I've been using Photoshop plug-ins by
Topaz Labs ever since they came out with Adjust a number of years ago. The Topaz products I most frequently turn to are DeNoise and Adjust. DeNoise, as its name implies, removes the speckles and blotches from underexposed areas of an image. Adjust provides a range of enhancements that will bring out details, pump up colors, and create effects that, in the extreme, can be called cartoonish. I use Topaz Adjust when working on many of my images, as the last step in Photoshop before saving the file. I bring it into the image as a separate layer and usually I dial it down with the opacity slider to make its effects barely noticable and quite subtle.
However, sometimes an image needs the industrial strength treatment.
A few weeks ago I was out to lunch with my wife and her mother, and decided to capture the moment with the only camera I had with me ... an Android smart-phone. Back lighting was severe, and even after activating the "flash" (a.k.a. LED bulbs) on the phone, the autoexposure on the smart-phone's camera couldn't handle it. Here's the picture straight out of the camera:
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Keep in mind that this is a jpeg capture on a smart-phone, so it doesn't come close to giving me the latitude of tonal adjustment a RAW capture by a DSLR would grant. I turned to Topaz Adjust for help.
I didn't expect very much from this image, but I went to work on it anyway.
First, with Topaz DeNoise, I selected the preset JPEG-strong. That pretty much smoothed out the noise in the image.
After that, I brought up Topaz Adjust and moved the Adaptive Exposure slider to 0.70 and the Regions slider to 6. I didn't move any other sliders from their default setting before clicking on OK. Here's the jpeg image that resulted
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Click on image to enlarge |
Finally for the finishing touches, I imported the image into Lightroom. In the Develop module, I moved the Red Saturation slider down to -30 to remove the exaggerated redness from the skin. Other slider adjustments followed: Fill Light to 40, Blacks to 3, Clarity to +30, Brightness to +20.
Here's the final image, before cropping and vignetting.
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Click on image to enlarge |
... and after cropping and vignetting in Lightroom
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Click on image to enlarge |
Topaz to the rescue, again!
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