AutoFX Mystical Tint Tone and Color

www.autofx.com

Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

Listed among my favorite plug-in filters, the name of AutoFX stands out. I have reviewed many of their products and with each release I marvel at what they have come up with and wonder how they can come up with so many new and innovative ideas. Mystical Lighting was fantastic and following on its heels is Mystical Tint Tone and Color and as the name suggests, it affects the tint, tone, and color of an image adding a range of effects that are as outstanding as Mystical Lighting is.

As with other releases in the Dream Suite series, the Mystical series acts as both a plug-in or as a stand alone application. This is a feature that I like very much. I don’t always want to open an application just to add an effect and AutoFX gives me the choice to use their products through an image editing application or on its own. Having both choices is an excellent feature that is very much appreciated.

The interface and tools are basically the same as in the other plug-ins in their new line but the Mystical series has even more in depth preset selection options. (Interface example above)  A separate menu drops down listing both the categories of presets and when clicked on, a complete thumbnail preview of the effects opens. I love this new feature and if you chose a preset from the list you still have all the tools available to make further adjustments. If you don’t like the effect or the changes, you can either undo it, use a saved memory dot to return to the former state, or delete the new layer that added the effect you are experimenting with. I like the delete feature, it’s fast and allows me to try many preset selections quickly and easily. Another feature is the ability to save your own manual settings to a personal preset. See the example of the “Preset” menu below.

Mystical Tint Tone and Color has 38 effects and over 700 presets for instant effect additions. It is a Photoshop compatible plug-in. It also works with Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, and Corel Draw – Photo Paint.  It comes with a PDF manual, which is also available online for download with the demo version, and comes with technical and customer support. It also features unlimited undo and redo settings, layers, and a robust set of tools. The effects are easy to apply and the changes are immediately generated and preview in the interface window. It also has a button that when clicked allows you to see the original image before the effect was applied. To save the effect you simply click OK and are returned to the image editor if you are using it through a host application. If not, saving closes the stand alone product. I have also found through using it that it seems to render fairly quickly and that it is quite stable. I’ve had no problems with it freezing up or taking up too much memory and crashing on me. I have a very heavily loaded system because of all the applications that I work with and it runs very well.

Effects:

Antique Photo              Hard Tint                     Soft Saturation            Black and White         

Hard Posterize            Soften Details             Blue Sky                      Harden Details

Tonal Contrast            Color Bleach               HSB Adjust                  Tonal Detail

Color Contrast            Image Brush               Tonal Sharpen            Color Mixer

Levels                          Tonal Smooth             Cool                             Multiply Darks

Tonal Soften                Dark Contrast             Over Exposed             Under Color

Darken Color               Restore Details           Under Exposed           Deepen Tones           

RGB Adjust                 Vitality                          Enriched Black            Saturate Colors

Warm                          Gradient Tinting           Sepia                           Washed Out

Green Foliage             Soft Posterize

Other features include Help on Demand, an advanced preview system, Autoupdate, File open and save support, SmartLayers, Photo placement tool, Clone effects tool, fast preview of changes, memory dots that save particular points and allow you to return to them, customizable interface,  and integrated support for Photoshop.

For the past several months at my Graphics SIG meetings, we have concentrated on digital photos and the products and methods used to enhance, retouch, or restore them. Mystical Tint, Tone, and Color has been a tool that provided me with multiple options when working with my photos. I can choose to intensify the color effects, play them down, or use the selections to improve the overall quality with minimal visible changes by fine tuning. By that I mean that I may have made distinct changes but the effect is so subtle that it doesn’t dramatically alter the photo and has a natural appearance.  The range of choices is excellent and the tools that accompany each effect further increase the adjustment capabilities. While I love to experiment with the effect possibilities and be able to show distinct changes at times subtle enhancements make the overall image much more realistic and helps restore the beauty to heirloom photos. I found it did a very good job of evening out the tone of a very old family photo of my great aunt that I was repairing. It was damaged and extremely yellowed. It had a sepia tone but the discoloration was so uneven and pronounced that I wasn’t sure even after repairing the damage and making color adjustments along with other restoration techniques that I could make the color come up better but using a low grade tonal effect, I managed to even out the very pronounced color differences so that they blended evenly and were very pleasing to the eye. I also used a soft focus from the Dream Suite series and further softened the overall look of the photo. See the photo at the end of the review.

These photos show examples of the original which is the first image and an Antique effect applied to the second image. The TTC effect has changed the whole complexion of the photo. It no longer looks like a snapshot that was taken recently.  The building and the scene now look like a photo from a bygone era. With a few clicks of the mouse, the photo has time warped back into the past. Experimenting with the multitude of Tint, Tone, and Color options will help you to add many kinds of effects that will change the mood of the photo or as previously mentioned correct some problems and improve its appearance. But aside from this, you can also make dramatic, artistic changes to photos. Altering the colors, tints, and tones to call attention to certain areas or bring a completely different type of visual effect to the image.

I particularly like having such a varied selection of ways to work with the coloration of images. Using multiple effects often helps me to make adjustments that wouldn’t be available to me if I didn’t have all of these tools or at the very least would be very difficult and time consuming to perform. Since each brings its own unique enhancement to the image, the more plug-ins I have the more I can experiment. And I also have the ability to make these added effects either dramatic for the sake of artistic expression or subtle for enhancement or correction. I highly recommend Mystical Tint Tone and Color to anyone who wants to have more color effect control of their images. It sells for $179 on the AutoFX web site but is often combined with bundled offers of other great AutoFX visual solution products. They have an outstanding web site with many examples of what their plug-in do. Please visit it to see more. Also visit our web site’s Graphics SIG section to see a flash demo and more images with examples of the effects. (www.njpcug.org)

Hopefully you can see that after the repairs were made to the photo that the dark and uneven cast that was in the original photo is lightened and blends more evenly across the second photo. I didn’t want to change the original tint but I did want to make it less pronounced as it went from being nearly black at the bottom to a deep gold in the upper part.