Photoshop plugins - Pixie Dust Introduction

Photoshop plug-ins - Pixie Dust Introduction
What is Pixie Dust Photoshop plug-in? Why did I write it?

Despite recent advancements in digital photography, pictures rarely come out of the digital camera or scanner in perfect condition. They need to be enhanced in software.

On this page you will find plug-ins for Photoshop and compatible image editors to allow you do that quickly, completely, and efficiently.

Numerous filters are included in this collection. They range from high quality corrective filters to the wildest of special effects.

Why so many? Because they were born out of years of frustration. Frustration with plug-ins containing only one filter, or one small family of filters. Frustration with filters limited in their flexibility. Frustration with bloated filters that require enormous amounts of computer memory to achieve the simplest of tasks. Frustration with filters that take forever to do their task.

I decided to end this frustration once and for all. I spent several years working on a library of image manipulation routines that were different. In what way?

• First of all, these routines work fast. They are written in 100% assembly language. That is the only programming language that controls the microprocessor directly.

  I don't want to bore you with tech talk. Let's just say that all other languages are designed to make it easy on the programmer. They produce bloated software which does many unnecessary things.

  Sort of like traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco via New York. Or even Paris. Without the sight-seeing. That will get you there, naturally, it just takes longer. Assembly language makes it hard on the programmer but easy on the program user.

• The library also is very small. It does not require much memory to run in: Just kilobytes, not megabytes. This is another advantage of the no-detour assembly language.

• The routines are very flexible. Whenever possible they control each of the three channels (that is, red, green, and blue) separately. That makes them go beyond the usual effect they produce ordinarily.

• Most of these routines can automatically set the opacity of their effect. It works similar to Photoshop layers.

  It is as if you created a duplicate layer, applied the effect, then set the opacity of that layer, and finally combined it with the original image to make the effect less pronounced. Or more.

  I don't know why everyone only thinks of opacity between 0 - 100%. There is no reason for opacity not to go beyond 100%, or even to be negative.

  Now suppose you did this separately for each channel so you could fine-tune them with one opacity for red, another one for green, and a yet different one for blue.

  Too much work? I thought so. That's why these routines do it for you automatically so you can concentrate on your creativity instead of technical aspects of your software tools. I guess, that's my job, not yours. ;)

There is more, but these are the main points I can think of right now.

Anyway, since all these routines work on individual pixels, I named them Pixie Dust. I wrote and re-wrote them many times over a period of many years. The particular version I am presenting here works as a Windows DLL (dynamic link library).

The plug-ins provide an interface between Windows version of Photoshop (and compatible hosts) and the library. They, too, are written in 100% assembly language.