Topaz studio question

[Ben Egbert]

At Alans suggestion, I downloaded and installed Topaz Studio to go along with my other Topaz suites. I am liking it and tried it out on my recent Moulton Barn image. But it has pages of presets. It takes minutes just to scroll through. I marked several as favorites, but I cannot find a way to save them in a special place, or to change the sort order.

I was just wondering if others use this and how they use it, and what their favorite recipes are.

 

[JimFox]

How are you liking the Studio set up? Maybe I am just too used to the look and feel of Photoshop, but when I downloaded and tried Topaz Studio last year I just didn't feel comfortable with it. Perhaps just because it was different, but I didn't feel at ease with the use of it.

 

[Ben Egbert]

I use topaz as a finishing tool after I finish in ps. It can get stuff beyond my ps skills

 

[AlanLichty]

I don't use any of their presets - I just wing it with the different modules. The primary ones I use are Precision Contrast, HSL Tuning, and AI Clear. All of those are from the Pro modules. Precision Contrast and HSL Tuning I got for free since I already had the equivalent Topaz Standalone modules. I make a new layer in Photoshop and then set it to be a Smart Layer so I can tweak the results. Topaz has tons of presets that do funky things to your images which is great if you are into weird abstract art but fairly useless for my tastes.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Right most are useless to me but a few are very good. I never mastered smart objects and I prefer a formula to individual tweaking

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, here is what I did. I created an action that create a layer, then goes to Topaz Studio and finds the pre-made settings under the "featured" selection menu. This is a very long menu and about 2/3 of the way through is one I like called "Color and contrast boost 2". The action oks the selection and closes TOPAZ leaving the changes on the action layer where I can fade or brush as desired.

Here is an example.

Same image after applying Topaz Contrast and color boost 2 and fading 50%.

 

[AlanLichty]

Those presets create a pretty hot color palette that's a bit over the top for my tastes in both cases. One option you could consider is to dial back the opacity of the Topaz Studio layer a bit to get more realistic renditions.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks Alan, yes, it is hot and this was dialed back to 50%. I mostly wanted to show how it could be used. There at least 3 other items in that set of featured presets that I will do actions for and try them all.

 

[AlanLichty]

Good luck!