Plug-In: ALCE - A Local Contrast Enhancer for CS4/CS3

[undavide]

Hello,
I'd like to recommend you a CS4 panel (and CS3 script) I've recently made for boosting local contrast: it's called ALCE - A Local Contrast Enhancer.

You can find high-res downloadable examples, comparative zoomify plus two free videos (if you have a soft spot for masking and channels operations I suggest you to have a look to the second one, "Advanced masking and tweaking") here:

ALCE - A Local Contrast Enhancer

Thanks for reading,

Davide

[keykey]

Interesting, indeed!
So interesting that after looking at the video in the linked page came to my mind an action FREELY DISTRIBUTED through dpreview.com and atncentral.com.
The action is named Local Contrast (what a coincidence!) by Jay Ryness.
Available for download here: http://atncentral.com/image_enhance.htm, if you compare this video and the Local Contrast action (released late in 2007 as you can read at atncentral.com) the layers are the same, even in the names!

[undavide]

Originally Posted by keykey

Interesting, indeed!
So interesting that after looking at the video in the linked page came to my mind an action FREELY DISTRIBUTED through dpreview.com and atncentral.com.

Hello KeyKey,
yes indeed, I've been in touch with Jay Ryness, a brilliant mind who is the Local Contrast Enhancement routine idea's father, and has been so kind to share with me the math behind it (if you look in our website, he is mentioned in the acknowledgements). Of course he knows about ALCE, he even wrote me his congrats - and I wrote back mines

I've packed his idea within a javascript and I've created a Photoshop Flash panel GUI in order to let the users choose the radius freely (so with ALCE you have a slider and you're not bounded to preset numbers as you're with actions).

RBG (the Roberto Bigano Group), who tested it, provides a lot of free documentation, tips and two videotutorials - the second one, Advanced Masking and Tweaking is 35 minutes long and about ALCE's use with about a dozen real world professional post production images: it covers color correction advanced topics that are somehow ALCE-indipendent, and feedbacks about it have been enthusiastic. (you can find it at the page's end here)

In my opinion all this makes ALCE a commercial product, and a worthwhile one since the price is relatively low (23 EUR). I see no problem in a free idea and a commercial application of it.

By the way, I'm currently on beta stage for version 2, new features:

Radius up to 350px (now it sticks to 200px)
100% faster (it takes half of the time)
Colorimetrically more correct in bright saturated areas
CS5 ready
Batch interface!! (Have a look to the screenshot: I plan to add a layer opacity control feature, so final version may be little different)
Last but not least, free upgrade for V1 customers.

BTW, I'm not planning to change the layers name, I'm fine with them (actually ALCE2 works with channels, it's faster).

Thanks for your attention,
ciao!

Davide