Category Archives: Editing

Topaz Labs Updates Adjust

Feb
06
2018
by Peter | Comments Off

Topaz Labs has released an update to their popular Adaptive Exposure Plug-in – Adjust

Topaz Adjust makes images seem more like what our eyes saw and tames some of the dynamic range inconsistencies cameras have.

The update takes into account some of the changes in Monitor technology that has occurred since the last release of Adjust. The updates include:

  • High DPI Display Support for Windows.
    High DPI monitors now display Adjust and Simplify properly. The application GUI has been updated to display correctly on 4k monitors.
  • Preserve Image Metadata.
    Adjust and Simplify now preserve all image metadata.
  • Separation of User Data and Program Files.
    Computer user accounts now store saved effects separately for each computer user. User-created presets are now saved in user specific data locations, in their own separate folder. Once you log off your computer user account, your custom effects stay private!
  • Import Your Custom Topaz Effects Easily.
    Adjust and Simplify automatically imports all of your saved effects from previous versions!

 

Just to give you a taste of what adjust can do. Here is a before and after using Topaz Adjust

 

Adjust can be used as a Photoshop  and Lightroom Plug-in or as a Plug in with their free Topaz Studio

Exciting new Photo Editor from Topaz Labs and it’s Free!

Jun
01
2017
by Peter | 2 Comments

Topaz Labs StudioExciting new Photo Editor from Topaz Labs and it’s Free!

Topaz Labs this week launched Topaz Labs Studio a full featured editor for your photos including many preset and editable filter effects and also as a host program for all your Topaz Labs Plug-ins, existing and future. Not only is it feature packed but it’s available at the best price…Free.

It has 24 Adjustment modules, all of which are active,10 are free and fully adjustable (the other 14 are active but full adjustability, if desired, are available separately or in pacs at additional cost) Along with that are 290 Preset Effects that are adjustable to taste, you can make your own presets and also share them in the community with others and pickup some of their shared effects also.

It is available in both Windows AND  Mac Os. Continue reading »

HDRsoft announces Photomatix 6

May
22
2017
by Peter | 4 Comments

HDRsoft announces Photomatix 6

Yesterday HDRsoft announced the latest version of their ever popular HDR software PhotoMatix Pro 6

The new features are: Continue reading »

ON1 Photo RAW 2017 Review – Part 1 – Why do I want this over LR-PS

Feb
09
2017
by Peter | 2 Comments

Red Trees 250x250

ON1 Photo RAW 2017 Review

Part one: The Why

Full disclose per FTC. I am an affilate for ON1 Software

If you would like to see a quick video showing an overview of ON1 Photo RAW 2017 before proceeding, click this great video by ON1’s Dan Harlacher

I want to start this review of ON1 Photo RAW talking about… Adobe

?

Continue reading »

ON1 Photo RAW is HERE!

Dec
19
2016
by Peter | Comments Off

ON1 Photo RAW Press Release:

Portland, OR – December 19, 2016 – ON1, Inc. today announced ON1 Photo RAW 2017 is available for immediate download. With modern code optimized for today’s super-megapixel cameras and high-performance computer graphics systems, Photo RAW is the world’s fastest, most flexible, and easiest-to-use raw processor and photo editor on the market.

ON1 Photo RAW 2017 is tuned for today’s sensors and graphics chips. It opens 50-megapixel images in a fraction of a second on a standard PC or Mac, and performs edits in real-time, without slider lag or frustrating waits for redraw.

Continue reading »

Topaz Labs Updates Adjust and Simplify Programs

Nov
17
2016
by Peter | 3 Comments

Updates to Topaz Adjust and Topaz Simplify

Topaz labs announced today two minor updates to their popular programs Adjust 5 (5.2.0)  and Simplify 4 (4.2.0)

About Adjust:
With Topaz Adjust you can give your images the soul and character you envisioned in the field! Unlike our eyes, a camera lens can’t compensate for all the tonal values we see right in front of us. If you shoot something bright, you’ll lose all the details in the shadows. If you shoot something dark, the highlights will be blown out. You can try to correct contrast, details, and vibrancy yourself, but it’s difficult to make images pop like you want.

Topaz Adjust is designed to enhance three characteristics: contrast, detail, and color. Specializing in producing vivid images, Adjust uses Topaz’s adaptive exposure, adaptive saturation, and even includes our cutting edge detail enhancement algorithms to give you the secret “oomph” ingredients that make your images stand out.

About Simplify:
Topaz Simplify gives you a set of tools to create art that only you can make. Build a wide assortment of effects such as watercolors, oil paintings, cartoons, charcoal drawings, sketches, and more. Make your art uniquely personal instead of using cookie-cutter filters and achieve better results faster with specialized digital art technology.

Simplify is designed to create cool graphical effects to quickly turn your images into sketches, watercolors, and a wide range of other graphical and artistic effects. With intelligent controls for edge tracing, details, large image features, and original image enhancement, the artistic effects and styles you can achieve are endless.

