Other Sites

Product: Visual imaging software

Developer: Auto FX Software

Minimum Requirements: Power Macintosh, Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X, 256MB RAM, 30MB hard disk space

Mac OS X Compatibility: Native

Retail Price: $179.00

Availability: Out now

It's been about ten years since I first started playing around in Photoshop. Since that time, I've taken courses on the program at Parsons School of Design, and I've attended numerous useless one day seminars. I've used it for design, and I've used it for electronic prepress. Other than my operating system, it's the one program where upgrades aren't a possibility, they're a necessity. Where other programs come and go, Photoshop is the one of the few applications that never leave my desktop. When I upgrade systems, it's the first application I reinstall.

Despite all this work, there's one aspect of Photoshop I've never really been able to grasp; the filters. I don't care how often I mess around them, the results are always different and unpredictable. There are some in there I've never even used. Indeed, I don't even know what they mean. And yet, each time a new filter comes out, I always have to check it out. If not try a demo, I at least read up and check out the samples. Will it give me good results? Is it easy to use? Will it make me appear more talented than I really am?

Such was my approach to Auto FX's latest set of visual effects, Mystical Lighting. To be fair, Mystical Lighting is more than just a Photoshop plug-in. It can work with just about any application that accepts Photoshop plug-ins, or it can be used as a standalone application. I'm a Photoshop users, so I'm writing this review from that angle. For those who would use this program as a stand-alone app, keep that in mind as you read.

In his recent review of Auto FX applications (DreamSuite Series 1 and 2, DreamSuite Gel, AutoEye and Photographic Edges) Gary Coyne had one major complaint throughout; interface. Auto FX apps take over your entire screen, including the Dock, and they somewhat take over your system, as well. In other words, they don't behave like Photoshop plug-ins should. I guess this is what happens when your plug-ins can also be stand-alone apps. Despite some negative comments from reviewers and users alike, Auto FX doesn't seem to be relenting on this issue. Therefore, I guess I will. I don't like it, but I've come to accept it.

The interface looks and feels sort of like a Flash-based website. The tools are on the top and the left, and they pop up to control and apply actions to the main content. Rolling over the various text options highlights them like CSS controlled web hovers, but you have to actually click off the pop-up windows to close them. I'd rather they close automatically when you pull the cursor off the window. You can customize the colors and textures used in this interface, but most of the choices offered would just distract and annoy your typical graphics professional.

There are a couple other annoyances as well. We have multiple undos in Mystical Lighting, which is a plus, but it's still not implemented very well. It's fairly limited in the number it can perform, and each undo takes a moment to implement. Perhaps this is why Auto FX provides memory dots, in which you basically take a snapshot of your image and all of the current settings. You can then experiment with various settings and be sure you can safely return to the state at which you assigned the memory dot. If you see something else you like, you can assign that state to a different dot. Basically, it's a less intuitive version of Photoshop's history pallette. You have to think ahead to gauge to which state you'd want to return, and that's not always easy to do. I found myself either assigning to many dots or not enough, and never really grew comfortable with the system.

On the other hand, there were some surprises as well. For instance, Mystical Lighting effects are compatible with Photoshop actions. If you're recording an action in Photoshop and apply a Mystical Lighting effect, this effect can be recorded. Most of the effects in Mystical Lighting are too dynamic to be applied on this sort of mass scale, but it could prove very useful for some of the more subtle changes Mystical Lighting provides. I'm not sure such compatibility with Photoshop actions is all that unique, but I certainly wasn't expecting it here.

I also wasn't expecting such effective layer and masking controls, but Mystical Lighting has them. There are four layer types that can be controlled by the user: photo, effect, masking and correction, and how they relate to one another is determined by their position in the layer hierarchy. Although I tested these effects as Photoshop plug-ins, it's easy to see how Mystical Lighting could be used as a stand-alone application.

Getting back to dynamic effects, that's pretty much what I thought Mystical Lighting would be all about. When reading about the software, I had visions of Boris Vallejo and Jonathon Earl Bowser paintings in my head. Yes, there are effects in here that can provide such imagery (provided you've got the talent to create the artwork to which you will apply the effects), but quite a few of the effects included are much more subtle and useful on a day to day basis. The total package includes:

