Let’s continue with another shot from Passau. I really like the huge cloud over the city here, and with a bit longer exposure, I got quite a nice view of it :)

This is a two shot blend, created in Photoshop. I used the second, darker photo, just do darken few bright spot under the tower.

Last week Topaz released and update to one of the plug-ins from their popular collection, the Topaz Impession, and today, I will take a look at it.

What is it for?

Topaz Impression changes your photos into paintings, by simulating brush strokes. It provides many (over 150) presets for different styles and also gives you access to huge amounts of settings, so you can further tweak the look you are going for.

How does it look?

It’s really hard not to be impressed by the results. If I did not know, you could easily fool mi with the results, claiming that they are paintings. I especially liked the impressionistic presets, that provide just wonderful one click results.

For each preset, you can also go into the settings and tweak many attributes. From the size and shape of the brushes, to color tones, textures, lights and more. It’s not always easy to tell what will result from a specific change, but exploring is part of the fun here.

Usability & Performance

Again, it’s hard to not be impressed by the speed of this software. Switching between presets takes a second (it get slower by huge photos, but one should expect that :)) and changes in settings take effect almost immediately. This really makes experimenting that much more enjoyable. The interface is very simple, similar to other plug-ins from topaz, with the presets being the center element here. You just select the one you like the most, and than just tweak the result a bit.

The quality of the result is really nice, with the brushes being high enough resolution, that it looks great even when zoomed in.

Conclusion

While the results are impressive, there is a question, where you would use something like this. For me, the usability is very limited, as I tend to go more toward realism. But if you want to put a more artistic touch to your photos, or you have a client that would be interested in something like this, you should really give it a try. For more info and a trial version, head over to the Topaz Impresion 2 webpage here. (btw. there is also currently a introductory price with a 40% discount available, the code is on the Topaz website)

Shooting fireworks

I mentioned one offer from MacPhun yesterday, and just today, they stated another one :) If you are interested in their Creative Kit plugin bundle, you can get it right now (and until next week) for a much discounted price, and they will also include a video tutorial on shooting photos of fireworks. You can check out the full offer on their website here.

Luitpoldbrucke

Let’s continue with another shot from Passau. This is the Prinzregent-Luitpold-Brücke right at the tip of the city, close to where the Danube and Inn lakes merge into one. I wanted a nice shot of the bridge, with the castle in the back, but wanted a bit more movement in it, so a passing bus really helped with it quite a lot.

I took this shot not that late in the evening, but since it was rainy, it got dark really quickly. This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Swith to Aurora

For those of you who are thinking of giving Aurora HDR a try, they are currently having a promotion campaign, where you will get a discounted price for Aurora, if you can show that you are using a different software right now. Head over to the Aurora web-page to find out more. You can also check out my review of it.

Split in the middle

I enjoyed a lot of rain last week, with the weather changing almost every hours during some days. And while taking photos, I even managed to catch the change in one of them :)

Here you can see a till clear sky on one side, while the rain is already coming in on the other one. And it even shown a rainbow for few minutes. This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

So my goal to catch up with the blog after all the travel I did recently really is not working that well, so I decided to abandon that, and just continue as normally. This will mean that some dates are missing, but thats something that will mostly bother my perfectionist view on how I do it :) So rather than trying to catch up, I will just post when I can and go with it.

And as last week I spend in Passau in Germany, let’s continue with a shot from there. I had some work while there, but I still got two evenings to get some photos (when it didn’t rain that much :)) and here is one of them.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.