Optics is a new collection of professional plug-ins for Photoshop from Boris FX.
In this Quick Start Video, I will show you how to dive into the Optics interface and
get started adding amazing visual effects and looks to your photos.
Optics is a set of cinematic optical camera filters that emulate lighting gels, lens polarizing
filters, real world lighting effects, beauty passes, and gobo effects.
Optics can recreate conditions that don't exist in the photo like lighting from windows,
lightning changes, adding environmental elements like mist or moons, and much more.
Bring beautiful VFX tools to your photography in just a few clicks.
First, let’s talk about how it works and the user interface.
I will convert my clip for smart filters, then apply Optics under the effects menu.
Optics supports Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom and also comes with a standalone application
for macOS and Windows.
To start in Photoshop, I’ll select my layer and under Filters, add Boris FX>Optics.
For lightroom classic, right click on a picture in the library and select edit in, then select
Boris FX Optics.
Once the filter is applied use edit a copy with Lightroom Adjustments instead of saving
over the original.
Or in the standalone application, we’ll launch and open an image under the FIle menu.
In the top left of the Optics interface, we have a few tools you need to know about: Reset,
crop, rotate, which are available in the standalone, and add mask which is available in both the
standalone and the plugin... and underneath that you can find the effects panel.
The effects panel is where you can view, and affect, your effects.
You can find zoom, pan, resolution, compare, snapshot, show mask and histogram at the top
of the viewer.
At the bottom of the viewer is the effects list with a built in search bar.
And to the far right is the presets and parameters panel with another search built in to navigate
presets.
We will get into the nitty gritty of what these tools all do in a moment.
You can change the layout to suit your preferences, but we will be using the default layout in
this quick start guide.
Double clicking on a thumbnail in the presets window automatically adds the filter to an
image in the viewer as well as a layer in the effects window.
Or, click on the add layer icon at the top left of the effect window to add the filter
as a layer.
Additional filters can then be stacked the exact same way.And once you have added your
filters you can blend them using blend modes or you can mask them and I will talk about
masking here in a minute.
You can also click on the screen icon and view that layer while working on an effect
in a different layer.
Optics has 75 curated, Emmy award-winning Boris FX Sapphire filters, 160 total filters
and thousands of presets.
While that sounds like a lot of filters, the search effects feature in the bottom left
is useful for finding lots of effects quickly... like blurs for instance... if I type blur
here in this search window I can quickly find the best blur for my shot.
And the great thing about Optics is that presets look good immediately without much work.
The Effect window shows all filters that have been applied to your image.
The most recently applied filter is at the top of the stack, while the earlier applications
are at the bottom.
When you click on a thumbnail, the Viewer displays that layer.
The search in the presets lets me find presets within that effect, or, I can simply star
my favorites.
Either Presets or Parameters are selectable in a tab at the bottom of the window.
Optics uses layers that you can manipulate individually even while viewing other layers.
The interface is fairly standard and allows for preferential rearranging.
Dragging masks to a different layer is a fast way to copy them from one layer to another.
Simply drag the layers around in the layer pile and select the effects or masks as needed.
Optics has truly excellent masking tools to selectively determine where the effects will
be applied on your image.
A gradient or spot mask is a black and white mask where white is opaque and black is transparent
and is great for vignettes and blurs.
Here you can see that the blur is only happening within the gradient mask
While effects can be expediently applied with gradient and x spline masking, where Optics
really shines are quick mask and edge snapping splines, which both use a "keep in" and "hold
out" scribble approach to determining what to grab.
Snap is an easy to use interactive image masking tool.
Snap provides instant visual feedback by snapping an editable spline to an object's boundary
even on low contrast edges.
Using Mark Foreground, first mark an area of the image to be selected and then refine
the boundary by telling snap what not to select by using Mark Background.
You can further refine an edge by either clicking and dragging spline points to edit or drawing
a stroke along the edge.
EZ Mask is an easy to use interactive image masking tool capable of isolating almost any
object in an image--even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections…
which honestly seemed a bit like witchcraft to me the first time I used it.
So we tell EZ Mask what the foreground is using paint foreground, and define the background
with paint background, anything unknown and tricky, like hair edges or transparency, can
be painted with the Paint Missing brush.
Make sure to grab all of the colors present in the FG and BG respectively with strokes
or the algorithm, no matter how clever, will have trouble processing the difference between
the two.
You can also use the fills instead of strokes for a faster and more accurate mask.
Click “create mask” and you’ll have a very articulated mask based on the estimated
transparency of the object.
Sometimes complicated foreground details may be missing after the mask is generated but
using the Paint missing brush can help recover lost detail.
This works best when the colors between the object and the background are different enough
to be keyed.
The selective color selection mask is also excellent, especially for grabbing gradients
of color like clouds, or solid areas of color like skies, buildings, and ground planes.
It uses either Hue, Saturation, Brightness, or all the available color channels individually
or together to define a mask based on a quick stroke selection.
You can then use the histogram tools to manipulate the values for the perfect mask.
To create a spline path, select the path tool from the Add Mask dropdown menu.
Simply click to create a “connect the dot” path between clicks like a standard selection
tool, and this will create a spline mask you can manipulate however you like.
And you can, of course, paint your own mask manually by using the paint mask.
Users can utilize selection masking and blending modes and also move masks around between layers
for fine control over every filter used.
And when using the plugin, Optics expresses itself as a smart filter, so you can always
fiddle with your applied effect after you have clicked “done” in the plugin.
To learn more about the powerful newest addition to our Boris FX toolset, Optics, please visit
us at www.borsifx.com, where you can find Free Training Videos, Official Documentation,
Boris FX news, Artist Interviews, Case Studies, and so much more.