Perfectly Clear Photoshop plug-in: Review

Perfectly Clear Photoshop plug-in

Condense your Photoshop workflow with this one-touch photo correction plug-in

Athentech is embracing new developments in imaging technology with its Perfectly Clear products. The company’s Photoshop plug-in, reviewed here, is accompanied in the line-up by a Pro, Lab and iPhone app version of the program, offering users a variety of options.
Claiming to be ‘the easiest and fastest way to improve every photo you take’, Perfectly Clear is aimed at Photoshop users needing to batch process a large volume of photos. In this way, professional Photoshop tools are simplified to make them more accessible and streamlined.
The interface is clean and simple, divided into White Balance, Tone, Color, Clarity and Portraiture. Perfectly Clear allows users to have more control and enhance images to their exact preference.

Split Screen view
When you first load your photo into Perfectly Clear, the plug-in makes the changes it deems necessary automatically. By simply clicking on the image you can toggle between the original and the adjusted image. However, you also get the option to view images in Split Screen – horizontally or vertically depending on the image. You can even zoom in and navigate around the photo so that the section you need to keep the closest eye on is in view. This tool saves time and simplifies the editing process.

Interface: The plug-in interface is simple at first glance, with automatic corrections made straight away and intuitive sliders down the side

Presets
To adjust an image, there’s no need to delve deeper than the Preset drop-down menu. Perfectly Clear gives you six Preset options: Default, Landscapes, Portrait, Noise Removal, Fix Dark and Tint Removal. Select one of these and the plug-in perfects the image according to the Preset slider positions. You can also create your own custom presets, a great tool for wedding photographers, for instance, who may need to batch process a large number of photos with the same settings. Although the presets may not be suitable for every image, they are a good starting point and can be further adjusted by manipulating the sliders below to perfect images individually in no time, making professional-looking results achievable for less experienced image editors.

Top features
Under- or overexposed images are a common problem, and Perfectly Clear offers a dedicated tool for correcting this. On Auto Correct, the plug-in does a good job filling in the lost detail in the underexposed areas – but have a manual play with the sliders to get a better end result. White Balance, Tone, Color, Clarity and Portraiture settings can all be further adjusted in the Sliders panel, and in Split Screen view you can see exactly what each adjustment is doing to the image.
The Light Diffusion tool is particularly suited to this type of image problem, although Photoshop’s own Shadow/Highlight tool does do a better job and is more customisable. Resulting photos are also quite noisy, so you need to keep a careful eye on progress throughout the editing.

Exposure: Control the exposure across an image so that both the background and the foreground are well exposed

Noise and clarity
With image artefacts creeping into images after adjustments, the Sharpening and Noise tools are important. As with Photoshop’s own toolset for Noise, results can start to blur pixels and lose detail. Load images into the program shot at high ISO levels – we tested against images shot at ISO 3200 and 6400 – and the program appears to do a good job while in the Perfectly Clear interface. However, hit the OK button and view the image back in Photoshop, and you’ll see it’s taken on strange artefacts and colours, and the pixel noise looks worse than before.

White Balance
The White Balance option is useful for correcting colour casts without going over the top or losing pixel detail. Load up your image then tick Tint Correction in the White Balance section. The plug-in gave us a start setting of 50, which didn’t affect our image enough. It was shot using an underwater setting, leaving an orange cast. We pushed the slider to 98, which removed the colour from the blues and greens, but left the people in the photo with a tint. We had to delve into other sections to get the result we wanted, manipulating Exposure, Vibrancy and Skin Tone.