic photos cheaply.

Flaming Pear Software has more complex filters available here. They all come with a free trial period, after which they can be purchased online or off.

Questions

Answers to common technical questions appear on the support page, and free upgrades appear periodically on the download page.

Trouble with your order? Orders are handled by Kagi, which can be reached at admin@kagi.com .

For bug reports and technical questions about the software, please write to support@flamingpear.com .