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.
It also gives
you an unusual amount of depth in the parameters you can assign
to each individual light object. You can select a preset from
the effects window (above) and then edit it (below), or you can
create an entirely new light from scratch.
The interface
above is the edit window, where you assign parameters for your
lights. It looks a bit ... technical at first glance, but it's
actually quite simple. You'll be able to figure things out pretty
quickly just by playing around with parameters and adding new
effects.
Performance
Genesis V2 Pro is definitely quick—actually instant—which
is quite surprising considering all the calculations it has to
go through. I tested this out on two separate Macs using Photoshop
5.5 and 6.0 running OS 9.0.4. In both cases, this plugin crashed
hard. Sometimes it would just crash itself. Sometimes it would
take down Photoshop with it. And sometimes it would even take
down my whole machine.
I believe
this program was written in Think C/C+. I say this because the
opening tutorial in Think C is a little exercise in which you
learn to make a program that prints the words "Hello World"
on your screen. This also happens to be the message you get in
Genesis V2 Pro when it encounters an error. That's not good.
Other problems
include buttons failing to behave as they should, such as the
"Cancel" button doing nothing, and general bugginess,
such as alerts that don't go away and screens that fail to redraw.
The bottom
line
Genesis V2 Pro is unquestionably the most powerful tool available
for creating lighting effects. I wish only that its stability
were improved so that I wouldn't have to experience crashes whenever
I felt like doing some unique lighting. For the stability issue
alone I can't give this program a strong buy recommendation. I'm
even hesitant to give it a buy recommendation. But it really does
do some nice effects. I also can't say whether it's this buggy
on the Windows platform, since I haven't tested it for Windows.
It's probably much more stable there, since it's been around so
much longer for Windows. But I can't say for certain. So I'll
compromise and give this a neutral recommendation with the caveat
that it will crash you, so make sure you save often. I hope also
to see the bugginess worked out in a future release, at which
point this plugin will certainly merit a positive recommendation.
Genesis V2
Pro is available for £99 (about $150, depending on the exchange
rate). For more information about Genesis V2 Pro or to download
a fully functional demo, visit http://www.futurefantastic.com.
