AUTO F/X POWER/PAC 1
by Bob Bailey
You're in front of your Mac with Adobe's Photoshop opened. You've worked hard on
a particular graphic and you would now like to add a finishing touch with a soft
glow around your graphic or maybe a nice soft, transparent drop shadow. You could
experiment with the Photoshop tools until you get what you're looking for or you
could do what I do and fire up AUTO F/X's POWER/PAC 1 modules and let them do it
for you.
AUTO F/X's POWER/PAC 1 is a program that works in Adobe Photoshop to enhance your
graphics. Included Effects are Auto/Glow, Auto/Shadow, Auto/Path, Auto/Saturate,
Auto/Screen, Auto/Select, Auto/Emboss, Auto/Focus, Auto/Recess, 350 Edges for Typo/Graphic
Edges, and 1,000 Textures for Auto/Textures.
"Unlike filters, Auto/Effect Modules take artwork and build the effect by
automating Photoshop, creating alpha channels and layers, applying fill textures,
transfer modes and some of its own stuff, to streamline the creative process.
The software is designed to allow you to interact with the effect. As such, you are
not locked into a filter dialog box like you may be accustomed to working in. Instead
you work in an open styled architecture."
---From AUTO/ F/X's manual
I'm planning to write more than one article about this very powerful software because
of the many different effects it can create. In this article I'm going to talk about
Auto/Shadow, mainly because it and Auto/Glow are the only effects I've gotten into
so far.
Let me start by telling you why I need these effects. My Mac is currently an 8100
PPC running at 100 MHZ. It was configured by a company called AVID, the leader in
non-linear video editing for broadcast. I've been running Adobe Photoshop for several
years now and have been ab ]le to use the graphics in some of my video work. Before
the AVID, I produced all of my video work on video tape. It was extremely difficult
to add the photoshop graphics into a video clip without seeing "jaggies"
or losing some of the graphic itself. If I used the graphic as a whole video frame,
it worked great. But most of the time I needed to display just the graphic of, say,
a company's logo over a video clip of their product. With video tape editing it was
never really perfect.
Then enter the AVID. Now I can scan a logo, add color, and composite it over a video
clip, no "jaggies" and no loss of the graphic. Because of this I now find
the need to embellish the graphic with "glows" or "drop shadows"
or more.
This is where AUTO F/X comes in. The first thing I tried was a soft drop shadow under
my graphic. Photoshop has the tools for you to ac Wcomplish this but it takes time
and know-how and I didn't always get the desired result. Now I simply activate AUTO
F/X by clicking on its button which appears near my Finder icon, and a menu pops
down. I select AUTO/Drop Shadow and away we go.
Before I activate AUTO F/X I made sure to rename my first layer "Background".
Then when activated, the Drop Shadow module starts setting itself up by automating
Photoshop. While the effect is being built, I'm asked to choose a shadow color. This
color can be any color I want.
The Shadow Control Palette will appear after the shadow effect has been created.
The palette has buttons that allow you to Reset the Shadow and start the effect over,
to Increase the Canvas size to 25% top to bottom and side to side, Apply a Gradient
to the shadow, Apply a cast shadow to make it appear as though a light source Vis
striking the object from an angle, to Apply a Texture to the shadow, to Use a Preset
of simple shadow blurs and offsets, or to Apply an Edge Effect to give the shadow
a weathered or rough look. Clicking on the edges button in the Shadow control Palette
will take you to the Typo/Graphic Edges palette where you can apply edges to your
shad-ow effect.
The Shadow Control Palette is also where you select your shadow direction, softness
and opacity (transparency). Once you've made your selection the module will complete
your shadow effect. Since you can see the effect being applied to your object as
you make your selections, undoing and making changes as you go along makes it easier
to obtain exactly what you're looking for in the effect than working in Photoshop
without AUTO F/X.
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