AKVIS Enhancer V.6.0
Reviewed by Michael Potter
Enhancer V.6.0 $69 USD, € 53 Euro System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later; Universal binary; 512 MB RAM; 15 MB Hard Drive Space; One of: Photoshop 6-CS3, Photoshop Elements or GraphicConverter X. |
|
Strengths: simple interface, recover lost image details with ease Weaknesses: limited documentation, minor quirk transferring image to Photoshop For a demo of this product: http://akvis.com/en/enhancer/index.php |
|
Introduction
It’s not uncommon to compose a shot in your digital camera only to find when you get back to your computer for “developing”, what you saw in the viewfinder and what the camera captured are two totally different things. In many cases these problems are caused by the automatic settings in your camera taking their readings from a different part of the scene than your eye. The end result can be images that are under or over-exposed, leaving the subject flat and lifeless.
AKVIS Enhancer is a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that promises to recover some of the lost detail in areas of uneven exposure and even bring back detail in parts of your photos that are overexposed.
Being somewhat of an expert at taking underexposed images, I
was eager to give AKVIS Enhancer a try. The Enhancer plug in was tested in
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended on my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4.9. Images were
captured with a first generation Canon Digital Rebel SLR.
Getting Started
Installation of Enhancer is straight forward, but there certainly is no hand-holding on the part of AKVIS. They spend more time in the sparse installation instructions describing their license agreement and how to get past it than they spend on installing the plug-in for Photoshop CS3.
"Drag the folder into the Plugins folder of your photo editor”
That’s the extent of their instructions. Though I downloaded the Photoshop CS3 version, there's no indication as to WHERE the plug-ins folder might reside on your Mac. Surprisingly, the DMG doesn’t include an alias to the proper installation location even though the download was for CS3 specifically.
So while I’m aware “Plug-Ins” is found in the Photoshop folder within Applications, I have to wonder how many other people are? Granted, AKVIS’ customer base likely trends toward the more experienced Photoshop users, but, still, there's a wide range of Photoshop users out there and many are not aware that plug-ins exist, let alone where the folder might be, so a little help from AKVIS would be appreciated to ensure everyone has a pleasant experience with their product.
Once AKVIS Enhancer is installed and Photoshop is restarted, however, it’s very easy to locate in the Filters menu under the sub-menu AKVIS.
When activated, you’ll see that it’s really quite a simple interface with only four main parameters to adjust.
The Shadows parameter lightens and enhances detail in the underexposed parts of an image without causing loss of detail in the light areas.
Conversely, Highlights brings out the detail in light areas of an image. As with shadows, the light areas become darker, but as you move the slider to the right, AKVIS warns that you may lose middle tones in some images causing the image to flatten a bit.
Level of Detail tells Enhancer how much detail to pick out of the image based on color transitions. So the higher the value, the more detail is visible. Because it's based on color transition, you may find more noise in your image if it was underexposed to begin with and you set this value too high.
And the last adjustment is Lightness. Quite possibly the simplest setting in the toolbox, it defaults to 50 on a scale of 1 to 100. As you slide toward 100 the image gets lighter and as you slide toward 1, the image gets darker.
In addition to those parameter adjustments, there are Before and After tabs to keep track of the progression of changes made to the image and a Presets drop down to save and select some of your favorite settings.
Using the Software
I set out to enhance a number of different pictures from my library. In the end, I limited my selection to just two for this review. The first was taken in a dark hallway with little overhead light and the other snapped outdoors with the subject backlit a bit too much.
Some of the others I messed around with didn’t highlight Enhancer’s core functionality as well as the photos chosen – namely, bringing the detail out from your muddy images.
Starting with the first image, you can see that although a flash was used, it’s still woefully underexposed in the left half of the image. Colors are dull and the whites are grey. Also, detail – what Enhancer is going to help us with – is lost in the texture of the wall as well as the subjects themselves.
The moment I bring it in to Enhancer, however, there’s a dramatic difference seen with no other tweaks to the parameters made:
That’s the original off to the left with Enhancer’s window floating above it on the right.
Clicking on the Before button in Enhancer reveals one of the issues I have with the program: What you see in the window is not necessarily what you get.
