With Harold's kind permission I am illustrating the effect of Topaz Detail 2 on his rather beautiful and classical pot-pourri still life image that he used to illustrate his thread on flash settings. This struck me as very nicely composed and lit, but I felt unsatisfied by the detail and contrast. I thought this image had more to offer in these departments, I used the micro-contrast enhancement feature of Topaz Detail 2 with the default settings to enhance the image, then applied a small amount of jpeg noise reduction with Topaz Denoise5 to remove some minor noise in dark areas introduced by the first process. Normally I would not think of reprocessing another member's image and reposting it but Harold's response to my demonstration was so positive and he generously indicated that he would like other members to see the result.
First Harold's original image.
After processing as I have described.
Harold's crop from his image.
Again processed as above.
The cost of these two plugins is modest and I have been very pleased with how they perform. I have not bothered with the other Topaz filters as they seem more aimed at commercial photographers. I should perhaps add that I have no commercial interest or connection with Topaz.
Of course it is terribly easy to overdo any image processing , but I think these tools are more subtle and controllable than the Photoshop sharpening and contrast tools, at least in my clumsy hands, and easily 'faded back' to reduce their effect where necessary.
