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 (Mac).
Click on the image to enlarge. The controlpanel and preview area can be changed by dragging the sides.

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 -

The Illumination Editor is superb for enhancing existing light.

Example - Fine Art Photography

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

Alerts

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

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.

Modifying flat Illumination

Enhancing Light and Shade

Use Transparency for Correction Layers

Graduated darkening

Histogram and Colorvalues

Histogram

Pixel data

These controls are common to most of the Power Retouche plug-ins. The displayed histogram will be for the area in the preview. You can choose between individual colorchannels, all colorchannels or luminance.

The colorpicker allows you to pick a point (pixel) in the preview and get some interesting data about it. The d-values tell how much the pixel is changed in percent. L tells the luminance value (brightness) of the pixel.

Since posterization is not an issue with this plug-in,
there is no anti-posterization slider.