Help finding old creative filter plugin used 2006-9

[testshoot]

Back in the 2006-2009 time period I was doing a lot of photo editing.  I had found a free plug-in for PS.  It contained a wide variety of color and black and white filters.  In addition to the ones created by the author, there was an equal number of user contributed filters.  For a novice user, the plug-in was a blessing from heaven.  Now, years later, I can't find the files and after a couple PC rebuilds and crashes, I can't find the files or remember the name of the plug-in.  I did buy the Topaz PS Bundle at the time, but actually liked the free plug-in more than Topaz.

Although probably quite common, it had filters named things like glamour, romance, Hollywood, etc.  

Am hoping someone was using PS back then and had used or knew about the packed I am searching for.  I have done a lot of searching to no availe.  I get a list of all the current, popular programs, not the ones like that from the oldies days 🙂

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Lew

[Jeff Arola]

Sounds like virtualPhotographer, which unfortunately has been discontinued and was a windows only 32 bit plugin, meaning it won't work on windows 64 bit photoshop or macOS.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180224031156/http://www.optikvervelabs.com/

[testshoot]

You are absolutely correct, and when I searched through my files, I in fact found two copies of the installer but none of the additional filters other photographers had contributed.  According to the installation instructions:

"64-Bit
virtualPhotographer works on all 32-bit versions of  Photoshop (up to CS3) on both 32-and 64-bit operating systems. Vista 64 for example will work using CS3. Photoshop CS4 comes with  both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and the default installer will install both on a 64-bit system. virtualPhotographer is not compatible with CS4 64-bit on a 64-bit system. However we do have users successfully using virtualPhotographer with CS4 in 32-bit mode on 64-bit systems. The install path for virtualPhotographer in this case is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS4\Plug-ins\Common"

When I turned back my own time machine, it appears in that time frame I was running Windows NT and CS2.  My current main PC is W7 and CS5.5.  I tried to install the plug-in and the installation completed, but the filter doesn't show up in the menu, which was expected given my environment.

Any suggestions on something equivalent that would work with my current PC and PS config?

Thanks so very much.....

Trying to figure out if it would be worthwhile to build a PC with old Windows and PS just to run that plug-in or if there is something free or inexpensive that is equally easy to use.  

[testshoot]

Interestingly, I found a 2017 review which still linked to the original web site. 

http://digiretus.com/optikverve-labs-virtual-photographer-photoshop-plugin/

That would indicate it was still online and being downloaded as late as 2017 and I see the domain expired in August of 2018.  How sad.

[testshoot]

After more diligence after you got me on track I found a dpreview forum topic where someone was unable to get VP to work with more modern versions of PS so they asked for help.  Suggestions included PSP, Elements, or Irfanview.  I had used Irfanview in the past so I installed the latest 32-bit version on top of my W7 64-bit system and that went fine.  I then had the install program for VP put the files into Irfanview's filter folder and voila, VP popped right up.

Thanks so much for reminding me of the program from my past which allowed me to get to this point!

[Jeff Arola]

You should have a 32 bit version of photoshop cs5 in C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1

so i would suggest you unistall virtualPhotographer and start over.

What i did was point the virtualPhotographer installer to the photoshop cs5 plugins folder, then clicked Make New Folder and named the folder virtualPhotographer and the plugin should then install in that folder and be available in the 32 bit version of photoshop cs5.