Mini review Topaz Clarity

A little while ago Topaz contacted me if I wanted to play with their soon to be released Clarity plugin. I have to be totally honest that I always had a weak spot for Topaz, they really have some cool filters and I know a lot of my friends also use Topaz.

Now one of the things I love about NIK/Google is tonal contrast and when I was told that if I loved that one I would LOVE Clarity I could not wait. By the way you also don’t have to wait anymore because Topaz has just released the plugin, if you follow this link you can get it (and you support the blog)

Well Topaz didn’t exaggerated, Clarity is like Tonal contrast on steroids, wow.
The layout of the plugin is very functional and when you start the plugin it won’t take you long to start playing with it and getting some awesome results, when diving more deeply in the possibilities I’m sure that you will be just as enthusiastic as me.

The first controls you will start to play with are the contrast sliders, with these sliders you can target certain areas and manipulate their appearance, but this is just the start, when you go further into the plugin you will very quickly see the HSL sliders, for people not familiar with this term it’s actually the Hue, Saturation and Luminance settings panel, meaning you can control colors not only by saturation but also by their hue and brightness (luminance), this is a very cool thing to have in a plugin like this because in fact it can prevent certain problems you could get on more extreme settings (which I did not encounter yet).

When you scroll down more you will also see a cool masking option and it’s even possible to brush your mask (or use gradients), this is really a very cool feature, although I’m always more a “I will do that in Photoshop” kind of guy, however some people will prefer to do it in the plugin itself. Drawing in the mask is actually very easy to do and it works smooth enough, so if you want to do it in the plugin it’s perfectly possible.

On the left hand side you can see different categories where you can store your own presets, the fun part is that you can even use Clarity for skin smoothing, and there are even some standard settings delivered with the plugin for this, combine this with the brush and HSL options and you indeed have a very cool tool.

For me personally I LOVE (and yes I wrote that with capitals for a reason) the super pumped up look you can get, use Clarity on walls with structure, dresses etc. and you will jump up and down in your editing chair from joy. In short Clarity just ROCKS.

So should you get it ?
Yeah without any doubt.

It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting fashion, architecture, landscapes or whatever, with micro contrast adjustments you can make your images POP in a good way, and if you want to go a little bit more overboard…. Well that option is also there of course, it’s up to you. I just love the effect where it just pops the images, it can give you a lot more contrast in your images without looking over processed, and again if you’re after that “cartoon” look, no problem that’s also possible. In the next week I will show some before and after shots, but we’re on the road now and the internet is not perfect everywhere and time is limited so I will save the samples for next week 😀

I love Tonal contrast from NIK/Google but since I’m using Clarity I have to be honest that I did not boot my NIK/Google software anymore for Tonal Contrast. So in short… get it as soon as possible, and for the price you don’t have to pass on it, as with all Topaz products it’s priced incredibly competitive.

if you follow this link you can get it (and you support the blog)