Auto FX Mystical Lighting Review

Lighting and shadows often set apart the ordinary from the extraordinary in photography. Viewers will generally have a much stronger reaction to an image that contains dramatic lighting than to one without. From dramatic rays of light to soft subtle lighting and shadows, Mystical Lighting will allow you to add that quality of light to your images.

If you own any of the Auto FX software products you will feel right at home when you open up Mystical Lighting for the first time. The interface is formatted just like all of the Auto FX family of products like Tint/Tone/Color etc. It will feel just like greeting an old friend. Your only learning curve will then be to master each of the wide variety of lighting effects themselves. If you are new to the Auto FX family of products, the presets included with each lighting effect will get you started using the software right away and give you a pretty good idea how each effect works and how they can be used. But you will quickly want to customize the presets to fit your own vision. You will then be able to save those effects you have customized as a preset that you can use over again.

You may already have one of the other “major” photo editors that include lighting effects in their filter sets, and wonder why you would need Mystical Lighting. Having used the lighting effects included with other photo editing software quite a bit in the past and after using Mystical Lighting for a couple of months now, I can honestly say I will never go back to using those old lighting filters again. The reasons are that Mystical Lighting includes many more lighting effects and options within each effect, and the control and precision with which you can place them in your image far outshines any other lighting effects filters I have ever used.

Here is a brief overview of the effects included in the Mystical Lighting bundle.

• Edge Highlights: Add subtle highlights to your images.
• Radial Light: Caster adds different types of radial shaped lights, beam and ray to your image.
• Ethereal: Gives you the soft lens look. This effect is great for wedding and portrait images.
• Rainbow: Lets you blend colored rainbows into your image using a path. Loads of styles to choose from great for Mystical images rainbows over waterfall etc…
• Fairy Dust:
Lets you add twinkles, sparkles, snow flakes, stars, glowing embers, light flares, confetti and lots more to the shape of a path.
• Shader: Lets you cast shading and tonal changes onto your images by a path.
• Flare: Make alien looking suns, rays of light and vortexes.
• Shading Brush: Lets you enhance the shading and tonal values in your image naturally.
• Light Brush: Brush on extra light and blend in the area you want. Control how the light fades onto the surface of your image.
• Shadow Play: Add realistic looking shadows to your work. Select from hundreds of pre-made shadows like foliage, branches and shape.
• Light Caster: Lets you stream light, sunshine and make underwater light effects. It can be used with or without a masked selection. This is great for adding mist or haze on your images.
• Spotlight: Adds various spotlight effects to your images.
• Mist: Add natural looking ground fog, blowing mist, smoke and even a blowing snow type of look to images. Just brush it on.
• Surface Light: Add light through objects like window panes and have it cast onto your image.
• Mottled Background: Add mottled canvas style backgrounds, great for portrait photos.
• Wispy Mist: brush on mist and fog.

IN SUMMARY:

Mystical Lighting works as both a plug-in and as a stand alone application for Windows 98/NT/2000/ME/XP or Power Macintosh systems running OS 9 or higher. Mystical Lighting runs native under all versions of OS X.

The only wish I have is that you could install all of the Auto FX packages into one interface. If you apply an effect in the Tint/Tone/Color package you have to save your work there, and then open up Mystical Lighting to apply those effects. If would be great if you could access all of the Auto FX software bundles from one interface.

While mystical lighting is a great product on its own, this set of filters works great in conjunction with the effects included in the Tint/Tone/Color bundle. Using both sets of effects on your images can give you unlimited options for creating dramatic pieces from your original photographs. You can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary!!