FYI-Insights PowerRetouche

Power Retouche is from PowerRetouche.com - visit them for a trial download.

Power Retouche is a very versatile and feature-rich image effects and enhancement program that can help you correct your images so they look their best.

What is PowerRetouche ?

PowerRetouche is a suite of plugins that will give you a wide range of image enhancement capabilities to your image editor.  The filters included with PowerRetouche and my examples of their effects are::

	The original image
	Contrast Editor - 8bit & 16bit Range: Make lights lighter and darks darker or keep within the images given range.
	Color Editor This filter lets you target very specific color for change without fiddling with clumsy selection tools.
	Color stitch & Light source Photo filters - 8bit & 16bit Correct any discoloration due to unwanted color of light. - correct the color of the light and how it spreads through the image in varying degrees - just as a regular lens-filter, it uses the laws of optics to correct the image. It does NOT just add or subtract a colored layer it operates on, with and from the light.
	Brightness Editor - 8bit & 16bit Full control over color preservation. You can preserve or reduce color freely while altering brightness.
	Exposure Corrector - 8bit & 16bit Full control over exposure in the image as a whole or targeted to either lights, any range of midtones or darks.
	Lens Corrector Correct distortions from lenses - zoom, telephoto as well as wide-angle, like barreling and pincushion as well as arbitrary variations and combinations thereof.
	Saturation Editor - 8bit & 16bit Preserves color relations by preserving hues and values while raising chroma. It preserves intermediate tones as well as the original images relations between saturated and unsaturated colors and it keeps the light/dark values intact.
	Sharpness Editor - 8bit & 16bit Borderless sharpening - based on optics. Three sharpening methods, all with adjustable unsharp size based on true optical blur parameters. True optical blur.
	Transparency Tool - 8bit & 16bit Lets you work with transparency in layers, and target the transparency to lights, midtones or darks with full control over softness in transitional tones.

Noise Corrector - 8bit & 16bit

Five different methods to remove various kinds of noise in digital images.
Soft Focus retains sharpness while removing noise. It is PowerRetouche's novel all-round method.
Also: Film-grain Leveling ... Enhanced Median ... Hue preserving Despeckle.
As with most other PowerRetouches, you can target the filtering to any range of lights, midtones or darks.

 Take a look here to see the user interface.

Key Features of PowerRetouche

• Enhance sharpness without creating borderlines (like Unsharp mask always does)
• Correct lens-distortions from telephoto or wide-angle.
• Instantly correct White Balance and color stitch from any light source - manual or auto-calibration.
• Slider for Photo filters Kodak 80A to 85B (European KB15 to KR15) with tone adjustment slider.
• Remove noise in skin, specks from film grain, hot pixels, etc. while preserving details and sharpness!
• Re-expose underexposed areas, compensate overexposed.
• True saturation-editing within value-ranges (based on Munsell color space).
• Selective transparency in layers - for toning and improving scans.
• Transparent masks (free floating) can easily be made for cut out text or cut out images .
• Color Editing - exactness and ease -apply any kind of editing to any hue of any brightness -spare everything else.
• Brightness with color preservation
  
   

My Impressions of PowerRetouche

PowerRetouche gives you more, and easier, control of adjusting your image in a variety of ways than Photoshop does for most of the same tools.  I was especially pleased with the Exposure control on my sample image.  It did a very good job of lightening the lower mid-tones which brought out some grass and creek bank details.  Also, being able to color correct images shot under not-so-ideal light, such as fluorescent or incandescent light, is a great asset and easy to do with PowerRetouche.

If you're looking for an easier to use filter that gives you more control over your image enhancements and corrections, then be sure to give Power retouche! a tryout-workout from powerretouche with a trial download of the program.