PerfectlyClear plugin

[MikeFromMesa]

I am working with the trial version of 2018 Ultimate and wanted to see if the PerfectlyClear plugin was worth the extra cost as compared to the 2018 Standard edition, but I can not find it anywhere on the system. Is it part of the trial version? And, if so, where should it show up in the UI? I can not find it under plugins and I can not find it in the Windows file system under Program Files\Corel.

Perhaps it is not included with the trial?

[rondo]

You may not get the plugin with the trial version. Perfectly Clear is OK- can't say it's worth the extra money or not.
Athentech has a free version- try it out and see.
http://www.athentech.com/get-perfectly-clear-free

[MikeFromMesa]

You may not get the plugin with the trial version. Perfectly Clear is OK- can't say it's worth the extra money or not.
Athentech has a free version- try it out and see.
http://www.athentech.com/get-perfectly-clear-free

Thanks for the link.

I bought a copy of PerfectlyClear a long time ago and decided it was not really worth the cost. A bit of Levels adjustment and brightness usually did about the same thing, but I thought the new version might be different, and I wanted to see if it worked with PSP.

When I looked at the difference between the standard and ultimate versions the only difference that stood out as possibly useful was PerfectlyClear so I wanted to take a look at it. The price difference between the two version is very small, but still ...

[JCBrown]

Hi,

Perfectly Clear has changed quite a bit over the last few years. I have the full version, 3.5, and it is my main tool as a plugin to PSP2018. It would take me a lot of work to get close in PSP to what the presets/automatic adjustment in Perfectly Clear can do. You should read up on it on their site. It definitely is not just adjusting the brightness. Of course, the version that comes with PSP Ultimate is watered down, but I found the presets to be very good.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p622dt2g5laja ... 1.jpg?dl=0

The screen shot does not have the parameters open on the right side. I can post screen shots if someone wants. The facial detection and adjustment is very good. I just did a batch of fairly close up photos and I went with the automatic adjustment each time. Of course, I had to make adjustments in PSP where there was a lot of glare from eyes and glasses.

[MikeFromMesa]

Perfectly Clear has changed quite a bit over the last few years.

I guess it has. It looks nothing like the UI I remember from several years ago. Just how "watered-down" is the PSP plugin? What differences between it and the full version? Does the plugin itself (one PSP one) have enough functionality to make it worth buying?

Nice photo, by the way.

[Ken Berry]

I'm attaching two photos. The first is the full PSP version menu of what it can do. The second is the same menu in the Perfectly Clear plug-in that comes with PSP. Clearly, the latter is missing two of the presets: Perfect Eyes and Perfect Skin. The buttons at the bottom of the full version menu are also missing from the plug-in version.

It would be up to you to determine whether the presets that are there are worth the price, or whether the two missing ones are really the ones you wanted.

[MikeFromMesa]

Thank you.

I do not real portrait photography so I suppose I have no need for Perfect Skin or Perfect Eyes. Most of my photography is landscape, birding and travel and I suspect that those functions (Perfect Skin and Perfect Eyes) would be largely useless for that kind of shooting.

The other question is whether the corresponding functionality between the plugin and the regular product is the same, and there is no real way to know that. On the other hand the full version of PerfectlyClear that I do have from some years ago came as an update to the version that came with PSP X7 or X8 or X9 or something like that, and the corresponding functionality between those versions was the same.

[JCBrown]

Attached are 3 images showing a landscape preset and more of the possible settings at the right side. The third image shows a before/after side-by-side with only the PC Essentials Landscapes preset selected, nothing else touched. Note that I scrolled down on the left to show "The Great Outdoors" but I did not select any of these presets. At the right, all of the collapsed toolkits can be expanded and turned on.

[MikeFromMesa]

Thank you for the post. It was very helpful and it does look like it is worth the extra $15. I thought I would not use PerfectlyClear as I had not used the version I got years ago, but now it looks vastly improved and I think it might be very helpful.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to post those screen shots.

[JCBrown]

What I showed is the full version. I'm not sure what comes with the lite version that comes with Suite. If you had the full version of Perfectly Clear before, you may want to check out the upgrade price of it separately and get it and not the lite version with PSP Ultimate. I upgraded recently, but not to ultimate as I already had the full Perfectly Clear, and a copy of Aftershot which I have never used.

[CHoffman]

Don't forget that, through processor intensive, PSP has it's own skin smoothing that works well in some cases. PerfectlyClear seems useful, but there's very little I can't manage in PSP even without it. Maybe haze removal, but that's mostly because I don't have a good "recipe" yet.

[JoeB]

Don't forget that, through processor intensive, PSP has it's own skin smoothing that works well in some cases. PerfectlyClear seems useful, but there's very little I can't manage in PSP even without it. Maybe haze removal, but that's mostly because I don't have a good "recipe" yet.

Try playing around with Adjust>Color>Fade Correction.

[CHoffman]

Fade correction- wow, what a good tool. In all honesty I never even noticed it before. Thanks!

[JoeB]

You're quite welcome. It works quite well on photos taken underwater also.

[MikeFromMesa]

What I showed is the full version. I'm not sure what comes with the lite version that comes with Suite. If you had the full version of Perfectly Clear before, you may want to check out the upgrade price of it separately and get it and not the lite version with PSP Ultimate. I upgraded recently, but not to ultimate as I already had the full Perfectly Clear, and a copy of Aftershot which I have never used.

I just wanted to let you know that I bought the Ultimate package and tried out the PerfectlyClear plugin that comes with it. While I do not yet have any idea how much use it will be to me, I did load a photo I took indoors with very low light to see what it did with a dark photo and was surprised at how good a job it did in brightening up the image and keeping the correct colors.

As I said, I do not know how much I will use it, but it looks like it was worth the extra $15 and I wanted to say thank you for the trouble you went to in posting those images.