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Photoshop CS2 review
By Colin Smith -
What's new in Adobe Photoshop CS2?
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Autofx Mystical Lighting Review
by Darren Winder
 Mystical Lighting lets anyone apply lighting and shading effects to digital images.
Mystical Lighting includes 16 visual effects, over 400 presets for instant results.
Edge Highlights: add subtle highlights to your images.
Radial Light: Caster adds different types of radial shaped lights, beam and ray to your image.
Ethereal: is the soft lens look. Great for wedding and portraits (a personal favorite)
Rainbow: lets you blend colored rainbows into your image using a path. Loads of styles to choose from great for Mystical images rainbows over waterfall etc…
Fairy Dust: lets you add twinkles, sparkles, snow flakes, stars, glowing embers, light flares, confetti and lots more to the shape of a path . Again great for mystical images and space scenes. (A personal favorite)
Shader: lets you cast shading and tonal changes onto your images by a path.
Flare: this is one for you space fans make alien looking suns, rays of light and vortexes. (Great for space scenes)
Shading Brush: lets you enhance the shading and tonal values in your image naturally.
Light Brush: Brush on extra light and blend in the area you want. Control how the light fades onto the surface of your image.
Shadow Play: Adds realistic looking shadows to your work. Select from hundreds of pre-made shadows like foliage, branches and shape.
Image show objects for the shadow that you want
Image shows the actual object as a shadow
Light Caster: lets you stream light, sunshine and make underwater light effects. It can be used with or without a masked selection. Great for mist or haze on your images.
Spotlight: Adds various spotlight effects to your images. Play about with it you get some realy cool effects.
Mist: adds natural looking ground fog, blowing mist, smoke and even a blowing snow type of look to images. Just brush it on.
Surface Light: add light through objects like window panes and have it cast onto your image.
Mottled Background: adds mottled canvas style backgrounds, great for portrait photos.
Wispy Mist: brush on mist and fog.
Installing:
Mystical Lighting works as both a plug-in and as a stand alone application for Windows 98/NT/2000/ME/XP or Power Macintosh systems running OS 9 or higher. Mystical Lighting runs native under all versions of OS X.
Just run the disk and follow the on screen information, if you want it to work as a plug-in point to your plug-ins folder. The first time you
My thoughts:
You can quickly apply high quality effects to images with ease by using the presets, but why stop there when you can customize the presets and it lets you save your customize effect so you can have it as a preset.
It’s a shame that it does not install into the Dream suite Bundle interface.
What I mean is if you do an effect in Dreamsuite1 then you want to apply an effect from Mystical Lighting on the same image. You have to save your work in Dreamsuite1 and close it, then open up Mystical Lighting and apply your effect. It would have been the icing on the cake if you could access all of Autofx software from one interface. With that said its still one of the best plug-ins that I have seen and used it does make life a lot easier and faster to apply great looking effects to your images.
Purchase Mystical Lighting for $179
ELECTRONIC DOWNLOAD OR PHYSICAL CD
Marks: - Five (5) out of Five (5)
www.autofx.com
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RATING SYSTEM
1 cup - bad
2 cups - not bad
3 cups - good
4 cups - excellent
5 cups - a must have
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