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MD+F Special Effects
(Volume 1) for ColorWorks V2
- by Chris Wenham

Modular Dreams Incorporated is the first company outside of SPG to produce a set of effects plug-ins for ColorWorks 2. Their first volume of 8 plug-in effects include some simple retouching filters plus a couple of "Woah, cool!" type effects that are fun to play with.

Equate Exposure and Flicker

Equate Exposure will correct image brightness and contrast at a localized level while Flicker will "flicker image pixels" or redraw them using their primary color components while maintaining original brightness.

Halo

The Halo filter will straightforwardly add a cartoon-like 'halo' effect (GIF, 13.7k) around the edges of the image you're working on. There's not much to configure here; you can't specify the thickness of the halo or how widely it is spaced from the edges.

Offcolor

This effect can actually be quite useful in day-to-day image work. It works just like the 'Offset' filter in PhotoShop, but here you can control the offset of the Red, Green and Blue channels independently. In this example (GIF, 12.8k) I've offset the red channel horizontally by 20 pixels. The effect looks a little bit like those '3D' pictures you have to view with special glasses. I could just as easily offset the blue channel -10 pixels vertically, or vertically and horizontally, or I could offset all three channels in any direction all in one go. It's a very powerful tool since you can achieve the regular offset effect just by entering the same pixel values for all three channels.

Picasso

The Picasso effect does what other filters (named after famous painters with a particular style) of similar monickers do. That is it re-creates your image to look as if it was painted in the same style as the famous Pablo Picasso himself (or in the programmer's opinion anyway). This effect will paint with circular swirls of the brush, looking like multicolored pencil shavings as seen from above. The effect (GIF, 12.8k) is startling and actually looks a bit like a flower mural.

This plug-in gives you the ability to control the X and Y spacing as well as the radius of the swirls. The plug-in dialog (GIF, 12.8k) does not, however, show you what the values of these variables are. You just get a slider-bar control for each and have to guess the optimal settings by trial and error.

Spiral

Spiral is the first of the "warping effect" plug-ins. This one will give you a spiral effect much like as if your image was being flushed down a vortex, very similar to the spiral warping of clouds seen in some OS/2 commercials and background bitmaps. The spiral can be limited to just one instance (GIF, 4.5k) of the source image, or you can tile it to continue forever (GIF, 12.8k).

Swirl

Swirl (GIF, 8k) can best be described as, "stretching your picture down a spiral staircase." You can specify the number of degrees, both in positive and negative measurements, that the image is swirled through.

Waves

MD+F's Waves effect (GIF, 7.4k) is probably the most configurable that I've seen, although it's very easy to produce chaos (GIF, 10.2k) with it. It's also the most powerful effect in the set, with the ability to control the number of waves, rings and their height percentages, the number of wiggles and their percentage, something called a "Spider Multiplier", and more. In fact, it's so configurable and powerful that I had a hard time trying to get just an ordinary waves effect like the one possible with Impos/2.

Complaints

I did find one problem with the package: it doesn't seem to be very well multithreaded. A complex Wave effect run on a large canvas will give you the "wait" cursor for a while and slow down any other program you have running in the background. I have Process Commander installed on my system and the PC Assistant would usually complain after an MD+F effect was finished running.

Summary

If you're a serious ColorWorks user, GET THIS. It's only US$27.99 and it adds so much to ColorWorks that you'll soon wonder how you did without it.
 * MD+F Special Effects (Volume 1)
by Modular Dreams Incorporated
MSRP: US$27.99
Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.

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