Flood
at a Glance

Maker: Flaming Pear
Price: $20
Platforms: Macintosh and Windows
Demo Available: Yes
URL: http://www.flamingpear
.com

Overall Impression: Flaming Pear's plugins are top-notch, and Flood is no different. The water effects are versatile and impressive, and the filter works pretty quickly, even on high-resolution images. (On a low-end G4, you won't even see a progress bar until your image passes about 1,024 x 768.) This is a solid piece of software.

Key Benefits: Like most of Flaming Pear's plugins, Flood provides a decent number of controls for customizing the look of the effect. This is a pretty specialized filter, but you'll still see a goodly range of effects. You can use the presets that ship with the filter, create your own or even generate random settings.

Disappointments: I like this filter a lot, but I'd like to see more control over the shape of the bodies of water that are generated, maybe some special edge effects (breaking waves, mist, etc.) and the ability to insert more than one ripple.

Recommendation: Strong Buy

 
REVIEW • MAY 23 , 2001

Flaming Pear Flood
[Page 2 of 3]

But customizing isn't difficult. The plugin itself matches the water to the scene, so all you need to worry about is the shape and density of the waves, the undulations of the ripple (if any) and the angle and perspective of view. You can also change the wave color, select random settings or load (and save) presets.

How it works
Flood operates off a single filter located in the Flaming Pear directory of the Photoshop Filter menu. Once you're there, you see a preview of the effect on your image and are given 11 adjustable parameters, all of which are pretty easy to get the hang of. The Horizon setting lets you set the position of the horizon, while the Offset parameter allows you to move the effect down away from the horizon, while still maintaining the horizon. Perspective and Altitude settings are also included.


The Flood interface

For wave control, you're given options for Waviness, Complexity, Brilliance (similar to highlight brightness) and Blur. Blur is particularly useful for "muddying up" the water and just generally bringing in more of the dominant colors from the original image.

Finally, you also get to add in a ripple, if you'd like. To do so, you simply click somewhere below the horizon line in the image preview. Then you get to set the Size (diameter), Height and Undulation. (Undulation determines how many ripples will flow off the main ripple.) You can adjust the overall look of the ripple by adjusting the altitude and perspective of the view.


You can save your settings (and load them) from within the Flood interface; you can apply random settings; and you can choose the "glue" (apply) mode, including normal, dissolve, screen, overlay, "superlay," multiply, add and subtract.

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