Phototools Tutorial – Take Back Your Windlight Control

PHOTOTOOLS TUTORIAL PIC 1

There are very few things I have hated as much as I have loathed the changed to the windlight settings in the new UI. I deal with them, as do you, but basically, what a pain in the ass they made it.

On plurk the other day, my friend Isa linked to PHOTOTOOLS which is a Firestorm plug in that you can use to wrestle back control into one easy interface option and make your photoshoots so much simpler.

First of all, go to Phototools and DL the plug in.

Follow the instructions it gives you in the zip file. You will be replacing some of the files in your Firestorm skins folder. I made a copy and put them in a handy dandy folder. It’s very easy and took me about two minutes.

Now, restart Firestorm and hit the QUICKSTART button at bottom right. You now get a different menu.

You will see that your camera control options are a bit different now too. For your windlight settings you have rocker arrows as well as drop downs.

A quick tap of water and sky arrows gave me a completely different look. But there’s more.

As you go deeper into the menu options you’ll find many of the more complex features of photography and that we bloggers like – all bundled up into one place.

I am pretty much just about as in love with this as a lazy blogger can be.

This is menu four and five. As you can see, it’s a super easy tool – so easy even a Gidge can do it, and puts so many options right at your fingertips. I need to crank up my antialiasing I see.

You can also get a quick look at your FPS here and other resources on menu five. It’s a little more obscure to me, but I know some of you geeks like that stuff. 🙂

Have fun and let me know what you think in comments after you try it!

If you want to blow up the images for better looks here is the set on FLICKR

 

Shot on Location at Uwst.

 

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