Send Your Family (or Someone Elses) to Hal...loween

Many people who use Photo Shop don't experiment with plugins, sometimes this is because many plugins are expensive; but a whole range of free (or low cost) plugins exist that can be used in PS and many other compatible programs. Many of these provide unique effects difficult to achieve any other way.
This Instructable combines two lesser known free plugins to quickly and very easily make a dramatic hell like effect from virtually any image. Check out the examples above for some variations of this basic technique.
You can do this Instructable as an introduction to the exciting world of plugins.
The first of these plugins is Amphisoft PhotoTinter: This is an unusual photo-tinter for adding colored effects to grey-scale (black & white) images. This comes with a library of parameter files, make sure you have 'Irina6.tin' after you install the plugin.
The second is Colourworks one of 8 plugin filters that come as a set, Cybia, The Works: These plugins provide a wonderful collection of useful effects.
You can use these plugins with many photo editor programs: Adobe Photoshop; Photoshop Elements; Paint Shop Pro; PhotoPlus; Photo-Brush and probably more. I use them with an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro.

The first step in this Instructable is to set yourself up with a photo-editor and the two plugins described above. I can't give you detailed instructions for every choice of photo-editor, but it should be straight forward if you read the help. If you are using a photo-editor for the first time learn:
(1) How to load and save
(2) Use the plugins
(3) Adjust brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation
(4) Convert to grey-scale (black and white)
(5) How to undo a change
(6) to crop, is worthwhile as well

Step 1: Selecting the Image to Convert

Once you are setup with your photo editor the next stage is to select your first photograph to send to 'hal'. I have chosen a nice old picture of some children with their grandparents. I have to assure you though that just about any picture will work, picture with trees and leaves work very effectively. To get those glowing eyes from the 'fire within' people with dark eyes work best. The fiery hair effect will mostly show itself in the darker parts of the hair.
I cropped the picture a little to make the faces more prominent (see second image).

Step 2: Making It Gray-scale

If your image is in color now convert it to grey-scale in your photo editor. Many people call this black and white but that is not technically correct. Digital grey-scale images contain very little pure black and white if any at all. It may seem odd to loose color here but trust me we will put back some color. In fact this stage provides a greyish dead look to the skin, just what every self respecting ghoul wants.
After you do this conversion some photo-editors (eg PSP) will need you to return to 24 bit or 16 million color mode to allow the next steps to work. Often playing with brightness and contrast at this stage is worthwhile, with trees and leaves sometimes making a negative of the image gives a cool result.

Step 3: Photo-Tinting

Now we apply the AmphiSoft AS Photo Tinter plugin; selecting and applying the Irina6.tin parameter file. This introduces some sepia and blue tones.You can experiment with contrast and brightness prior to doing this effect. If it doesn't look roughly the same tone as the example image you can undo and try again. Don't worry too much though the final result is quite tolerant to wide variations. The version here has less blue than the version shown in the introduction. The dark blue tones will get fired up soon.

Step 4: Light the Fires

Next we apply the Cybia Colourworks plugin; use the Reverse option with the color settings: Red 110, Green 90, Blue 70. Yes of course you can experiment with these settings but the suggested settings give a pretty reliable result. At this stage the image usually looks a little dark (pun intended i{^_^} ). So now we resort to the tools in your photo-editor to get it just right.

Step 5: Brighten and Contrast

In my old version of PSP I have applied a brightness of 60 and a contrast of 45 to push up the light and restore some contrast. Different photo-editors and pictures will require different settings and might even need adjustment of gamma. First store the image so you can get back to where you were and just try different amounts until you get the desired result. Keep track of the settings for future Halloweens.
Don't worry if at this stage the 'fire' looks a little washed out, we will fix that in the next step.

Step 6: Saturation

To get the color back in the 'fire' in PSP I pushed the saturation up by 40. Again you can experiment with this setting. You can also experiment with other settings to get exactly what you want. The brilliant eye effect is hard to see here so I have provided a close detail picture of the grandfather, see the second image.