Benefits
of the plugin

Change or edit the illumination in a photo
Set the direction of the light to any angle of 360 degrees
Raise or lower exposure and/or brightness independently
Target retouching to lights, midtones or darks independently

The Illumination Editor plugin works with most image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK, Lab, Duotone, Grayscale, Multichannel.

Illumination Editor
controls

This is the Illumination Editor controlpanel.
Click on the image to enlarge.

It has four groups of controls:

1. Light: Direction and shade and light ratio.
2. Exposure.
3. Brightness.
4. Retouch levels: target lights, midtones or darks.

Example - shifting the light round the clock

The Illumination Editor is indispensable for editing the direction of the light in your photos. Superb for enhancing existing light. Leftmost image is the original.

Example - Fine Photography

Notice how nicely the plug-in brings out details from the shadows it illuminates. (Photo Copyright 2005 Shelsea Henderson)

The Controls

Light

Direction

Shade - Light

Direction will rotate the direction of the light within a full circle. The slider ranges from -180 to 180 degrees. 0 is top vertical. 180 bottom vertical. -90 is left horizontal and 90 is right horizontal.

Checking Show Direction will draw a line from the center of the preview in the direction of the light. This will only appear on the preview.

Shade - Light will determine the ratio between shading and illuminating. 50% means equal parts of the image will be affected by raising and reducing exposure or brightness. If you move the slider higher (right, towards light), a larger area will be affected by raising than by reducing. Use this if you predominantly want to raise the illumination of the image. Move the slider to the left side (shade) if you predominantly want to deepen shadows. Actually it is not a matter of a simple dividing line between one part of the image being raised and the other reduced. Raising and reducing fades into each other over the entire image, but "Shade - Light" will change the emphasis the plugin puts on either.

Exposure & Brightness

Raise and Reduce operate mainly on opposite sides of the image. If you have checked Show Direction one half of the preview will show a line indicating the side of the light and its direction. This is the side that will be raised. The opposite side will be reduced. As explained above, there is no hard division between the two sides, but one side mainly raises and the raising fades out into the other side - and vice versa with reducing.

Use the slider "Shade - Light" to change the ratio between the two so a larger or smaller area gets raised or reduced.

Use Transparency

If you are working on a layer, then this checkbox will be enabled. If you check it, the plugins Brightness Slider will no longer change brightness, but will instead turn the image progressively more transparent (this slider only; the others will work as usual). You can use this feature for creating graduated correction layers - as we will show later.

Retouch Levels

Retouch Levels is common to many Powerretouche plugins. It will change the amount the filtering is applied to lights, midtones and darks respectively.

Alerts

When checked, the two alerts will color pure white pixels and pure black pixels with the given color. You can change the color by clicking in the rectangles. The alert colors of course only show in the preview.

Example - Changing the Illumination

Example - Enhancing contrast in a flatly lit face

The light in this image is flat. There is too little contrast between the light and shade.

A slight enhancement with Illumination Editor improves the image a lot.

Example - Better than regular levels adjustment

Original Photo

Adjusting Levels

This picture is of course underexposed. The simplest way to improve exposure is to stretch the distribution of levels to fill the entire range.

The right image is fixed this way using Photoshop's Levels adjustment.

As you can see, the light is flat. Also this will most likely posterize the image.

Illumination Editor

If you use Illumination Editor to correct the image, you get a more interesting light. We might have exaggerated a bit to better show the possibilities of our plugin.

A feature of the Illumination Editor is that it does not posterize the histogram like editing levels might do.

Examples - Use Transparency for Correction Layers

Graduated darkening