So this weekend my buddy Rod Harlan of DV Confidential sent me an email asking if I had any experience with a fairly new Photoshop plug-in from Topaz Labs called Topaz Adjust. I hadn’t actually heard of it but it didn’t take me long to download the trial version and give it a quick test run. Rod’s question was simply, do I think this would be a good alternative to Photomatix. My answer is, not really. Now to Topaz lab’s credit, they don’t call this plug-in an HDR tool but look at the sample images on their website and it’s not hard to se that they were working on a tool to render similar tonemapping results. The sample images on the website let you mouse over the images to reveal the before images and some of the results are very interesting. So all that being said, here are my initial thoughts on the plug-in.
The plug-in is activated like any filter in Photoshop. Simply open your image and then go to the Filter menu and then scroll down to the Topaz Labs filter and give it a click. The plug-in has it’s own interface window which is where I will begin. The window, at first glance is nice. There is a fairly large preview of your image and a rown of tabs and sliders underneath where the adjustments are made. The window is actually resizable so you can drag it out to suit your needs. This is where I found my first flaw and that is that the screen would not refresh the image right away. You actually had to do something else within the program before the image would finally resize to fit your new size. Just before writing this I noticed that Topaz had released an update which supposedly takes care of this issue for Macs.
On the right side is a button for viewing the original image as well as a checkbox for faster panning. I clicked the box but never really noticed any increase in my panning. There is also a Reset All button which sets all the sliders back to theri default settings. You can also save any slider settings as a preset which might be handy for quick processing down the road. I personally wouldn’t use this except to set some basic settings to build on later. This might be handy if I find that I use some of the same settings for all of my images. Aside from the presets and the About tab, there are four different tabs for adjusting your image; Exposure, Details, Color, and Noise. Each one has a multitude of sliders and are actually very powerful. Here’s a quick look at each one.
To make adjustments, I just sort of worked from left to right as I watched the display to see the effect. I was thoroughly impressed with some of the features. The exposure and details tools are very powerful but easy to over do. A light hand is best when starting out. The Noise tool is pretty incredible but takes some getting used to. It also has a De-JPEG slider for removing those pesky JPEG artifacts.
So that’s what is right with the plug-in. Now here is what I really felt were the weakpoints. First of all, you may wonder why you would need a DeJPEG slider. Well, it’s because if you use any large image with this plug-in, you had better be ready to invest some time. I was working on my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and I found myself waiting much longer than I thought was appropriate for the change to appear on my preview. Speaking of waiting, maybe it’s just me but I don’t want to move a slider and wait to see the effect. I want real-time adjustments when I move a slider. I know, a little picky but still, it would be nice. To really use the program, I finally had to resize my images to 800×600 or so, just so that the program would render the changes faster.
Another annoyance is the little pop-up slider descriptions. I found them very helpful when trying to figure out exactly what each slider did but they pop up in random locations around your mouse and sometimes they even obstructed the slider to the point that I couldn’t use it. I would really like to have the ability to turn them on or off and also have them pop up in set locations that didn’t actually obscure the slider.
My bottom line is that this is a tool that I could really see myself using but it still has some real work to be done to make it as slick as plug-ins from NIK or OnOne. And for $99, I just don’t believe that you are going to get the necessary bang for your buck. Topaz is running a special intro price of $39.00 that runs until October 1. My advice is to download the fully functioning trial and see if it is worth the $39. If so, then get in on the intro price because I think you will agree that it still has a little ways to go before it is ready for the C-note, primetime pricetag.
Here are a few images that I processed with the plug-in.
Related posts:
and I’m glad it did.
Erik Perozo 
coree coppinger 
Canon Chick Kimmy 
Entries (RSS)
Nice post today Mr. Revell. Good info about the program. You are definitely the HDR Overlord.
mike meyer