Here is the original on the left and what should be the original within Enhancer on the Before tab, but you can see that Enhancer’s version is much lighter. And I’ve found that to be the case in Photoshop as well after the enhancements have been applied.
Below is the original image and on the right is the enhanced image. Though notably improved, it’s still not as light as the version seen on the After tab in the AKVIS Enhancer dialog box.
My initial reaction was that this was due to the image being a JPG and not a RAW image that would allow for more granular tweaks, so I played around with a few RAW images to see what would happen.
In the screen shot below you can see the original outdoor image on the left behind the Enhancer dialog box.
AKVIS Enhancer did a great job of pulling the subject out of the picture and adding a lot of detail otherwise lost to the shadows, but, once again, when I clicked Apply, the image darkened considerably when brought into Photoshop.
It’s hard to say what the problem is here. Clearly Enhancer gave me a much different result in its dialog box than what it gave me in Photoshop. It could be a compatibility issue with Photoshop CS3 or perhaps a minor flaw in Enhancer that’s not sending the data over properly. In either case, there aren’t very many places to turn to find out the answer. I clicked through to their FAQ only to find, once again, multiple questions about licensing and serial numbers, but nothing on specific issues in any of the photo editing applications they support.
However, Enhancer’s main function is to bring out the detail in an image. So how did it do with that?
Pretty darn good!
Sticking with our little furry friend, I loaded up the original, the Enhancer retouched version and a version that I tweaked by hand using the Camera RAW dialog box in Photoshop and, though not obvious if you look at them individually, the results are quite striking when compared side by side:
On the far left is the original, the AKVIS Enhancer version is in the middle and the hand re-touched photo is on the right. What should grab you immediately is the wonderful contrast in that middle photo. The blacks are black and the fur really looks great. Despite my best 5 minute effort in Adobe Camera RAW, the meerkat on the right is still a bit washed out and I couldn’t get much more detail in the fur without the image getting too grainy from the sharpening – though I think I may have pulled a bit more of the ‘kat’s facial features out.
I’m sure I could have come up with better results if I’d messed around in Camera RAW a bit longer (especially to get rid of that washed out look), but it would have taken me considerably longer than the results produced by Enhancer in a mere fraction of the time.
For fine detail work, AKVIS Enhancer could not be beat.
Conclusion
Perhaps one of AKVIS Enhancer’s biggest downfalls on the Mac platform is the limited number of programs it’s compatible with. Though I’m not familiar with GraphicConverter X, I’m well aware of the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. If you only shoot in JPG or TIFF, the simple controls of AKVIS Enhancer will help you bring out the best in your photos and do so much more easily than you could using Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight adjustment or even Levels and Curves. It’s a shame the plug-in is not available for iPhoto.
Considering the target market is most likely the prosumer photographer who shoots in RAW 100% of the time and can take advantage of the excellent RAW image importers in Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom – and has the skills to use them properly – if you’re looking for a program to offer only tonal enhancement to your images, then AKVIS Enhancer is likely overkill.
What I didn’t “get” about Enhancer when I first sat down with it is what, ultimately, makes it a great addition to your Photoshop toolbox. That is, the ability to draw out detail in specific parts of an image – the shadows or the highlights – without affecting the areas you want to leave alone. For extracting detail thought lost to the shadows, AKVIS Enhancer could save an image that otherwise would be destined to the trash can.
Recommendation
AKVIS Enhancer is a great product and performs as advertised. I am a little concerned about the differences between what we see in the Enhancer dialog box and what we get in Photoshop after applying the filter. For that I marked it down a half a star or so. And if it really is meant for a broad range of users with varying skill levels, then the lack of proper installation instructions is unacceptable – a simple one sentence “Please place in the Plug-ins folder of Adobe Photoshop CS3 which is found...” in the Read Me would be more than they have now.
However, if you came to me tomorrow and said, “I really need an easy way to enhance the detail in my digital photos. What’s an easy way to do that in Photoshop?” I wouldn’t skip a beat in recommending AKVIS Enhancer … though I’d be waiting by the phone for your call asking, “How do I install this thing?”
