What I found was an incredibly powerful plugin for Adobe Photoshop whose sole purpose is to generate lighting effects and related special effects, such as glowing fogs and the like. Probably familiar to those of you who come from the 3D side of things (3D Studio Max or NewTek LightWave), Genesis V2 Pro is, nevertheless, relatively new in its form as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and not even a year old as a Photoshop plugin for the Macintosh. (It was introduced for the Mac back in May 2000.)

When you think of lighting in Photoshop, you no doubt bring an image into your head of cheesy lens flares or glows that can easily be created using Photoshop's built-in tools. This is not at all what Genesis V2 Pro is about.

What's it about then?
Genesis V2 Pro creates lighting effects that nothing else comes close to. If you take a look at the examples below, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Above you see four different types of lighting effects generated from some of the presets you can download from Future Fantastic's site. The presets are in PC format, but they'll work in the Mac version as well. (But see below under the "Performance" heading for stability issues.)

But the plugin doesn't stop there. Obviously its use would be fairly limited if it just created objects like those seen above. It can also be used to insert lighting into the image based on color samples from the image. In other words, you can assign a color to which the lighting effect will be applied, and then allow it to feather out from there. You can see in the interface shot below how the active area appears in its original color, while the rest of the image is masked off.