Major features introduced in the latest versions of Adjust and Simplify include:

  • High DPI Display Support for Windows.
    High DPI monitors now display Adjust and Simplify properly. The application GUI has been updated to display correctly on 4k monitors.
  • Preserve Image Metadata.
    Adjust and Simplify now preserve all image metadata.
  • Separation of User Data and Program Files.
    Computer user accounts now store saved effects separately for each computer user. User created presets are now saved in user specific data locations, in their own separate folder. Once you log off your computer user account, your custom effects stay private!
  • Import Your Custom Topaz Effects Easily.
    Adjust and Simplify automatically imports all of your saved effects from previous versions!

New Effects.

  • Adjust 5.2.0 comes with 18 new effects. New notable effects can be found in the Stylized Collection, the Vibrant Collection, and the Toned Section.
  • Simplify 4.2.0 has 12 new presets in the Detail Removal and Enhancement, Line and Ink, Painting, and Sketch Collections.

 

As always, updates for current users are free

To learn more, get free trials or buy, click the links below

Topaz Adjust 5

Topaz Simplify 4

Luminar – New Photo Editor from Macphun – Release and Review

Nov
17
2016
by Peter | Comments Off

Luminar – The new Photo Editor from Macphun (Mac OS ONLY)

Today, Macphun software introduced Luminar their new all in one photo editor. (sorry Mac OS only)

The key features are the ability to design the Workspace to how you work, Adding or subtracting Modules (filters) to show only the ones you find necessary and work with often but always having those other modules  available. The other key feature, if you want to call it that, is simply…price. At $69 normal price (there are some savings I will talk about at the end of the piece) That’s pretty darn inexpensive in the world of editing software especially when you consider how much power and versatility is built into Luminar. Now I’m a big Adobe fan and have been a user of Photoshop since Photoshop 2. so that’s quite a long time. And currently a membership to Photoshop CC/Lightroom is $9.99 a month. Now for a professional like me that’s a small expense relative to the other expenses of running a business. Not everyone is a professional but what if you could get software that offers Pro level performance at a price that’s greatly affordable to people that don’t do this to earn money. That’s where Luminar comes in and very strongly. Even a Pro may find the feature set to be everything they need. Continue reading »

By Starlight in ON1 Photo 10

May
18
2016
by Peter | 2 Comments

By Star Light – Milky Way Astrophotography Composting in ON1 Photo 10  Final Composite Milky Way Image

Soooo, you know those amazing images you see of the Milky Way with that awesome foreground and the caption next to it says…Lit by Starlight. OK ehheemmm. OK sorry to break this to you but, well, They are 100% bull@#$%…Yep. Having spent many a night during a New Moon (No Moon) out in the middle of the desert. I can tell you, the stars don’t light up much. In fact you don’t really know how dark  dark is till you’ve done just that. Continue reading »

ON1 Photo 10 and Lightroom HDR

Apr
26
2016
by Peter | 2 Comments

It’s no secret that Lightroom does a pretty darn good job with HDR, it makes a great NATURAL looking HDR which of course as my long time readers know, is my preferred look. But I’ve come to terms with the  fact that that is not the look everyone desires. Everyone has differing Artistic Visions and so they may want to deviate from a Natural Look to a mutitude of looks from mild to wild. The problem is besides a bit of use of the Clarity slider, there is not a lot you can do in Lightroom to push beyond Continue reading »

Are your Lightroom Plug-ins Keeping your Color Space?

Aug
25
2014
by Peter | 2 Comments

Are your  Lightroom Plug-ins in your Color Space?

I came across s this other day and thought if it happened to me surely it happened to others.

We have Working Color Spaces for our image; sRGB, Adobe RGB,  ProPhoto RGB. Everyone has their preferences and this article won’t delve into which you should use. A problem comes when you install Plug-ins from different manufacturers,(Nik, Topaz, Macphun etc) when they install they may not install with the Color space you desire and you may not even know this is happening. For a lot of people this may not even matter but if you are s stickler like I am for Color Management, it’s very important. Continue reading »

HDRsoft’s Merge to 32 Bit. A simple and effective Lightroom HDR workflow

Jul
01
2014
by Peter | 1 Comment

logo_hdrsoftHDRsoft, the makers of Photomatix Pro 5  the top selling HDR software, also make a Plug-in for Lightroom that allows you to select your exposures in Lightroom and then Merge those files into a 32-bit Floating Point Tiff file and automatically re-import back into Lightroom for all your Tone-mapping and finishing needs The plug-in; HDRSoft’s Merge to 32 Bit, makes the whole process easy, effective and pain free. So let’s look at the plug-in and then follow through with some thoughts on a quick and easy yet thorough workflow using Lightroom only. Continue reading »

Stop Buildings from Falling Over with your Bare Hands

Sep
27
2012
by Peter | 2 Comments

Or …your mouse 

Many times when we shoot architecture, if we don’t have our camera perfectly level to the building, either shooting up on it or possibly down on it, we will get some geometric distortions or ”keystoning” effects to our image. This at its extreme may look like buildings leaning in on themselves or each other. Or it could just be an element of the building like a door or window that don’t appear square.