• Edge Highlights - Adds subtle highlights to images to provide extra depth and separation. Such effects aren't too difficult to obtain with Photoshop itself.
• Ethereal - Adds tonal diffusion and light to soften and enrich the lighter values in an image. Very cool and easy to use. One of the better ones.
• Fairy Dust - Adds a wide assortment of creative fantasy patterns and content (twinkles, sparkles, stars, etc.) to the shape of a path you draw. This one's fun. I especially like that you can draw the path, then manipulate it after the fact using bezier curves.
• Flare - Creates bursts of light and glowing vortex shapes to simulate a wide variety of looks from a realistic suns to sci-fi styled rays of light. Provides a decent set of controls to achieve either very subtle or extremely stark effects.
• Light Brush - Lets you brush on highlights in areas where you want to add new or improve existing light on your image. As with Edge Highlights, these results, although nice, can be just as easily obtained directly in Photoshop.
• Light Caster - Adds a wide assortment of streaming light sources onto your image. Very cool. You can easily determine the path of the light, and can even create smokey effects in the atmosphere through which the light passes. Even the areas outside the stream of light can be controlled. Fantastic for drawing attention to certain areas of an image or for creating interesting light effects.
• Mist - Adds natural looking ground fog, blowing mist, smoke and even a blowing snow type of look to images. I thought this would be one of my favorites, but I was never able to achieve a realistic look with it. Also, brushing it on my images would sometimes achieve nothing. I was never able to discern the reason.
• Mottled Background - Adds distinctive mottled canvas style backgrounds, like those you find in portrait studios, behind your images. One of the more impressive effects, and certainly one of the most useful, but also one of the most difficult to pull off effectively. You'll need to work with a masking layer with this one, so there's still plenty of blending issues to work out before you can apply the effect.
• Radial Light Caster - Creates bursts of streaming light that radiate outward from a central point. You'll have to play around a while to get the exact effect you want, but I liked that it was easy to brush out the effect in certain areas to make it appear behind elements in the image.
• Rainbow - Lets you add gently blended colored rainbows into your artwork. Excellent control in every way except in that you can't brush out the effect to make it appear behind elements in the image as you can with the Radial Light Caster.
• Shader - Allows you to cast shading and tonal changes onto your images. This can fairly easily adjust the shading of an image and give it some extra dimension. I was surprised at how much better a few of my photos looked after a quick run through this filter.
• Shading Brush - Enhance the shading and tonal values in your image in a very subtle and believable way that simulates a natural event that would have occurred in your image if the lighting conditions had been different. This is the kind of thing amateur photographers will love because it allows them to achieve professional looking lighting effects without the cost of professional quality lighting rigs. It'll take some practice to get this one done, but it's time well spent.
• Shadow Play - Adds a touch of shadow to your images. As the name implies, this one's just for play. It works okay, but I wasn't able to achieve a result that looked natural. Perhaps if there was a way to easily customize the shadow being case instead of using the presets...
• Spotlight - Adds a wide assortment of streaming light sources onto your image. Another nice one with which you can achieve some striking effects. However, here is where the slowness of the program really cam into play. Each time I even slightly changed the perspective of spotlight (you can apply more than one) I had to wait quite some time for the change to take place. See more on this below.
• Surface Light - Projects light through a shape to create photo-realistic light patterns on the surface of your image. A much better and more effective use of the Shadow Play filter, casting light patterns instead of shadow patterns. Very useful for creating streaming light effects, as if through a window or trees.
• Wispy Mist - Allows you to brush, shape and flow wisps of mist and fog. As with Mist, I wasn't able to achieve realistic looking results with this filter. Perhaps it was the image I was using, because some of Auto FX's samples look pretty nice.

So, that's the pack. As with most packages of this sort, some are more fun than others, some are more useful than others, and some are more effective than others. Rest assured, though, there's bound to be something in here for everyone.

The thing is, you need to have a good idea of what effect you want to achieve before you come into Mystical Lighting. To do this, you'll need to have a strong knowledge of how these filters work and what they can do. This, then, requires a lot of practice, and practice in this program can be extremely frustrating. Applying the effects was, as I've mentioned, somewhat slow on my machine. Plenty of undos were required, and quite often I had to go back to Photoshop to better set it up for Mystical Lighting.

To their credit, the developers of Mystical Lighting seem to realize it's slow, so they've set up a couple features to help out. You can set a preference that tells Mystical Lighting to apply your changes only when you tell it to, thereby allowing you to make as many changes as you want before it redraws the preview. You can also set it to redraw on a delay if you prefer.

You can achieve some amazing results with Mystical Lighting, but precious few of them are easy to come by. Some more of the problems with previous Auto FX effect packages have been solved, the two main holdouts still being speed issues and the domineering interface. However, a new one has popped up for me. I'm a little more patient these days with PDF manuals I have to print myself, but people...for the love of all that's holy...number the pages and give us a table of contents! I don't want to have to sort through over 80 pages of text to find information on the filter I want, and I certainly don't want to have to open the PDF just to determine in which order the pages should go in the event they get messed up. It sounds petty, yes, but the manual is extremely important in a program such as this. If these guys can't even take care of something as basic as page numbering, how can we expect them to worry about something like interface issues?

Seems we could all use another class at Parsons, huh.

Before

After applying three fairly simple filters

More impressive samples.