New to the “Photoshop Parody Plug-ins” collection – “L-Plates” for Photoshop. This is a clever little plug-in that you can give to all your friends who produce endless over-saturated, over-processed images. Now, with “L-Plates” you can configure how far they can push each slider in Photoshop.
For example, the default setting in L-Plates for the saturation slider is 15. This means that the use cannot physically push the slider past 15 without getting an over-ride code. And you’re not going to give that code to them, are you? Because you’re so used to seeing images with the saturation slider up around 40-45 (and beyond).
You can also opt to go for the “Electrode Edition”, which includes a hi-voltage adapter that’s connected directly to the user’s skin (location to be decided by you) that will deliver an electric shock to the user each time they try and push the slider beyond the configured limits. And each time the user tries to go past the limit, the delivered voltage will increase, and can only be reset back to the low level by exiting Photoshop, going off to get a cup of tea, and coming back in a more relaxed state, where the user is less likely to over-process an image.
In the testing for this product it has been found that after a week of using it, the resulting images are far more pleasing and natural looking. In fact, and added bonus seems to be that rather than pushing the sliders up to their default limits, the user under re-training actually stops short of the limit rather than going right up to it. In the case of the saturation slider, which is set to default 15, some user actually only go as far as 13 or 14. This was an unexpected side-effect of using the “Electrode Edition”. Because of this, the next revision of the product may have the capability to deliver a more powerful electric shock, which may encourage even lighter use of the sliders, and will probably result in normal images in a much shorter time-scale.
Installation is a snap. Just browse to a friend’s Flickr or Facebook photo, and let the plug-in do the rest. It’ll analyse the picture, and if it detects that the image is over-processed, it’ll find where the image was uploaded from, and install the plugin on the remote machine automatically.
There are over 100 slider configurations available in “L-Plates”, and you can control the maximum setting for each one. The plug-in also has a fail-safe, in that it will detect if the administrator attempts to change the default limits to something that is beginning to look a bit over-processed. In this case, it will automatically recognise that you don’t have enough cop-on to set sensible limits yourself, and you certainly should not be telling friends what they should be doing. If your plugin gets into this state, there is a special trainers edition of ‘L-Plates’ which comes with hard-wired limits that you cannot change. Once you’ve used that for a month, you can then upgrade to the normal version, where you can then configure the limits for installation on your over-processing friends computers.
At last – an end to the assault on your eyes every time you view new images from your friends. 🙂
Related Plugins: L-Plates for HDR – Similar to Photoshop -L-Plates, but works with all popular HDR software packages.
This news-release is scheduled for publication on April 1st 2012.