Standards Based Development

Standards Based Development

Resources and Miscellaneous

Grayscale psds for Resolution Bumpting dems

Resolution bumping is a technique in Adobe Photoshop for manipulating GTOPO30 and other small-scale digital elevation models (dems). The technique alters digital elevation surfaces in a manner that allows rugged mountains to be depicted more legibly and with a more natural appearance compared to unmodified data. Although resolution bumping is accomplished in Photoshop, the well-known image editing application, the technique is used solely for modifying raw elevation data prior to creating 3D scenes and shaded relief. Resolution bumping is not a post-rendering touchup procedure.

Use these prepared 16-bit grayscale Photoshop (.psd) files to experiment with resolution bumping. Centered on the Alps, the 1,024 x 1,024 (2MB) files are ready to use on either Mac or PC - High-resolution, Low-resolution (downsampled from 1,024 x 1,024 pixels to 128 x 128 and back to 1,024 x 1,024), and Resolution bumped (a 50:50 mix of the two previous files).

Plug-Ins

Maps

See the Light: How to Make Illuminated Shaded Relief in Photoshop 6.0

CartaPGM

CartaPGM is a Mac plug-in for Photoshop that reads and writes files in the Portable Gray Map (pgm) format.

Plug-ins

CartaPGM

CartaPGM is a plug-in for Photoshop on Macintosh that reads and writes files in two Portable Gray Map (PGM) formats:

  • PGM 8-bit grayscale images
  • PGM 16-bit grayscale images

CartaPGM reads the following formats:

  • PGM 8-bit grayscale images
  • PGM 16-bit grayscale images
  • PBM 1-bit black and white images
  • PPM 24-bit RGB color images

Download the plug-on, then decompress the ZIP file and drag the plug-in to the Plug-Ins folder in the Photoshop application folder.

Once the plug-in is installed, open PGM, PBM or PPM files with the normal File - Open menu command. To write files in the PGM format, use File - Save and select Portable Gray Map (PGM) in the Format menu.

Eraser Classic

Eraser Classic is a plugin for erasing; to use, simply activate the eyedropper, select desired color in the preview window, and adjust tolerance.

Fine Threshold

Fine Threshold plugin allows for getting quickly, anti-aliased and sharp shapes, unlike the traditional threshold command of Photoshop.

Flat Median

Flat Median is a median-like effect which have some advantages over the "regular" median filter:

  • Level of Flatness Control: at low level of flatness the result would look like a regular blur, while at high level the result would look more contrasty.
  • it is "isotropic" just like gaussian blur.
  • apply the effect on horizontal or vertical directions.

Gorgeous Random Color Scheme Gradient Generator for Photoshop Gist random-color-scheme-gradient-generator.jsx

My Gist Fork

Sorting Tiles

Sorting Tiles imitates vaguely painting. Fundamentally, the filter cuts image in several blocks, makes a sorting of colours, and redistributes these ones following more or less complicated patterns.

B-W Conversion

B-W Conversion is another B/W conversion plugin, but one with powerfull features that allow full control over the final result:

  • Total control over the tonal response of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta, and the intermediate hues. The user can boost each color's tonal response all the way up to white or limit it down to black, without affecting the other colors at all.
  • The plugin offers presets that accurately simulate the tonal response of the most popular b/w films.
  • The plugin can introduce a grain effect of controllable intensity and density.
  • An option to simulate the effect of color lens filters, with selectable hue and saturation is also available.
  • The user can also apply a toing effect of selectable color and intensity.
  • A brightness meter is displayed when the cursor is over the preview window.
  • All settings can be saved in a parameter file to be available for future use.

ColorLab Tiff Lab Bug Correction

ColorLab Tiff Lab Bug Correction ppLabCor is a special purpose plugin to correct a bug in the current version of ColorLab* that causes Lab TIFFs generated from data files to have wrong colors.

The plugin will not produce sensible results in any other situation.

Selective Saturation

Selective Saturation .

