Well many of you are familiar with Topaz's fun Adjust program, for HDR type effects or just for general photo recovery. ; And Topaz's quite good Denoise3 program. Well they recently released Detail...this is a program that allows flexible sharpening and detail options for photos - with adjustment sliders for small, medium, and large detail and boost, and also for color and contrast tweaks. ; There is some overlap with Adjust, but detail has some real nice sharpening capability without halo or other artifacts that you can get when you push too hard with regular or USM sharpening. ; I downloaded the free trial to play around with it, and found it pretty impressive for boosting details and overall sharpness. ; Here are a few quick-and-dirty samples: I tried to find a challenging shot to sharpen up - so I went to my safari shots of the male lion. ; At 345mm, from a moving truck, and ISO400 and a megazoom lens wide open, it was certainly one that was sharpness-challenged. ; After initial processing, and applying my basic USM to the resized shot, this was about as good as I could get without sharpening halos: I was OK with it, because there was hair detail in the mane, and some facial scar details. ; It was far from perfect, but the lions are hard to get on that ride. So I took the original shot (notice it isn't cropped in as close as the above shot), and ran it quick and dirty through details using the microcontrast setting with the small details slider pumped up a bit: Now...just to point out, I've done no other processing here. ; With some noise reduction in the background, or layering over the original, the background could be suitably smoothed down a bit, but still leaving the detail on the lion. ; But the details in the lion really do jump out a lot more, and despite cranking up the sliders high on a slightly blurry shot, it didn't produce typical sharpening white haloes around the edges. Here's another - this original shot was fairly sharp, and I didn't process it at all other than resizing and light USM: Now this is actually a different photograph, but taken at almost the same time, from the same spot, of the same gorilla, in the same light - for all effects and purposes, it should be the same basic shot for details. ; This is the version that I did no processing on other than running through Details on microcontrast setting: It does bring out much more detail in the fine hairs. Now, I need to fine tune using it - I may go for a blend, as sometimes the adjustments make the shots a bit too contrasty - I need to work the sliders to pull that down a bit. ; But you may want to download it and try it out...it's just another neat thing to play with. ; And for those with other Topaz software, I believe they are still offering a limited time $19.95 purchase if you want to buy it.
That's pretty amazing! ; Thanks for posting. ; I'll take a look at that when I am home again. ; I'm at work now.
It's definitely worth playing with on the 30-day free trial - pull up some shots you had a hard time with sharpening, and see how they look - then pull up some shots you like just to see any subtle enhancements. ; That'll help you determine if it's worthwhile to buy.
