Drab and gray? Flat? No highlights? It can happen. Maybe you're on location, and it's getting late and the light is fading fast. Or, you're in the studio and there's not enough strobes for the kind of setup you want. It really is frustrating when you can't shoot right just because the light is not right.

On location, it would, of course, be fantastic if you can get done while there's still available light. Or, when in the studio, the light setup is complete and up to your specs. But if you're running out of luck, it is at least good to know that a post-production editing plug-in that can touch up, improve or cure a photograph's lighting is now available. This plug-in, made available to Aperture users, is DFT's Light!

So now, with DFT's Light! plug-in, you can just go ahead with the shoot, dial the exposure right, and capture as much detail as possible even if the light is not up to snuff. The usual advise works: Get the brightest image without blowing up the highlights, top that with an interesting subject or an interesting composition, and you are good to go. DFT's Light! can then work its magic on your pictures in post-production. The idea is, with a few tweaks, you can quickly and easily add the right light you want in your pictures. And, by playing around a bit, it is even possible that you might see other or better lighting possibilities that you may have never before imagined.

The award-winning technology that now allows you to do this in Aperture is not new. DFT's Lights! has been available as a Photoshop plug-in for quite some time now. And now, you can already install and use this tool from within Aperture as well. Because of what DFT's Lights! can do, it is actually possible that this plug-in might end up being one of the most essential and most-used in your expanding arsenal of tools to help you spruce up flat and lifeless images directly from inside Aperture.

DTF's Lights! contains an extensive library of 567 pre-built lights and textures created by Gamproducts, Inc. This includes all sorts of commonly shaped blendables, breakups, Christmas, cityscapes and towns, clouds, fences and openings, fire and water, flags, flowers, foliage, holidays and symbols, moons, natural elements, religion, signage, sky and stars, spirals, spotlights and pinspots, stones and bricks, structures and sets, themes, tress, vignettes and windows.

This is all well and good, as you spend time figuring out which shape to use, but in the process, you might easily overlook one important thing which is built right into the DFT Light! plug-in: the GamColor system. You can, and you should, take advantage of this sophisticated color system that simulates the front-of-light use of colored filters and gels designed to evoke a mood and achieve the desired effect. The digital equivalent of the lighting gels can be quickly and easily applied--running the visible spectrum of nine color selections with circular classification of colors logically arranged by hue, referencing the primaries, secondaries and important subdivisions.

As you work in and master DFT's Light!, using extensively both the gobo patterns and the color system, You can begin to create and add in this step in post-production, a user-selected pre-defined shaped lights/shadows as well as colors. With your own pre-defined settings, you can easily apply any of these to any of your photographs, figure out which works best, and then, tweak it some more. You'd be able to almost magically add realistic lighting and shadows to any of your photographs, just as if you were adding lights and shadows and using actual and real colored gels at the time of the shoot. If it's impossible, difficult or expensive to setup real lights, the virtual lights (and shadows) as well as virtual colored screen gels of DTF's Light! will come to the rescue.

Because of DFT's Light!, I've recently been going through my previous shots, selecting a few images that I like but have not picked because of less than ideal lighting. I want to see how much of an improvement I can give my not-too-perfectly-lit photos with this plug-in. Here now is the right tool that I can use to turn these photos around. Other than that of course, I can also imagine that this plug-in will come in handy whenever I shoot with imperfect lighting conditions in the studio or on location. The DFT Light! plug-in seems very capable of producing the kind of stunning lighting that appears natural in order to save the images.

It is simple to activate the DFT Light! plug-in. Just select the image and press Right-Click, or, press Option-Click. You can also initiate the plug-in from Aperture's Toolbar. Press Images, and from the drop-down menu, select Edit With, and then DFT Light! The editing interface comes up, and you can go straight to work.

I just have one observation about the convenience and ease-of-use of editing tools such as the quick-to-use plug-ins: While the editing tools and the technology behind them have been around for quite some time, translated from analog to digital, and then adapted as a plug-in tool, the adaptation of these editing capabilities into easily accessible and convenient add-on tools changes the nature of photography's "final image." Nowadays, there is no longer a single final image. Any one of the 5-star rated images in Aperture can now be versioned into many different final images, endlessly repurposing each adaptive, edited version for a thousand and one variety of usage. Depending on the need and the purpose, images can be further custom-made into a new final version, and there won't be an end to it. The technology is there. It is a technology solution that is now looking for a problem to solve.

Digital Films Tools, the company that created and brought DFT Light! plug-in to Aperture, is composed of software designers, motion picture visual effects veterans, video editors and photographers. With an impressive background that includes three Emmy Awards combined with years of experience in creating visual effects for hundreds of feature films, commercials and television shows, their products are designed with the needs of the visual and imaging professionals in mind. The right ingredients are all there: understanding of photography, film and video editing, particularly visual effects, They want to produce software that is useful and easy to use. And the company is on a mission: to put visual effects tools and techniques into the hands of as many visual and imaging professionals an hobbyists as possible at an affordable price. The technology that was once found only in expensive high-end packages or as propriety in-house tools are now availabe to the photographers with this plug-in.

If I were to rate DFT's Light!, I'll give it a 4 out of 5 rating. You should try it, as well as DFT's two other plug-ins, Ozone and PowerStroke. Head over to the Aperture plug-in page of their website, download the free trial version, and see for yourself how it works.

[Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]