Quite often some parts of a photo require a saturation adjustment while others do not. If we increase the saturation globally, the most saturated parts get oversaturated and if we decrease it, the less saturated parts get undersaturated. We need a Saturation Mask based on the individual pixel saturation in order to adjust it just where it is needed. Unfortunately even Photoshop does not provide a fast and straightforward way to create a saturation mask, like it does for brightness masks. So this plugn, Selective Saturation, lets the user define a Saturation Zone by setting it's center and range with two sliders. A mask preview mode is available to fine tune the settings. Then every saturation adjustment affects only those parts of the photo with saturation value that lies in the specified saturation zone. The "Smooth Adjustment" checkbox, when checked, gives a smoother adhustment by applying the full adjustment at the center of the saturation zone, while fading it to zero towards the zone ends.

Local Contrast Enhancement

Local Contrast Enhancement plugin's main purpose is to bring out detail.

This is accomplished by increasing the contrast between a pixel's value and the mean value of the adjacent pixels in a local area of the photo.

You can control the amount of the increase of contrast, the size of the local area and the amount of blending with the original photo.

High Pass Sharpening

High Pass Sharpening is a plugin to sharpen photos with the classic high pass method. The user can adjust the high pass filter radius, and control the blending with the original image. A high pass output preview is also available to help the user adjust the filter radius up to the point the edges to be sharpened show up.

High Pass Sharpening is generally considered to produce less halos and other sharpening artifacts than USM.

Soft Focus

Soft Focus plugin applies a soft focus effect, which is often usefull in portraits or fashion photography. There are controls to adjust the focus softness, the overall strength of the effect and the blending mode of the overlayed blured image.

Lens Correction

Lens Correction .

This plugin corrects barrel and pincushion distortions that many zoom camera lenses.produce. Just move the sliders to the left to correct barrel distortion, and to the right to correct pincushion . Many thanks to Martin Vicanek who provided the code for this plugin.

Contrast Mask

Contrast Mask .

This plugin uses a contrast mask to reduce the overall contrast of the image, simultaneously bringing out more detail in both highlights and shadows. A b/w negative of the image is blured (with a radius controlled by the "Smoothing" slider) to avoid hard edges and then overlayed with the original, darkening the highlights and lightening the shadows. The opacity of the overlay is controlled by the "Strength" slider.

Gradiant Blur

Gradiant Blur plugin applies a gradient blur that can help us draw the viewes attention to the photograph's main subject.

There are sliders to control the position where the blur starts and it's strength.

A preview mask can be displayed, and there is a selection between horizontal, verical and radial blurs.

SuperPNG

SuperPNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for using PNG ("ping") files. It has more comprehensive support for the format than Photoshop's included plug-in and provides control over alpha channel handling.

PNG is an open source file format that supports tight lossless compression. It can be read on any platform by most graphics applications and is fully supported by all modern web browsers.

SuperPNG fully supports the PNG format. It includes some additional options for saving PNGs:

  • Alpha channel control
  • Variable Compression
  • ICC profile embedding
  • Meta Data saving

j2k

j2k is a free Photoshop and After Effects plug-in set for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG.

Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression as opposed to the DCT compression used in standard JPEG. The end result is better image quality in a smaller file. JP2 also includes mandatory metadata such as information about an image's color space. Check Out Some j2k Samples of jp2

The After Effects and Premiere Pro versions have the ability to Auto Proxy, meaning that when working at half or quarter resolution j2k will only need to read in a fraction of the file, resulting in dramatic speedups.

j2k also features:

  • Alpha transparency
  • Lossless compression mode
  • 16-bit color
  • Digital Cinema Support

OpenEXR

OpenEXR - Included with the download of ProEXR is a collection of 3 free, open source plug-ins providing complete access to OpenEXR files in After Effects. Many EXR files feature extra channels beyond simple RGBA. In some cases they may include depth and velocity vector information, in other cases there may be entire render passes folded into a single EXR file. These plug-ins were created to open up After Effects to all the possibilities in OpenEXR.

Version 1.5 of these plug-ins ship with After Effects CS5.5. Newer versions are 100% project-compatible.

Included is the OpenEXR file module that provides API access to all the channels in an EXR and various compression options when rendering EXRs out of AE.