Topaz Labs has come out with a NEW addition to the Topaz Lab Suite!! I was really excited to hear about this one. I’ve wanted to create painting-like images for quite some time.
Topaz Impression lets you turn your images to art with settings that imitate the master painters such as Van Gogh, Monet, and Cezanne with brush strokes that you control yourself. There are plenty of adjustments that you can make within this plugin!
Here’s the original of one of my “squash” images.
Here’s the same image after running Topaz Impression. You can see the brush strokes but know that I didn’t push the limits…….YET! I’m still learning more about the plugin and will definitely be using it on more of my images!
I’m also including a couple screen shots from inside the plugin to give you an idea of some of the tools you can use.
On the righthand side, there is a drop down menu where you can choose from a number of preset effects, such as:
- Ancient
- Impressionistic
- Modern
- Painting
- Pencil
- Charcoal and Pastel
and you can create your own presets as well! Once you choose a panel to work from, just click through the effects until you find one that you want to work with.
Once you’ve chosen an effect, you can further adjust it by double clicking on it, which will open a new panel with tons more adjustments. And it’s not hard at all! It’s just a matter of experimenting with the effect sliders, brush sizes, color, etc. AND it has BLEND MODES (you can see the drop down in the above image at the bottom of the screen).
For my preview image, I chose Van Gogh and brush 2 (it’s highlighted there in blue). You can see the other brush choices as well. The brushes are different for the various presets. This panel is actually much longer than this preview shows. When you scroll down this panel, you’ll find color adjustments (hue, saturation and lightness) as well as lighting adjustments and textures to choose from.
The best part about Topaz is…….you can download a free trial and experiment on your own. I think this would work beautifully on landscape images too!
If you’ve ever wanted to “paint” your images, I encourage you to give it a try! Pick up a free trial or purchase your copy HERE.
You can get 25% off until September 30 by using this coupon code: SEPIMPRESSION.
I hope my review helped you understand a little more about Topaz Impression.
Hugs and Have A Creative Day!
Cheryl
Deb M says
September 26, 2014 at 5:44 pmI so wanted to get this but my graphics card is too old (3 years). I don’t remember what the requirement was, just that I don’t have it. I’ll be upgrading my computer in the next year or so, though, so then I can get it. Topaz is a great company and thye are very upfront about the requirements and even let you run a little test to see if your computer is up to date.
CherylMC says
September 26, 2014 at 6:13 pmOh bummer on the graphics card Deb. I’m sure there will be opportunities later on to get a deal on the Topaz Impression.