Software Review: onOne PhotoTools Professional

Hello all. Thanks for checking out this week's software review of onOne Software's, PhotoTools 2 Professional Edition. 

From the onOne website: With PhotoTools 2 you get hundreds of professional-grade photographic effects designed by Jack Davis, Kevin Kubota and onOne Software in house Photoshop professionals, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use program making this the fastest and easiest way to make your photos stand out from the crowd. With PhotoTools 2, you can preview, stack and combine effects to produce professional grade results in just a few clicks. You can even save an effects "recipe" as a preset and use it not only with Photoshop, but also with Lightroom 2 and Aperture 2.1.

I have to say, I do like the results I've seen from the tool, and they are correct when they say it is fast and easy. Many of the results can be produced using native photoshop effects, but it takes much longer than the one-click access you'll find with PT2.

Like we've mentioned before, everything in the Plug-In Suite can be found under the onOne menu in Photoshop. Once open, PhotoTools presents a pretty easy to navigate user interface. I'm going to include a screen capture I got from onOne to show you what it looks like. Like many of the onOne tools you find the ability to mask the effects, and a photoshop layer-like "Stack" available to arrange multiple effects on top of each other.

The main purpose of the interface, however, is to select and preview the massive library of effects. (271 total effects straight out of the box) With that in mind, instead of taking a lot of time showing how to use the tool (which really is quite easy), I've decided to show you a half a dozen or so cool effects applied to one of my photos all done with a single click in PhotoTools.

Here's my starting photo:

Nikon D3, 24-70mm (at 35mm), f/2.8 at 1/500s, ISO 100

Effect - Feel the Dragon

Effect - B&W Grainy Film

Effect - Impressionist

Effect - Day For Night

Effect - Wow Tint Brown

Effect - Kodachrome

... and as I mentioned - there are 265 other effects to try out too.

In conclusion, I first tried PhotoTools 2 in order to write this review. I've had a lot of fun playing with it, and it yields some pretty cool results. It would certainly be worth downloading the demo, particularly if you're one of those folks that doesn't want to take a lot of their time learning all the intricacies of photoshop.

Make sure you check back next week to see the final plug-in of the suite, Mask Pro 4.

If this, or any of onOne's software interests you, the folks at onOne have generously provided a 20% discount to all of my readers. Simply click on the link below to go the onOne store, and enter coupon code "TJP10" at checkout to receive your discount.