The most recent *new* Photoshop Plugin I purchased was Flaming Pear's Hue and Cry. Flaming Pear is most famous for Super Blade Pro, the beveller/texturizer/materializer filter that creates other-worldly precious-yet-tarnished effects on any selection in Photoshop. Flaming Pear also has a few dozen other plugins both free and commercial at very reasonable prices. One thing I absolutely LOVE about Flaming Pear's Plugins that have an interface with controls (as opposed to ones that just apply one standard effect) is the dice. Click the dice and you get a randomized effect. I think there should be a law that mandates randomizing dice on all graphic software or plugins. I can hear the anal retentive perfectionists now, you know the kind, the boys from artschool who never got dirty in painting class but preferred the sterile environment of graphic design. Their work was technically good, but lacking in passion: "You should know how to use the software without resorting to the dice to create an effect for you". Bite me. Just because I like the dice doesn't mean I don't know how to use the software. And it's very easy with Flaming Pear because all their plugins are very intuitive. Dice makes experimentation fun, and sometimes surprises you with an effect you probably never would've come across on your own. The anal retentives were absent the day they studied Dada.

I downloaded a demo version of Hue and Cry, a "color noise generator" several years ago when it first came out, but it didn't knock my socks off at the time. I was still relying heavily on KPT 3's Texture Explorer for random color and patterns, as well as KPT 5's Noize. When I also got Alien Skin Textures, that gave me a bundle full of textures and patterns to play around with, generate and mutate. But I thought I'd give it another try. I downloaded another demo and fell in love with some of the color combinations it would generate. It was a sentimental attachment to something long lost that made me feel happy. But upon deeper experimentation I realized this Plugin has the ability to create effects very evocative of abstract modern artists. Upon clicking the dice a few times, I'd see vignettes of art history float by. I created the miniature samples exhibited on this page in the styles of the following artists in order from top to bottom:

Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keefe, Gustav Klimt, Georges Braque, Hans Hoffman, Wassily Kandinsky.

Hue and Cry works by applying colored effects in various modes to whatever shape you select: circle, square, diamonds, octagons, tvs, fluerons and points. You can also control for overlap, warping, complexity (which doesn't move from "0" when I hit the dice, BTW...must be a bug), softness and zoom. You can also select the saturation of the color, the hue, the "striping", and something called "doublure." And not only does Hue and Cry have one randomize dice button, it has three! The big dice mutates the most, the two medium-sized dice less so, and the three little dice button mutates in small increments. The only thing I wish is that there was a way to apply a separate dice to each feature so you can *only* randomize the color, for example, or lock certain features so you can randomize everything except the smoothing as another example. But for $20 (with free upgrades on future releases), I'm not complaining!

Labels: Graphics and Software