OT: A look at Topaz Adjust plug-in

[greenmorpher]

Whether you use Topaz Adjust, etc., plug-ins or are just interested in photo work, there's an interesting Topaz Webinar here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNiBMA3ves

As you might expect, it involves using Topaz plug-ins in Photoshop but the environment is not that much different from PhotoLine.

I'm using Topaz Adjust with PhotoLine (32 or 64 bit) on Mac. It's a great help for the same reason mentioned by the tutor here -- while often a single click on one of the listed adjustments will do the job, if the effect isn't quite right you can either remove what would be a multiple parameter adjustment with a single click or you can tweak individual components of the adjustment to get the result you want. So if the Topaz Adjustment doesn't do the job it provides a great starting point by doing the donkey work, as it were, leaving only some final tweaking to be done.

Warm regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
Buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" -- the world's ONLY scientifically based guide to type and layout, and receive a free 140 page guide to advertising for small business: "How to make great ads for (small) business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com

[Paul]

Hi, Geoffry,

please don't tease me. I'm saving for a new Mac Pro (my current system is a 7-year old G5, but the Topaz-family only works on Intels...)
But aside from that, the Topaz suite seems to me a very valuable extra for PhotoLine. In my printshop I regularly come across projects in which these plug-ins would be very useful. After my summer-holidays, I think. By that time the Mac Pro series will hopefully be upgraded.

So, thanks for the YouTube-tip to keep me on my saving-track

- Paul

[OldRadioGuy]

... the Topaz-family only works on Intels...)

Paul, Topaz Adjust works on the Mac, too. All of the Topaz plug-ins do. And, those I have work well in PhotoLine 16.5

Bob

[OldRadioGuy]

Whether you use Topaz Adjust, etc., plug-ins or are just interested in photo work, there's an interesting Topaz Webinar here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNiBMA3ves

Geoffrey has pointed us to a great tip here -- the use of a duplicate layer, a mask, and a brush to restrict effects to only part of an image.

Many of us can learn from this link. Thanks for this information, Geoffrey.

Bob

[Paul]

Paul, Topaz Adjust works on the Mac, too. All of the Topaz plug-ins do. And, those I have work well in PhotoLine 16.5

Thanks for your repy, but I just wanted to mention that it doesn't work on the older G5 Processor. I tested it on my Intel MacBook, and it all worked fine. But that's not my main production computer, which has a much larger monitor. So I'll wait with the purchase on my new Mac.
PhotoLine does a great job.

- Paul

[greenmorpher]

...a great tip here -- the use of a duplicate layer, a mask, and a brush to restrict effects to only part of an image.

I was blown away by that one Bob. Why didn't I think of it? Of course -- I was doo busy being blown away by making any adjustment at all!

I was also intrigued by the regions adjustment -- which allow adjustment to concentrate on the lightest and darkest (small number of regions) or overalll (high number of regions). I had missed that notion. I'll have to look at it all again.

Hey, Paul, consider buying a 15" MacBook Pro with the i5 processors and the dual graphics capacity. Max the RAM. Get the mini-DVI plug to plug-in the big monitor. Not as fast as the current top of the line desktop, but I'm pretty sure the new laptop would look like warp speed compared with your G5! I have a 2010 13" MacBook Pro with a 23" Cinema monitor, and it's great. The current model 15" with the i5 processors and dual graphics is two or three times powerful than that!

Warm regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
Buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" -- the world's ONLY scientifically based guide to type and layout, and receive a free 140 page guide to advertising for small business: "How to make great ads for (small) business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com

[Paul]

Hi Geoffrey,

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into that option. Maybe indeed I have set my bar too high. I aimed at a €4,500 Mac Pro to be ready for the next maybe 10 years, but 2 times half the price will do the job maybe even better.
Waiting for 2 seconds for the results of a filter instead of 20 makes all the difference!
BTW, this forum and the German version are two of my favourite internet pages with really usable information.

Thanks,

- Paul

[greenmorpher]

BTW, this forum and the German version are two of my favourite internet pages with really usable information

The information is good, but I sometimes feel there is not enough of it. I don't know whether that is because there aren't enough users (more users inevitably = more questions raised) OR a lot of other people are just so smart that they don't need to ask about stuff OR a lot of other people aren't using PL enough to push the boundaries and thus need to talk to others about that.

Oh well!

There's a useful Mac forum at DPReviews: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1017

There are a whole lot of photography forums there too dealing with different brands of cameras and formats. I'm about to make a new post to the Panasonic Talk forum over there of some pictures I took this morning.

Warm regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
Buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" -- the world's ONLY scientifically based guide to type and layout, and receive a free 140 page guide to advertising for small business: "How to make great ads for (small) business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com

[greenmorpher]

Here are a couple of gentle examples from Topaz Adjust in PL.. http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=38289577

Warm regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
Buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" -- the world's ONLY scientifically based guide to type and layout, and receive a free 140 page guide to advertising for small business: "How to make great ads for (small) business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com

[Paul]

I would be very glad if we could have categories, like filters, actions, tutorials, and so on. There must be many actions people have made across this forum, I would like to test them all. It could be under Forum-> Gallery/Galerie.

So, when you write in the forum, you could select one or more categories.

- Paul