Introduction

Stumbled across a new plug-in called Shadow Illuminator (SI) from . The blurb says "Shadow Illuminator restores details in shadows through physical modeling of light and surfaces" - "Coo!", I thought, "sounds impressive." The PDF manual further explains that this software has been developed by The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Anyway I downloaded the trial and after a little experimentation decided to spring for the USD 39.95.

Installation and Activation

Installation of the software was very simple. The install program recognised that I also have Photoshop v7 and Photoshop Elements installed on my system and allowed the plug-in file to be installed in all three locations. Activation, however, was slightly more convoluted. Activation? Yes, activation! You can only use SI on the system for which you obtain activation. The manual is a PDF containing 12 pages - of these, three are taken up by the cover, copyright notice and contents, there are four pages on the Licence manager and getting the key and less than one on actually using the plug-in. Of the 11 Qs on the , 8 are about registration, licences and activation. For a 40 buck piece of software this seems like overkill to me.

I confess it was rather late at night when I went through the activation process and maybe I didn't read the instructions as carefully as I could have, but I did go round in circles for a little while. The bottom line is, you end with an account of the Intrigue Plug-ins site that has a record of what you bought. One question I didn't find the answer to is: how do I transfer the licence to another system? The activation requirement may cost them a few customers, as this is an emotive issue for some users. (Update: Stan Bonis has reported that he registered before downloading the trial - which I didn't - and described activation as "a snap".)

Operation

Being more positive, there is a reason that the manual has only one page of instructions on using SI and half that page is a screen shot of the dialogue window like this. SI has only two controls:

• Amount: specifies how much of the effect is applied to the original image
• Fill Light: specifies how “flat” the illumination field is. Increasing the Fill Light slider “illuminates” shadows increasingly more in respect to already illuminated surfaces

This software is very simple to use. For my first few tests, the default values for Amount and Fill Light worked fine.