Have you ever looked at an image when you got home and were sort of disappointed in the colors or felt the images was just sort of flat? There could be a lot of reasons and most of them are caused by exposure problems. If you are an Adobe guru with their Photoshop and Lightroom software you can do a lot of things to help fix that. What about for those of us that don’t want to spend the time to become expert with the software? Well there is a company call Topaz labs and they have a solution for almost all of your problems!

Their plugins work with all of the major photo editors, Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Elements and many others such as iPhoto, Irfanview, Paintshop Pro, Photo Impact and Serif Photo Plus. That means that really all of you should have access to some photo editor that will let you make magic with the Topaz Labs plugins.

Here is an example of what you can do. For this example, I used the default setting for everything that I did. I also did not do any manipulation outside of Topaz Labs. So this was maybe 3 minutes of work and that was also me saving screen shots along the way…

Click any image to embiggen.

Here is the original image. A pastoral scene from the Texas Hill Country with Bastard Cabbage in front of a field of Prickly Poppy. In my minds eye the scene was more vivid and had more depth. So, I used a couple of Topaz plugins to bring it back.

[singlepic id=1251 w=500 h=240 float=center]

I used Topaz Adjust – Simplify first. This really gave the image a lot more depth by blurring out the background even more than the original.

[singlepic id=1252 w=500 h=240 float=center]

Next, I actually put some detail back, but kept the backgound blurred using Topaz Detail – Micro Contrast Enhancement.

[singlepic id=1250 w=500 h=240 float=center]

All of my manipulation tends to bring back and or emphasize the noise on the image and so the last adjustment was Topaz Denoise – Light.

[singlepic id=1249 w=500 h=240 float=center]

There you have a couple of minutes of clicking and I’ve moved the image back to what my mind saw when I took the image. Imagine if you actually manipulated the features of the software how much you could do to make your image really pop or make something completely original and unique…like this!

[singlepic id=1253 w=500 h=240 float=center]

You can learn more about the filters and the abilities of Topaz Labs filters on their website…HERE. All of my readers can enjoy a 15% discount on the plugins by using the code Jeff15 when you check out.