Magic Bullet Photolooks

Magic Bullet Looks is well known among video post-production editors; it provides different ‘moods’ to footage, such as a mood that better communicates a criminal scene or a mood that predicts something horrible is going to happen. Looks works well in video so why not apply it to images? That’s what Magic Bullet Photolooks does.

I knew Looks from a year or so ago when I had the chance to review the plug-in for After Effects. I expected Photolooks to have a somewhat different interface, but when I first launched it, it was exactly the same as Magic Bullet Looks, the video type plug-in.

Photolooks has four kinds of effects, each tied to a specific element in the image build-up. For example, there are effects that apply to lenses, to the camera body and to post-production. This comparison or rather this workflow pattern is very suitable in video post-production, and it is surprisingly easy to understand in a photo workflow.

Most of Looks’ –and therefore also Photolooks’– effects are related to colour, vignetting and lens effects. The effects are not as outspoken as what you’ll find in an Alien Skin environment, for example, but since in Photolooks you’re expected to compound multiple effects, the result can be quite dramatic –much more so than with any other plug-in.

The challenge is to come up with a result that looks exactly how you envisaged it, and that can prove to be difficult and stressful, especially with regards to computer resources. Each effect by itself costs little CPU and memory, but if you compound half a dozen of them your Mac’s GPU gets stressed considerably.

Also, because you can never say how an additional effect is going to work out until you’ve tried it, the possibilities are endless but the end-result rather difficult to forecast. In other words, it’s easy to spend a couple of hours with Photolooks only to find out none of your attempts are leading to something worthwhile.

Photolooks does come with a large number of presets. Unfortunately, Red Giant, the developer of Magic Bullet Photolooks, hasn’t bothered to create different presets for images, so you end up with the same ‘moods’ as video editors. And in my opinion, these moods or presets don’t work so well with still images. Most of the time, I’m absolutely not interested in making my carefully exposed photo, taken with my very expensive camera body/lens combination look as if it were shot with a throw-away camera of the eighties.

Of course, you can use the presets as a departure point, and that’s what you’ll often be doing. Magic Bullet Looks is a plug-in to Photoshop, but also can be started as a stand-alone application. It accepts and recognises Photoshop file formats, but can’t work with RAW files.

After having spent a good three weeks trying to come up with a look that I find dramatic yet subtle enough using Photolooks alone, my best result are the photos running at the top of this page. I’m sure there are better photographers and image editors than myself who will do a far better job of achieving dramatic results with this plug-in.

Perhaps that’s also Magic Bullet Photolooks’ major limitation: if you’re not after drama, Photolooks may not be what you want. If time permits, though, I’ll be experimenting further with this plug-in to see if I can create far more subtle effects from photos with less dramatic lighting than the above.