SCoombs
Well-known member
I hate to make a whole other thread when there's already a Topaz one on the first page, but my questions seem distinct enough that I feel like I really should.
To make a long story short, I finally broke down and purchased Topaz Ai, along with the 3 standalones, as part of their Black Friday sale today. This is after I would up shooting a weekend long event where the lighting was poor enough that a sufficient number of shots I want/need had slightly missed focus or have motion blur due to having to keep shutter speeds at least around 1/200 to get an ISO I knew I could work with. After playing with the trial I found that almost all of these shots are absolutely workable and will produce worthwhile results with Topaz's sharpening. Once I tried actually using the full version to save photos, I found myself fairly confused as to how exactly to go about it.
First, I want to use LrC's denoise, which I just think is much better. To me the Topaz denoise leaves everything looking like vinyl. That seemed simple enough except that whenever I try to open a denoised image from Lr it opens with an enormous amount of noise, especially chromatic noise. Even if Lr's output was spectacular and it is that output version of the file I go to open in Topaz, Topaz opens what looks like the original RAW file which has had no denoising, even the basic Luminance and Chromatic sliders, applied. Is there a way to avoid this?
Second, the consequence to this has been that I have to denoise from LR, do most of my edits, and then export as a JPEG which I then open in Topaz standalone. When I do this, it looks great and I can sharpen as required. However, I then need to export this as a SECOND JPEG. Then, I will sometimes have to go into Photoshop there is some small part of Topaz's work I want to adjust. For instance, I was just working on a photo of a girl where the sharpening looked good overall except it made one of her teeth look very wrong and unflattering so I wanted to go into Photoshop to clean that up. I can then output the final version from PS with the watermark - except I need to also save the PSD file somewhere so that I have access to the final edit without the watermark.
This is producing four or five separate files for each photo I need to do this to which is in addition to taking up disk space is just a mess to try to keep organized. Is there a better workflow that would avoid all of this - or at least some of it?
To make a long story short, I finally broke down and purchased Topaz Ai, along with the 3 standalones, as part of their Black Friday sale today. This is after I would up shooting a weekend long event where the lighting was poor enough that a sufficient number of shots I want/need had slightly missed focus or have motion blur due to having to keep shutter speeds at least around 1/200 to get an ISO I knew I could work with. After playing with the trial I found that almost all of these shots are absolutely workable and will produce worthwhile results with Topaz's sharpening. Once I tried actually using the full version to save photos, I found myself fairly confused as to how exactly to go about it.
First, I want to use LrC's denoise, which I just think is much better. To me the Topaz denoise leaves everything looking like vinyl. That seemed simple enough except that whenever I try to open a denoised image from Lr it opens with an enormous amount of noise, especially chromatic noise. Even if Lr's output was spectacular and it is that output version of the file I go to open in Topaz, Topaz opens what looks like the original RAW file which has had no denoising, even the basic Luminance and Chromatic sliders, applied. Is there a way to avoid this?
Second, the consequence to this has been that I have to denoise from LR, do most of my edits, and then export as a JPEG which I then open in Topaz standalone. When I do this, it looks great and I can sharpen as required. However, I then need to export this as a SECOND JPEG. Then, I will sometimes have to go into Photoshop there is some small part of Topaz's work I want to adjust. For instance, I was just working on a photo of a girl where the sharpening looked good overall except it made one of her teeth look very wrong and unflattering so I wanted to go into Photoshop to clean that up. I can then output the final version from PS with the watermark - except I need to also save the PSD file somewhere so that I have access to the final edit without the watermark.
This is producing four or five separate files for each photo I need to do this to which is in addition to taking up disk space is just a mess to try to keep organized. Is there a better workflow that would avoid all of this - or at least some of it?
