Topaz and other PS(E) plug-ins

Do any of you use Topaz products?
If so which ones do you use or find the most useful?
Any other plug-ins you use?

Gwyn - I've seen Topaz Lab's Adjust & Detail potential demonstrated at a recent BPS meeting. They are definately worth serious consideration if you are looking at doing a lot of (less obvious) PP manipulation of your images. User had PS5E and was demonstrating some high end stuff you can do with that package and Topaz's plug-ins were touched on.


Steve

I use Topaz Adjust 4 I find it extremely useful, it has many presets, the one I use most is portrait smooth.

Gwyn - just found the card of the guy who was doing a presentation (Foto Synthesis) at BPS a couple of weeks back - he's got a deal running with Topaz Labs . Check out the web site

link

Steve

At less than £110.00 for the whole bundle (using the 15% discount from Steve's link) its a steal. I just bought it.

Thanks for the link Steve, and Gwyn for raising the topic..

Glad the link was of use - downloaded the interface for Topaz to work with Lightroom last night and nearly hit DOWNLOAD this morning when I was checking out the info I had from the card I picked up at the BPS meeting. At a £110 net for the whole package, looks too good to miss.

The Foto Synthesis talk/demonstration is very impressive and if anyone who's involved with clubs and society is looking for ideas for club nights, this is worth considering. Don't know what they charge, but BPS had a turn out of better than 2/3 for them - so a popular choise at Bath.

Steve

Thanks everyone. I too am going to buy the whole package. It looks very impressive, and is cheaper than some single plug-ins I've seen.

I have to pay off the credit card first though - Norway was expensive and my darling husband has been running up a huge bill in France - why he doesn't use his other CC, which earns frequent flyer points I'll never know.

i have de noise and remask 3, re mask 3 is really awsome.

i have denoise and adjust 4

I prefer Lightroom noise reduction to Topaz Denoise, but perhaps it's just me not doing it right? I prefer a little grain to over-smoothed shots, and I can't see a vast improvement over the in built noise reduction in PSE.

I have FocusMagic which is great at reducing movement blur (including K7 shutter blur when it pops up) and sharpening focus slightly.

topaz give loads of adjustment control

I use the whole Topaz bundle
Remask 3 is excellent (though I've been using CS5's quick mask too with good effect).
I mainly use: Adjust, Detail, InFocus and Remask.

Matt

There's some nice Topaz examples here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=19955996369&aid=201133
and
http://bobtowery.typepad.com/bob_towery/topaz-tuesday/
(Some are a tad OTT for me!)
Matt

Here's a couple of examples I've been playing with:-

Before Topaz . . .



. . . and after Topaz.




Before . . .




. . . after.




Both of the before images are more or less unprocessed RAW images straight from the camera. The image of the bronze in camera was actually all shades of blue because I hadn't reset the WB from a previous project. That one has been corrected to daylight WB before being Topaz'd.

I've the Topaz bundle and the Nik bundle.

I only use Clean and Denoise from Topaz to clean up noise and such, they work very well other than that I like the Nik plug-ins better they seem to give you more control.

I also use de-fine from nik to clean up noise, it really depends on the photo if nik is better or topaz that's why i use both of them.
The lightroom noise reduction works fine on low noise but with high noise it really makes the photo softer and then you see that third-party products do preform quite a bit better.
I always leave noise reduction off now in lightroom and only decide when i output/finish the photo if i load it into PS or do everything in LR and with that I decide which noise reduction i'll use.