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.