I mentioned quite a few plugins from Topaz before and today they are introducing a new one Topaz Texture Effects. And since I had the opportunity to already try it, today I will show you what it is about, and what I think about it.

As the name already suggest, this plugin is mostly about adding textures overlays to your photos. But you would be mistaken to think that all it’s about. In a way it’s similar to Nik Analog Efex, but without the focus on trying to emulate vintage cameras. Topaz Texture Efex comes with a set of tools (which I will get to in a moment) and a huge collection of over 275 textures, all over 5000x5000px in size. Of course this makes the installation file a little bigger (1.5Gb+), but that’s to be expected.

Working with presets

When you open Texture Effects you are greeted with a set of default presets. These are quite diverse and use all of the available tools the plugin provides.

 
Still, if you want to tweak any of them, replace the texture or any other adjustment, you can easily edit the presets and save new ones.

 
Additionally, you can download more presets from Topaz website, and if you register, also upload your, for other users to use. From what I seen, no registration is needed to be able to download presets.

Performance

Before I get to adjustments, a little about performance. On my work PC (i7, 16gb Ram, SSD driver, gtx660) the plugin was very snappy, with most of the adjustments taking effect almost instantly. The only time you will experience a big slowdown, is when you try browse the pressets gallery, when between downloading and creating previews, it get really slow.

Standard Adjustments

In the first group of adjustments, you will find some very standard ones, well known from other editing programs. Adjustments like basick adjustments (brightness, shadows…), diffusion, film grain, posterize, split tone and vignette are well known. Two more different that it also provides is Edge blur, which allows you to soften the borders of your image and Edge exposure, which allows you to change the exposure and color of the edges. One very nice touch here is, that you can edit every edge separately, so you can create light leak effects very easily.

 
Another nice feature is, that you can apply the same adjustment as many times as you want, and each adjustment has it’s own opacity slider. Like this you can easily layer as many as you need.

Texture Adjustments

The second group of adjustments is all about included textures. You can add borders, color overlay, dust/scratches, light leaks and textures. Additionally, you can do double exposures, by blending two different photos.

 
All this adjustments offer the same flexibility as the standard ones, so you can use the multiple times and change the opacity as you want (among other tweaks). For each of those, you also have the ability to import your own textures or just stick to the ones provided.

 
You also get all the classic blending modes for all the texture effects, so you can choose how it’s overlayed over your photo.

Overall

Overall, this is a quite nice plugin. It gives a huge amount of options and you even get a good texture library with it. I like to split the plugins based on who are they better for. It’s either for those who want more realistic photo edits, or for those who want a more artistic result. This one is really more for the second group. Texture effects creates a very artistic and vintage camera looking results.

So if this is what you are looking for, you should give it a try. You can find more info on the Topaz Labs website. Also, since it’s a new product, Topaz is giving a big discount for the next 10 days for both, the PC and MAC versions.

From time to time I like to share with you the RAW images from one of my photos, and today is again that day. I share them mostly for those of you, who don’t have a high end 36Mpix camera, and you would still like to try your editing skill on a photo like that.

You can find this three raw files in this Dropbox forder, and download them right now. They are in ARW file format, which is the RAW format Sony cameras use.

As always, please take note that these are shared under the Creative commons license. You can share them and your editing result as much as you want, just please link back to this blog, and don’t use them commercially.

And here you can see what result I got from this RAW files, feel free to share yours on my Facebook page.

When I shoot fireworks, I really like to plan it beforehand. Know when they are, where and have an exact spot, and composition in mind. This time, in this photo I took earlier this year, I was absolutely not prepared. I was at the Slavin memorial to take a few shots of the city, when fireworks above the castle started. It was quite a surprise. At the last minute I managed to get a usable view, and capture at least few shots. And here is one of them.

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

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 1, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 70-200mm F2.8 IS II, Focal length: 85mm, Aperture: 5.6, Middle exposure time: 3.2s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.152944, 17.099966

I added quite a few 21:9 wallpapers recently, but so there are some new also for more standard sizes, here are three new wallpapers in 1920×1200 and 1600×1200 resolutions. You can get them from the wallpapers page as always.

Just a simple photo for today, a classic reflection from the Strkovec lake in Bratislava.

This is a HDR from three exposures, created ion Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 54mm, Aperture: 5.6, Middle exposure time: 15s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.157639, 17.148792