Topaz BW Effects Review

The Adjustments

The available adjustments are as follows:

1 CONVERSION

This group is the first you work. The group has five adjustments:

  • Basic Exposure: Contrast, brightness, boost blacks, boost whites
  • Adaptive exposure. This adjustment is borrowed from Topaz Adjust and allows you to increase the dynamic range by recovering detail selectively in the shadows and highlights
  • Color Sensitivity. here you can adjust the balance between the grey nuances corresponding to red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta
  • Color Filter: A hue and a strength slider - refer the illustration above
  • Curve tool

curve toolThe curve tool has a number of handy presets hereunder also "Negative" which turns an image into a negative, or vice versa.

We are puzzled by the lack of presets for the color filter adjustment. We would have liked set presets corresponding to the traditional color filters for film photography: Red, Yellew1, Yellow2, etc. Topaz B&W Effects presents us with a hue slider and a strength slider and while we assume that any real filter can be simulated with these sliders, but presets would have been faster and easier to use.

 

2 CREATIVE EFFECTS

This is a group of adjustments that goes beyond mere conversion to monochrome. We like these adjustments, they are fun to use and can create some great effects. The adjustments are:

  • Simplify (simplify Size and Feature Boost) - combines detail into blotches
  • Diffusion
  • Posterize
  • Camera Shake (adds a camera shake effect)

simplify and diffusion

simplify and diffusion

3 LOCAL ADJUSTMENTS

This is the weakest area of the tool. The intention with this group of adjustments is to make it possible to perform adjustments locally on the image. The adjustments are performed by brushing over the areas that should change but this is very difficult to do with any degree of precision unless your image has clear edges which the adjustment must follow. In this case you can turn edge-awareness on and the plug-in goes a great job of preventing that the local adjustment bleeds outside the intended area. For images with no clearly defined edges this approach is no match for the results you can achieve with selections and masks in Photoshop.

The adjustment brush has five settings:

  • Dodge
  • Burn
  • Color (convert the brushed-over area back to color)
  • Detail (emphasize detail)
  • Smooth (suppress detail)

Local adjustment group

dodge

4 FINISHING TOUCHES

This is a great group of adjustments which goes well beyond what you can achieve in Photoshop. The adjustments in this group alone could justify the purchase of this plug-in if you're into creating images that look film-like with realistic grain and as if printed through the old-fashioned, chemical development process on specific types of photo paper.

The sub-groups of adjustments are:

  • Silver and Paper Tone
  • Quad Tone
  • Film Grain (Tri-X and other Kodak films, Rollei Pan 25, various Ilford films, and many more)
  • Border
  • Edge Exposure (emulates a break-down in your development process)
  • Vignette
  • Transparency (brings an adjustable amount of color back across the image)

It deserves to be mentioned that the film grain feature is based on scans of actual film - it is not just some randomly computer-generated noise pattern!

The image below illustrates how a digital image can be turned into a realistically looking film-based and chemically developed print. The image was processed as follows:

  • Classic preset
  • Orange filter
  • Curve medium contrast
  • Silver and paper tone (at default setting)
  • Film grain Kodak Tri-X
  • Edge exposure

sample1Click on the image for a large version (1MB file)

Here is a 100% crop which shows the grain and paper texture:

100 pct crop


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