PLUGIN: Retrodots product reviews

Ever looked at an old 60's era poster and seen the coloured circles that vary in size, and if you step back you can see an image, but up close it's just a pile of circles? Or perhaps you might understand the concept better if you look at a colour photo in a magazine under a magnifying glass, looking at how the colour gradients are made up not of smooth blends, but of a range of differently coloured dots of various sizes...

Or, if you play with Photoshop a lot, you might be aware of the FILTERS > PIXELIZE > COLOUR HALFTONE filter... either way, you'll get the idea eventually I bet.

Well, I really like making new layers of colours or images, creating a layer mask, filling it with a gradient and throwing the Colour Halftone filter over it to get some cool dotty-effects. Makes some awesome web-buttons, I tell ya! However, on larger images, that method just doesn't work because the Halftone filter has a maximum size it will operate at. BUGGER!

So you can imaging how chuffed I was to find a 3rd-party external plugin that did the same sort of thing, but at ANY size! And it does a good job of it too.

However, unlike the rest of Philipp's filters, this one has a MAJOR annoyance... the interface! You can hardly see a damn thing, because he's Retro-dotted the background to all hell, making it almost impossible to read many of the buttons, and some of the labels are in German, making it a tad awkward for us non-Deutsche. But since there are hardly any labels to be seen, it's not too bad I guess. If he were to re-design the interface a little, keeping the same pattern, just faded down to something a little more subtle, it would be heaps easier to see.

However, the effectiveness of the filter is stunning, and by waving the sliders around a bit you can vary the results greatly, giving you a very broad scope of functionality indeed.

The main difference between this filter and the Colour Halftone filter built in to Photoshop is that CH filter works on the image itself, whereas this filter works on the SELECTION, meaning if you were to outline a shape in an image, feather the selection, then run this filter, you would see some cool things happening. Imagine masking, shape layers, etc!

Overall, still way cool, just hard on the eyes.