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Photography can be quite a fun hobby. I used to spend countless hours in Photoshop tweaking photos until I discovered Adobe Lightroom. Now that I have this great seamless workflow, I find I rarely go into Photoshop anymore. Now that I don’t have those pixel pushing color warping capabilities quite so readily available, it’s nice to be able to find ways to get them right at my fingertips in Lightroom.

Topaz makes an incredible suite of plugins available both individually and in bundle form. I won’t talk in detail about the ones I haven’t used personally, but the Topaz suite includes Adjust for HDR effects on single exposure photos, Simplify for making artistic versions of your photos, Clean 2 for smothing and edge styling, DeJPEG for removing JPEG artifacts, DeNoise for removing noise obviously, Detail for sharpening, ReMask for making selection masks and InFocus for sharpening and deblur.

Personally I have used the trial for Simplify and I have purchased InFocus and Adjust.

I’ll include the promo shot from the site, and then a photo of my own that shows real world results with the plugin.

Topaz Adjust

For the uninitiated, HDR or High Dynamic Range photography is usually accomplished by taking a series of photos with different exposure settings, and comp’ing them back together into a single image with a much expanded dynamic range. Adjust is a tool that is able to achieve similar results from a single photo, look at the example below.

This is a fantastic example of tasteful HDR. A lot of times people go absolutely crazy with it and the image looks like a cartoon. In this you can notice how much the reflections have been pulled out of the finish of the car, the clouds are much more dramatic, the detail in the road is exaggerated and the field absolutely pops with texture. These kinds of details and color saturation are the hallmark of HDR and I have achieved amazing results with this particular plugin. Of the 3 I have used this is the one that I think is an absolute must buy.

This was taken about a year ago in the Bahamas. I don’t think I need to tell you that the scene was not this dramatic out of camera.

Simplify

With Topaz simplify, the opposite is the intent. The plugin reduces detail, but in a very attractive way. Simulating several styles of manual art like pencil or painting, Simplify creates artwork that is worthy of hanging from your photos, look at the example below.

Aside from the stunningly beautiful dog, look how the plugin has managed to capture the detail of the image, and the color, but in a completely believable paint-stroke look. There is even one preset I used that does this in an impressionist fashion with stunning results:

This photo is of my son and our dog playing in the creek near our house. I couldn’t love this photo more.

InFocus

This is the newest one I have purchased from the bunch. InFocus is a sharpening and de-blurring tool. I have yet to achieve results as dramatic as the ones in the promo shot below, but I have definitely seen some very nice detail added to my photos.

My personal opinion would be that this is the least intuitive of the bunch to use, but keep in mind that I have only owned it for about two days. I have become used to having presets to help me learn how to tweak the sliders. I will continue to work with it until I hopefully understand it better.

I think the photo below did benefit from the additional sharpness.

I might have went ahead and bought the bundle as I have now spent close to that with just 3 of the plugins. It’s something to consider if you like what you see here. Given the astronomical prices of most good Photoshop plugins, I think these are definitely a bargain.

I can’t say that I love the way you have to leave Lightroom to use them, and it seems VERY slow to sync the changes back into Lightroom, and Adobe problem I am sure.

That being said, these relatively inexpensive plugins could significantly increase the quality of your photographs in a very simple and repeatable way.

I have been into digital photography since 2003. I first started messing with RAW then using Phase One’s Capture One software. At the time I was shooting with one of the original Canon Digital Rebels and printing large prints. The ability to tweak the RAW photos in Capture One was an obvious advantage, but the need to still use Photoshop to remove dust spots, fix blemishes and the like meant that my workflow was take photos, download card, open photos in Capture One, edit white balance, contrast, exposure, export all photos, open up photos in Photoshop, correct issues with photo, save, select photos for prints, reopen, resize to output, save.

I had been teetering between Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture for awhile and a friend offering to sell me Aperture 2 for $100 tipped the scales of economics towards that direction and I picked it up.

Now I can point you to plenty of articles about all of the features, and I will at the end of this post, but the real value here is not the editing tools themselves, but the way they change your workflow. This Sunday, I shoot 186 photos, all in RAW. Here is a little peek into the process of how I managed them.

When I got home, I plugged my CF card into the card reader and it began to download photos. Even as it is downloading photos, ones that have already imported are available. I started rating photos right away. The view that shows a large photo and thumbnails at the bottom is fantastic for this.

By rating photos there were usable 2-3, and photos that were fantastic a 4 (I don’t rate anything 5, I am pretty critical of my work), and skipping over 1 in the favor of 9 (discard), I had whittled the 186 photos down to 54, 9 of which were 4s, the rest twos and threes. I then re-sorted my photos in reverse order, highest ranking first, and looked through the twos and threes for a photo I remembered wanting to place on Flickr.

At this point, I went through the photos one by one, adding cropping when needed, adjusting the exposure on most of them to punch it up a bit, then finally a sharpening to make things look just so.

Then I selected my 10 photos, exported the "Versions," which are Aperture’s edits, to jpg and gave it a resize to have no edge longer than 1,024 pixels wide.

I uploaded my photos to Flickr and I was done. 10-15 minutes, 20 tops.That’s some serious time saving for going through nearly 200 photos.

Today I learned that there is even a plugin to export your photos directly to Flickr!

If you shoot raw, or think you want to, this software is a serious time saver.