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Author: Jose Fernando Baldo Caneiro, aka Rorshack (not Rorschach !), a 21 year-old digital designer from Sao Paulo. You can get the plugin directly from here. (20 k)

The Ripleyer is a simple effect, that allows you to add to an image a scanlines / TV-screen-like effect (black horizontal bars), with controls for adjusting shadows and highlights.

Clearly a must-have...

How-to by the author :

The Ripleyer filter is a rather simple filter, done with really simple functions on Photoshop's Filter Factory. And although really simple, it's easy to find (even in really known or "top of the net") sites that uses the same effect that it produces.

As you might have seen, it only produces horizontal lines (duh) adding or subtracting values from the RGB channels. And by creating this (making lines on-off-on-off ad etc), it produces an effect that most eyes will be fooled into thinking it is a low-quality image or transmission (such as a TV image).

Sure enough, people have used this effect to produce TV-like images on many places. One of'em is the Alien: Ressurrection website (http://www.alien-resurrection.com) - it was the first place I've actually realized this effect was used somewhere. I also remember having seen it on StarCraft (a strategy game from Blizzard) level intros.

Well, of course you can simply make a raw use of it, running it on your images and forgetting about it. But there also some little hints you might find useful to create different effects on your images. Here are the actions I most use.

A. Creating monochrome images. I usually apply the Ripleyer with the Hue/Saturation adjustments, producing monchrome images, which are more TV-like. Here's how to do it:

1. Apply the ripleyer filter on your image using whatever values you want.
2. Add a new Adjustment Layer (Layer > New > Adjustment Layer) [Adjustment Layers are layers that act as applying the effects that are on the "Image > Adjust" menu, but with a great advantage: the setting can be changed or even deleted, maintaining the original image].
3. As a name, put whatever you want. As type, select "Hue/Saturation". Click OK.
4. A new box appears, now with the Hue/Saturation settings. Click on "Colorize" to activate the colorize setting, and then change the settings. It's a good tip to simply let the default values, but you might want to try sliding the "Hue" bar to some color you like. 20 adds a orange/red/brown color set (most known as sepia), and there's a lot more of options available. To create a simple black & white "TV-like" aspect, simply bring the "Saturation" bar to 0. Click OK.

Ok, it's done. :-) now you got an easy and fast TV-like aspect.

B. Creating "1,5 pixel high" bars. Sometimes you'll see that lines are too noticeable and might make your image look strange. In this case, create bars with 2 as "Bars Height" value on Ripleyer. Then, resize your image to 75% of its size (Image > Image Size > 75 percent). This will blend your white and dark lines and create a less accurate and "difficult to see" line effect (this was done on some of the Alien: Ressurrection site images, for example).

C. Using Fade Effect. This is a largerly-used Photopshop trick, and it produces great effects when combined with the most common filters. Simply apply your filter (Ripleyer, hehe) as you would do normally, but then select Filter > Fade [filter] (where "[filter]" is the last filter you've used). This allows you not only to apply a filter using less opacity (only 50% of the Ripleyer effect for example) but also to apply it using other layer modes (Normal, Lighten, Multiply, Difference, Exclusion, Dodge, etc).

That's it. Ripleyer is a really simple filter, but the most useful I've ever made. :-) I usually do filters to use for myself on my very own weird jobs, but I've decided to distribute Ripleyer because it proved to be useful not only to me but also to other people. Don't take it too serious, it's just a bunch of math expressions. :-)

If you in any way need to contact me, please do it. Any feedback would be acceptable, and I'd like to hear from people that are using it - and see where are they using it. :-)