There's more...

I put up an alpha test version of my Photoshop CS2 plugin that does the for-real Synthetic HDR transform. For anyone interested, it's here:

http://findatlantis.com/wiki/index.php/Synthetic_HDR

It's free as in free beer, but not entirely as in free speech thanks to nasty Adobe and their Photoshop SDK licence terms. Oh well, maybe one day.

I'm really pleased with the results, actually -- go to the web site to have a look, because I'm limited to 500 pixels width here and you need to see them with a bit more resolution really. It seems to turn digital noise into something that looks like film grain from a very slow film. It looks a lot nicer to my eye anyway.

As ever, comments welcome. This has been a lot of fun, actually -- it's the first bit of recreational programming that I think I've done in years. I should do more of it. Which I will, probably along the lines of more plugins. My Vague Plan for world plugin domination is as follows:

1. 'Subsonic', a plugin for mapping from a 16 bit image back to 8 bits with error spreadingFloyd-Steinberg dithering for printing or web purposes. The name comes from the intention, which is to eliminate Mach banding. (Sorry about the bad joke)

2. A Better Light-specific dust filter that identifies and corrects the classic Better Light-style dust streaks automatically.

3. An off-axis realignment tool that corrects images that have been affected by slight camera movement at right-angles to the direction of travel of the sensor.

4. An 'streak killer' that can fix problems with imperfect dark capture or slightly flickering/unstable light sources.

5. Possibly more than one plugin that can process photographs and turn them into plausible botanical illustrations, semi-automatically.

Plugs 2, 3 and 4 are specific to processing photos made with scan backs, but the others are general purpose.

*goes to watch TV*