Insight Plugin People: Interview with Harald Heim of The Plugin Site By Sonja Shea Dateline: January 7, 2007 More Insight articles

Sonja Shea: While your name and products are well-known to longtime members of the graphics community, could you give me a brief history of yourself and The Plugin Site? Harald Heim: Most people seem to know me because of my free Harry's Filters. They were the first Photoshop plugins that I created almost 10 years ago with Filter Factory. I started back in 1997 with a Web site called Premiere Plugin HQ, which was renamed one year later to Plugin Com HQ. It was hosted and sponsored by the I/US Corporation, which helped a lot to make it popular. After I/US was acquired and later shut down by Getty Images in 2000, the current The Plugin Site Web site was born. The freeware Harry's Filters for Windows. The Plugin Site is a hybrid Web site that offers its own plugin products and also delivers information about other companies' plugins. Somehow I have never managed to do two different Web sites, one for my own plugins and one for plugins in general, but so far it has worked out fine. For two years I wrote dozens of articles about Photoshop plugins for the Digital Photography Techniques magazine, which was later renamed to Digital Photo Effects. I have also written many articles for The Plugin Site and Graphics.com, and recently one for the Luminous Landscape Web site. Additionally, I am publishing the monthly Plugin Newsletter, which has a subscriber base that's grown to more than 120,000 during the last nine years. In regards to my software, there were basically three periods: From 1997 to 1999 I only developed freeware products. From 1999 on I started doing commercial products. The products consisted of image effect plugins, standalone tools and image collections. I also did the Alpha Magic video effects with Hollywood FX, which were later sold to Pinnacle. Finally, at the end of 2002, I started developing photo correction plugins, which turned out to be more successful than my previous products. Since 2001 I have also been helping to improve the FilterMeister tool, which is used by many plugin developers for creating freeware and also commercial plugins. I am glad that I can give something back to the community of Filter Factory/FilterMeister users. Why did you choose to develop plugins? I started programming for fun at the age of 13, but decided against studying informatics (computer science) at 22. You know, teenagers often ask themselves why things are as they are and not as they would like them to be. I guess that's why I was more interested in psychology at that time. When I started studying psychology at the local university in 1995 I came in touch with the Internet for the first time. When searching the Web for some effects for Adobe Premiere on improving my own wedding video, I came across the Filter Factory plugins. They sparked my interest in programming image effects. I had a lot of free time at the university—except the few months before the intermediate and final exams—so I started developing my own Filter Factory plugins and software for managing and converting them. During my last two years at the university I already made a living with my software. But I usually finish things that I start, so I completed my final psychology exams in 2001, luckily with very good results. After that I decided to continue with developing software full time. I could not resist the convenience of being my own boss. Since you create plugins to be Photoshop compatible, I assume that is your graphics editor of choice. What version did you start with and how was creating plugins for that first version you used different than the most current version? Although I tested my plugins in Photoshop from Version 4 on, I was a big fan of Paint Shop Pro up to Version 7. Photoshop 6 turned the tide for me, because I started with digital photography at that time and Photoshop felt much more elegant for editing photos. My filter plugins are still mostly based on the Photoshop 4 SDK, so nothing really significant has changed when developing plugins for Photoshop CS and CS2. Only my plugins get more and more complex, so they need more thorough testing. ColorWasher corrects photo colors, contrast, exposure and saturation. Image editing applications typically have their own suite of built-in filters that work reasonably well. How do you find yourself able to compete with large graphics software companies? As a plugin developer you have to try to stay ahead of graphics applications that contain more and more stuff with every major release. It is quite easy to develop better versions of some Photoshop tools that have not changed since Version 2 or 3, but on the other hand Adobe adds a lot of good new tools with every release, which are not so easy to top. There are a few factors that play into the hands of plugin developers. Graphics applications usually offer very general and simple tools that are meant for a wide range of people. Plugin developers can offer more specific and complex tools, which work more effectively for special tasks and are aimed at more advanced users. Additionally, the software developers of these big companies have to work on a wide variety of things and are usually not highly specialized experts. As an exclusive plugin developer you can spend more time on a single image processing subject and therefore deliver a more sophisticated tool. Plugins can also offer alternative workflows for reaching the same result. As taste and preferences vary a lot among users of image editing software, you can find a group of people for every available solution who will tell you why they like this particular software best. Clever plugin developers can also think of tools that are currently not available in Photoshop. But such things tend to be included with newer versions of Photoshop, unless they are very specific and not so interesting to a wider audience. If you develop special image