There's a new plug-in in town. Buena Software has made available Au Naturel for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Combustion. The software is a collection of effects that allows you amazing control over your image footage. With the new plug-in, you could have effects that look like they might have been done in camera.
The First Effect…
The first of the effects is the Adjust Exposure effect. This is a combined brightness/contrast effect that allows the users to adjust exposure. Users will be able to preview how much adjustments are made, as well as the end result.
With Au Naturel's 32 bit floating point linear RGB color space, the results from applying the effect to a layer often yield more natural effects.
The Second Effect…
The Directional Blur effect allows users to constrain the blur to a particular angle. An added bonus in this plug-in lets the user utilize the two blur effects to change how the edges of the frame are interpreted. Instead of the soft edge that reveals your underlying layers, users can mirror the edges or simply repeat the edge pixels.
The Third Effect…
The package includes a Levels effect that is an applications levels control but allows users to utilize values outside of the minimum and maximum pixel value range. The Levels control also lets users to make adjustments on one or more of the color channels or alpha channel. For that matter, many of the effects in the collection allows the users to make adjustments on individual channels that lead to some very interesting and powerful results.
The Fourth Effect…
The Transform effect has the ability to rotate and scale a layer. Au Naturel claims that their algorithms resample the image by users to deliver a much better result.
The Fifth Effect…
This effect is a brand new version that can be used to create a time lapse effect by averaging frames. The end result is an image that looks like it had a long exposure time.
The Best Effect…
The best thing about the plug-in is that the interface allows you to apply the effects quickly for various results. For After Effects users, each time they apply an effect, the effect controls appear in the interface.
However, with Final Cut Pro or discreet Combustion, all of the controls are visible regardless of the user's application of the effect or not. This can be confusing on the Combustion interface where one must go through several pages looking for the controls for the effect. Also, the separation among the effect controls is not well marked.
Clearly, the Au Naturel may not be a must-have application. Nevertheless, at $99 for both Mac and Windows, it is a good buy.
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