What they are How to Install Effects Other Plug-in Filters Questions |  | Freebies What they are The Freebies are plug-in filters for Photoshop and other paint programs. They change colors in simple ways and you can use them free of charge. How to install To use this software, you need a paint program which accepts standard Photoshop 3.0 plugins. Just put the plug-in filters into the folder where your paint program expects to find them. If you have Photoshop, the folder is Photoshop:Plugins:Filters or Photoshop:Plug-ins. You must restart Photoshop before it will notice the new plug-ins. They will appear in the menus under Filters->Flaming Pear. Most other paint programs follow a similar scheme. If you have Paint Shop Pro: you have to create a new folder, put the plug-in filters into it, and then tell PSP to look there. In PSP's menus, choose File-> Preferences->General Program Preferences... and click the Plug-in Filters tab. Use a "Browse" button to choose the folder. The plugins will appear in the menus as, for example, Image->Plug-in Filters->Flaming Pear->Tachyon. Effects These filters only do one effect apiece, so they have no controls. Here are some example effects that you can do. Open a favorite picture for these examples -- you won't see anything if you start with a blank canvas. Select part of the picture, and invoke a filter.
|  | Original image
|  | Tachyon Tachyon ("Tak-ee-on," a faster-than-light particle) inverts the the bright and dark areas of your picture, but does not change the hues. Ordinary inversion would change blue to yellow, for example.
|  | ChromaSolarize ChromaSolarize combines the Tachyon effect with solarization, which produces attractive surreal effects.
|  | Swap Red & Blue Swap Red & Green Swap Green & Blue These filters work on RGB images – those with three channels of color: red, green, and blue. By swapping data between channels, they transform color, changing the picture’s chromatic harmonies in useful ways.
|  | Vitriol Vitriol changes colors’ contrast as if viewed through colored glass, but without tinting the image. Imagine you want to use black-and-white film to take a spooky picture of a landscape. You could make the sky unnaturally dark by placing a yellow glass filter over the lens; this will make the blue sky very dark, while the appearance of the green landscape is affected very little. It would be fun to do the same effect in color. But the yellow filter would of course make the picture yellowish. But Vitriol will get the contrast effect without the colorization. Just set the foreground color to the color of the imaginary colored glass, and choose Vitriol from the Filter menu. Vitriol automatically provides density correction, so you can use a strongly colored filter without making your picture go dark. The effect is most vivid on areas of strongly saturated color; apply repeatedly to intensify the result.
The next two filters only operate on layers with a transparency channel.
|  | Make Opaque Make Opaque turns an image layer entirely 100% opaque. It reveals partially transparent areas, and can even help repair the corrupted transparency channel that some paint programs occasionally produce. In this example, the strawberry was in a different layer from the background.
|  | Ghost Ghost turns an image layer into a semitransparent picture made entirely of black pixels. It produces a smoked-glass effect that's hard to produce by hand. In this example, the strawberry was in a different layer from the background.
Other Plug-in Filters Flaming Pear Software has other, more complex filters available here. They all come with a free trial period, after which they can be purchased online or off. Questions Answers to common technical questions appear on the support page, and free upgrades appear periodically on the download page. Trouble with your order? Orders are handled by Kagi, which can be reached at admin@kagi.com . For bug reports and technical questions about the software, please write to lloyd@flamingpear.com .