effects, it is much easier to create something really innovative. If you create photo correction plugins, you often have to develop improved versions of existing tools. Apart from the big companies, a developer of commercial plugins also faces competition from freeware developers and other plugin companies. Freeware plugins get more and more sophisticated and are sometimes better than commercial plugins that were created a few years ago. So you have to make sure that your commercial plugins offer something that isn't already available for free or for less money. I think my products are quite competitive because I offer them in the $50 price range, although they could certainly be sold for twice as much. Other plugin companies, who have several employees and other production costs, usually have to offer their plugins for $100 to $200 to make enough profit. All of this competition also has a good side. It forces plugin developers to be more creative, which results in better products for all of us. LightMachine is now available in a Mac version. How did this come about, when you are primarily a PC user? I don't have any motivation to dive into Mac programming, so I hired a company to do it for me. They have done quite a good job. Concentrating only on the Windows versions gives me more time to develop new products. Future plugins will certainly become available as Mac versions, although there are no plans for Mac versions of HyperTyle, Plugin Commander and HTML Shrinker. Which of your products is the most popular? FocalBlade sharpens photos for screen display and print, as well as creating blur, soft focus and glow effects. Harry's Filters is certainly the most popular and widely known product of The Plugin Site, but that is no surprise since it is freeware and has been around for a very long time. If you take only the commercial products into account, the most popular product at the moment is FocalBlade for Windows, probably because it got so many fantastic reviews. If you only consider the Mac side, ColorWasher for Mac is currently the most popular, although it is hard to say with the two other Mac plugins just released. All in all, it is quite a close race between the PhotoWiz products. How long does the process of creating a plugin take? The process can vary between one day and a few years—it mainly depends on how sophisticated you want your plugin to be. Developers of freeware plugins often only put a few days of work into their plugins, whereas those creating commercial plugins have to invest much more time. I usually need several months to develop a commercial plugin product. It seems that it gets longer and longer for every new product, because I am getting more and more demanding. Additionally, you have to invest even more time for minor updates. Major updates with a lot of new stuff usually take just as long as the initial product development, but they are worth the time if the product sells well. Programming the main functionality of a plugin doesn't take so long. Much more time needs to be spent on optimizing the code and user interface, as well as adding some extra features to make it more comfortable. Getting rid of all the bugs certainly takes most of the time. What do you use as inspiration for new products? I always create products that I personally find useful, but I also try to include features that others can easily use as well. I started developing ColorWasher because I needed to correct photos from my father's birthday and was not able to achieve satisfying results with other tools. FocalBlade, on the other hand, is the result of playing with various algorithms. And I developed LightMachine because I was dissatisfied with Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight tool, although the final product ended up with a much broader feature set. So generally speaking my inspiration comes from everyday image correction problems or from playing with abstract ideas and algorithms. Sometimes I also get some inspiration when looking at other tools that could be improved. I hate copying other products—it would be intolerablely boring for me anyway—so I always try to do it differently, offer more possibilities or try to approach an image editing problem from a different angle. Would you encourage others to get into plugin creation? Certainly. There are many great tools available that would not exist if Adobe had not started this plugin thing. So plugins bring a lot of variety to the image editing business. The people who work for the big companies can't think of everything, so it helps a lot to get new creative input into the market from hundreds of plugin developers and companies all over the world. What tools would you recommend to get started? People with no programming experience should start with the Filter Factory language, as I did. It is more like writing small mathematical formulas than real programming, but it gives you the basic knowledge about how image filtering works. FilterMeister and Filter Foundry are nice tools for writing Filter Factory code. Those more advanced can try the more sophisticated FilterMeister modes or programming in C with the Photoshop software development kit (SDK). What are your plans for new plugins? My most recent product is B/W Styler. I have a lot of new ideas for the existing PhotoWiz plugins and plan to work on them in the near future. I would also like to do updates of older products like Plugin Galaxy and Edge & Frame Galaxy if time permits. Even more, I have some rough ideas for a plugin for enhancing portrait photos, but I don't know yet if they are realistic. I have even more ideas, but I guess these plans alone provide enough work for the next two years. I usually have more ideas than time, so I need to carefully choose which ideas to work out.

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Sonja Shea is a Paint Shop Pro book author and instructor. A version of this interview appeared originally on The Plugin Site.