At the end of last year, I didn’t buy a new camera. Only it feels like I did. Let me explain.
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Since 2008, I have been using a Nikon D80 and processing the results in Capture NX2 and Photoshop Essentials 8. The Nikon is a great camera but I had been limiting myself to ISO 400, as the image quality at ISO 800 and above was unacceptably noisy (in my view) and the noise reduction software in both PSE8 and Capture NX2 smeared detail too much. The end result was that I never shot above ISO 400 if I wanted quality results.
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Enter my ‘new camera’ – a set of filters from Topaz Labs. “DeNoise” is the filter that gave me access to ISO 800 and 1600. DeNoise seems to be uncanny at distinguishing between noise and fine detail and does an incredible job of removing the noise without destroying detail. The other week I shot a whole natural light portrait session at ISO 800 with excellent results – something I wouldn’t have dared attempt last year. Topaz DeNoise has given me a camera with an extra two stops in the ISO department or, put another way, a set of lenses with two stops faster glass. That’s cool.
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Topaz “Adjust” is another game changing filter. As well as providing a whole raft of artistic possibilities, one of Adjust’s most useful features is it’s ability to adjust exposure and saturation differentially across regions of an image. This can be a bit like tone-mapping a standard image – not exactly HDR but, within the normal dynamic range, it can pull up shadows and tone down highlights across an image – very useful.
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Did I mention my new 40Mp sensor? That comes courtesy of Topaz Clean and Topaz Detail. Every photographer knows that you can’t blow up a digital photo by 100% and get quality results. Only now you can; using whatever method you prefer to resize the photo (incremental resizing is best for the highest quality results) the resulting image can be processed through “Clean” to remove and smooth any enlargement artefacts and then processed through “Detail” to pull up the finer detail and produce a very clear and sharp enlargement twice the size of the original.
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There are other filters in the Topaz set: “Simplify”, “ReMask”, “DeJPEG”. I have been using the whole set now for three months. The Topaz filters have changed the way I take new photographs, allowed me to take photos I wouldn’t have attempted before, and caused me to go back through my old images and reprocess them the Topaz way.
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Just like having a new camera :-)
Peter Hill
I agree. Topaz is pretty cool. They are getting better and better each version and getting really specific in their range of apps. Really gives CS5 (and others) a boost especially when you add them to the drop-down filter menu.