Possible fixes are to; well shoot with our camera level – which of course isn’t always possible. Or, we could shoot with a Tilt-Shift Lens( a specialized lens that the barrel twist and turns so the camera stays level but the lens itself points up at a building) But not many people have these expensive lenses in their kit (ha-ha I love to sound British and say “Kit” instead of Bag)

So the other choice is to use software instead. In this exercise I will show how top do it in Photoshop and also Lightroom/Adobe Camera RAW.

Continue reading »

Update your Video Card – Update your Video Card Drivers

Aug
21
2012
by Peter | 2 Comments

Photo editing software these days is placing extraordinary demands upon your computer and it’s resources. Motherboards, CPUs Memory. But increasingly, Photo software companies are moving a lot of that load to your video card and it’s own memory and processors. Since the introduction  of Photoshop CS4, Adobe has shifted a lot of the work of editing photos over to the GPU (Graphic Processor Unit) rather than only the  CPU.  So much so that Adobe set about standards that Graphics boards needed to meet for their software to run at its optimum

A lot of Plug-in makers like Nik software, Topaz labs or onOne  rely heavily on Video cards and Open GL Continue reading »

How to get the Color right in your Black & White Images

Apr
04
2012
by Peter | 1 Comment

To quote Kyle’s Mom from South Park, “What, what, WHAT?! Have you gone mad, man?! There is no color in a black and white image!” Well no, there isn’t, but there is a correct way that those colors should be converted and represented in a black and white image. 

Here, let me show you what I mean. Here are color images of three automobiles:

Continue reading »

Compositing the HDR Portrait – Topaz ReMask 3

Jan
21
2012
by Peter | 12 Comments

Compositing the HDR portrait – Topaz Remask 3 

I was challenged to do this by a few people, last week a Long Island Photography group asked if it was possible (most said no). Then this week, a friend sent me a link to Joel Grimes and his commercial work blending HDR and sports photography and kind of challenged me to see what it would look like if I did it. (Never challenge me) 

I’ve had this idea for almost a year now but I had a different vision for it, which I still will try next weekend when I have a model for a different reason but if we have spare time I will try my other method. But inspired by the above I thought I would give an HDR Portrait a whirl using compositing of two images using Topaz Remask 3 to make the selection masking process as easy and precise as possible. 

First let’s take a look at out two images. 

Our background: this was an image I shot in San Diego’s Balboa Park a little over a year ago. It is a 3 exposure HDR, finished in Photomatix Pro.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 The Model Image was shot two months prior when I was shooting images for my book, How to Take Great Photos. It is a standard photograph shot using OCF

 

Topaz Adjust 5

The first thing I did was take my background image and it needed more of an HDR look to it…yes I actually wanted to grunge it up a bit. I could have started from scratch and reprocessed the image in Photomatix, this time with a heavier hand. But I knew that wasn’t really necessary as I had a tool that would do it with much less work: Topaz Adjust 5 

I opened the image in Photoshop, duplicated the background and then used my plug-in for Topaz Adjust 5. I went to the HDR Presets and selected HDR Heavy Pop Grunge. This provided just the look I was after

 

 With my background image as I wanted it, it was time to move to my Model Portrait of lovely Noelle and to start the masking process for a smooth and precise selection

 Topaz Remask 3

Opening the image in Topaz Remask 3, It was a simple task of painting red what I wanted to remove, painting green what I wanted to keep and using the Blue Compute brush to paint a line around the subject to compute what stayed and what went

 

After about 15 minutes to really get things right, slowly refining the mask till it was perfect. I had the mask I needed for the selection

 

Bringing it back into Photoshop, here is the selected image of our model Noelle.

 

After a few adjustments it was time to drag our model onto ourBalboaParkbackground. Using the move tool, I simply dragged the selection onto our background image. At this point I needed to mirror flip her so that she was facing the right direction to fit into our scene. I did that with Edit>Transform> Flip horizontal. Then, again using the move tool, positioned her where I wanted in the frame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this point she really wasn’t blending well into the scene so I thought she needed a little HDR look to her too. I duplicated the layer and again I returned to Topaz Adjust 5 but this time I went a little lighter handed and used one of the Vibrant Collection presets: Detail – Strong. 

Now she had the detail I wanted to match the background but she still didn’t blend with the tone of the image as much as I would have liked. So I used a trick I showed you a year ago when I did the shoot at the harbor. I duplicated the model layer again and this time opened Topaz BW effects and selected the Platinum preset. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then turned the color layer above back on and changed the opacity of the color level to about 65%. Now she seemed to blend in pretty well, but I still wanted her to look more natural because going too far can highlight things that are not flattering to a woman. 

After a few tweaks here and there with position, and a little use of the blur tool around some of the edges and a little dodging and burning. I had the look I wanted for the image

Edit*

The last step was to take a soft brush and some dark gray set to a medium opacity and on a new layer add some shadows behind her feet to make her blend in better

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 At this point I though it best if the image was cropped but I couldn’t decide which way I should crop it to 8  x 10 proportions, so I did both.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You tell me. 

I hope you enjoyed that. It actually was a lot of fun and challenging to do. I haven’t been a fan of compositing, preferring to do all my work in camera. But I am happy with the results and of course I really can’t resist a challenge from anyone.

 

Hope that helps,

PT