Creative Mac: Review: Future Fantastic Genesis V2 Pro

Genesis V2 Pro at a Glance

Maker: Future Fantastic
Price: $150
Platforms: Macintosh and Windows
Demo Available: Yes
URL: http://www.future fantastic.com

Overall Impression: This is a powerful tool for creating lighting effects. I still have not explored all of this plugin's features. Stability is an issue, but the tradeoff is complete customizability and the power to do just about anything you want with light.

Key Benefits: This plugin has a lot of options that you can explore for creating a broad range of effects. Lighting can be applied as an object or as a glow, with wisps, starbursts or any number of shapes seeping in through your image.

Disappointments: This is some seriously crashy software in the Mac version. (I have not tested the Windows version.) The downloadable presets available from Future Fantastic's site are available only in Windows format. They'll work on the Mac, but they will also crash you if you make too many changes.

Recommendation: If this thing didn't crash so much, I'd give it a strong buy recommendation. But I also can't give it a negative recommendation because, for some of you, the crashes will be worth the effects you can pull off. So I'll rate it at neutral for now and hopeful for the future.

REVIEW • APRIL 18 , 2001
Future Fantastic Genesis V2 Pro
Special lighting effects for Adobe Photoshop

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

I first encountered Genesis V2 Pro just a few months ago when I was compiling a guide to commercial Photoshop filters. I had left it off the list because I had never heard of it. So a reader wrote in and said, "Man, you have to check this out," or something like that. So I did. True story.

What I found was an incredibly powerful plugin for Adobe Photoshop whose sole purpose is to generate lighting effects and related special effects, such as glowing fogs and the like. Probably familiar to those of you who come from the 3D side of things (3D Studio Max or NewTek LightWave), Genesis V2 Pro is, nevertheless, relatively new in its form as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and not even a year old as a Photoshop plugin for the Macintosh. (It was introduced for the Mac back in May 2000.)

When you think of lighting in Photoshop, you no doubt bring an image into your head of cheesy lens flares or glows that can easily be created using Photoshop's built-in tools. This is not at all what Genesis V2 Pro is about.

What's it about then?
Genesis V2 Pro creates lighting effects that nothing else comes close to. If you take a look at the examples below, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Above you see four different types of lighting effects generated from some of the presets you can download from Future Fantastic's site. The presets are in PC format, but they'll work in the Mac version as well. (But see below under the "Performance" heading for stability issues.)

But the plugin doesn't stop there. Obviously its use would be fairly limited if it just created objects like those seen above. It can also be used to insert lighting into the image based on color samples from the image. In other words, you can assign a color to which the lighting effect will be applied, and then allow it to feather out from there. You can see in the interface shot below how the active area appears in its original color, while the rest of the image is masked off.

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Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of the Creative Mac, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion and Synthetik Studio Artist WWUGs; and executive producer of Creative Mac, Digital Media Designer, Digital Pro Sound, Digital Webcast, Plug-in Central, Presentation Master, ProAudio.net and Video Systems sites. All are part of the Digital Media Net family of online industry hubs.