Philoking.com

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.

One of the problems with using a news style theme is that you constantly have to upload files for lead stories, etc. If you aren’t always on a machine with a full fledged blog client or possibly suffer from firewall restrictions like I do, you need to be able to upload your images through the web.

After a failed attempt at writing a quick and dirty script to accomplish this task, I decided to browse the WordPress Plug-in library and I came across WP Easy Uploader. It installed in seconds and worked flawlessly on the first try.

It’s a simple tool. Once installed, on your dashboard go to Tools > Upload Files.

From here you can upload files from either a web reference or directly from your file system. You can upload to the default WordPress upload folder, directly to your plug-in folder or into a theme folder. These two also benefit from automatic extraction of zip files. You can also use a manual path, which is what I used to solve my problem. Remember to point your slashes / or you will get some weird folders in your WP root with \\ and \\\ between the elements. Other than that you can have it automatically overwrite files, rename if it already exists, remove the archive after an extraction or force files not in a folder to be extracted into a folder.

Pretty complete feature set and a plug-in that I would say is a must have for any WordPress site operator. You can find the plug-in in the auto install tool or visit the author’s site.

Enjoy!