OnOne's Perfect Layers Gives Lightroom and Aperture What They're Missing
When I got into digital post-production over a decade ago, there was only one software solution, Adobe Photoshop. Adobe had a small program called Photoshop LE, which soon became Photoshop Elements, but the program was so anemic that I quickly moved beyond it. For several years, every image that I imported and published went through a Photoshop workflow.
With the introduction of Lightroom in 2007, I began using it as a front end to Photoshop. As Lightroom matured, more and more of my work was done within that program. Today, most of my images never go into Photoshop. When I do turn to the Big Gun, it is usually because I need to use layers.
Now, OnOne Software has brought layers to Lightroom and Aperture. To be clear, OnOne's new brainchild, Perfect Layers, does not put layers into Lightroom. It is a stand-alone program accessed by Lightroom or Aperture through a plug-in. The resulting image is saved as a PSD file and re-imported into the host program. Because Perfect Layers is a standalone program, it can be used with any image editing tool, such as Picasa, but my interest is specifically how it integrates into my Lightroom workflow.
The web has many examples of Perfect Layers doing all sorts of complex projects, even combining different images into one. I decided to put it to work in what for me is a routine application.
Here are three images of Winter Falls in Oregon's Silver Falls State Park. They were shot in rapid succession at 1/80 sec, enough to create a slight blur, but still leave considerable definition to the cascading waves of water. Because this series was taken in mid-summer, there was less volume of water than one would get in the spring, but if you compare the three images, you will see slight differences in the paths the water is taking. I want to combine the three streams of water into one image to increase the perceived volume. For this simple task, I routinely export the source images to Photoshop as layers. This made for an ideal test for Perfect Layers.
In Lightroom, I selected the three images and exported them to Perfect Layers through the Plug-In Extras dialogue. As shown above, I changed the blending mode of the top two layers from Normal to Lighten mode. This combined only the lightest areas of the top two layers, which happen to be the part of the dynamic range that holds the water. Often, this is good enough, and I could save the resulting image and go back to Lightroom. Here, though, I had an additional problem--one I frequently confront in Oregon. Part of the yellow-green lichen alongside the falls was also in the range effected by the Lighten blending mode, and causing this portion of the image to bloom. I needed to control that.
The solution was to grab the mask brush from the tool pallet in the upper lefthand corner of Perfect Layers and paint out the areas with lichen in the top two layers. I showed the mask in overlay mode, giving me a clear indication of where I was painting. Normally, I would use a higher rate of feathering than I used in this example, but feathering makes no difference in this operation and the small amount I've used indicates the high degree of control you have in Perfect Layers. You literally could use this tool to mask the background behind an object or individual to place it over a new background.
I saved the resulting image as a PSD files and exited to Lightroom. Within seconds, the new image showed up in Lightroom. I did some final tweaking in the Develop module. The result was exactly when I would have achieved in Photoshop, but, if I were faced with the Perfect Layers vs. Photoshop option today, I could get do so for far less money.
In this pre-release version, Perfect Layers seems slower than using layers in Photoshop, but I expect OnOne engineers to improve performance in the final version and even more as the product matures. The result is that, for photographers, at least, Adobe Photoshop is no longer required software, as it was for me eleven years ago. Using Lightroom and Perfect Layers, you can combine different images or virtual copies of the same image and do almost anything that would require the use of layers in Photoshop.
Use the link below to take Perfect Layers for a free test drive.
