Topaz Labs Bundles

While going through http://farbspiel-photo.com/, the HDR Cookbook the author mentions using Topaz quite a bit. I looked at http://www.topazlabs.com/bundle/ where you can download trials and see how it works for you.

Keep in mind that the files are large so first check the size if bandwidth is a worry for you.

A special ran on St Patrick's Day and it was a pretty big saving for me. I bought the bundle, didn't include Star Effects, which I will get later, but for the price I was happy with my purchase.

The site seems to run specials on a regular basis so keep checking. My favourite is Simplify. It gives a very artistic look to a photo, almost as if the photo was drawn.

Another great tool is the Vignette in Topaz Adjust. I worked through a tutorial, which I will post a link to (trust me these are great tuts) where I needed to use a distort filter that PSE9 didn't have. Now I have a similar tool with Topaz Adjust.

So far I'm impressed with Topaz Labs. Because PSE9 is a watered down version of Photoshop CS5, Topaz Labs has provided that extra bit of flexibility to PSE9. Yes I know, why haven't I upgraded to PSE10?

No real interest since there isn't much of an upgrade in the program worth spending more money on. They apparently fixed the issue with laptops where they failed in PSE9 to tell consumers about the restriction in monitor size. Basically, some options on menus were not available if your monitor size was incorrect (as said they didn't let consumers know this before hand).

Anyway, when it's worthwhile upgrading I'll bother but not right now.