This week we meet with a guy who can speak Deke. Stu Maschwitz of Red Giant Software joins us to talk about his new product, Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. Despite the cumbersome name, this software—which you can run either as a standalone product or as a Photoshop plug-in—takes technology originally designed for video and makes its coolness available for your still photos. As Stu explains, it does things in new (read “intutive”) ways that may upset your Photoshop-based view of image editing. But in the end, you’ll enjoy the way this application and it’s new way of presenting photo editing makes your brain expand, and still ultimately plays nice with Photoshop.

A few words about how PhotoLooks works:

PhotoLooks is less a plug-in and more a collection of filters. Think of Photoshop’s own Filter Gallery, but way the hell better. To start using PhotoLooks, you just drag and drop the filter you want onto your image, or use a preset which contains a collection of filters and settings in one simple bundle. Then you can adjust the order of filters in the camera view, and modify the numerical settings of any one filter to taste. Each filter “lands” on the appropriate part of a video camera (where PhotoLooks has its origins), so you could drag the Diffusion filter out and drop it onto the matte box, or drop Vignette onto the lens.

PhotoLooks handles everything as a floating point calculation (and I do my job and ask Stu what exactly that means), so there’s no way you can harm an image. Even if you use one filter to ramp the luminance until the image is altogether blown out, you can use another to bring it back into the visible range. Which is perhaps what inspired me to call PhotoLooks “an interface that just makes you want to play.” Or maybe I just liked rearranging the filters to see what would happen.

You have to check this out to really get the fun and coolness of it. You can learn more about PhotoLooks at redgiantsoftware.com/deke. There’s a trial download available as well. And by way of update to what we said in the show, PhotoLooks 1.1 is fully compatible with Photoshop CS5.

Have a listen and see how fun it can be to play in an environment that rethinks the expectations we might have for photo editing. Here’s the regular-quality (128kbps) audio file. You can stream, or for best results, right-click and choose Download or Save. And here’s a link to the high-quality recording (320kbps). Be sure to download that one, don’t stream. And don’t forget the usual suggestion to subscribe via iTunes.