I went ahead and bought a license for Clarity.
Hi,
Well, you were just in time for their discount, so you're set for any future updates
and version upgrades which will be free. Obviously, if and when there will be an update or upgrade depends on the popularity of the plugin, and whether a feature upgrade will offer them enough pay back for the R&D investment. They are a normal commercial company, with the possible exception of their business model. Free updates/upgrades for life, means they need to produce new plugins regularly, or upgrade existing ones, if they want to fund their organisation with new customers joining in.
Luckily, their new plugins are really adding a lot of workflow benefits, and several existing plugins are apparently so popular that they are relatively frequently upgraded with real new functionality and user interface improvements. So it's not like they are milking an existing product to death.
I am still not sure if it is useful for the "natural" look I am interested in. My early impression is that Topaz Clarity may be better suited to making stuff look less natural and more stylized with a contemporary desaturated color cast look.
"Less natural" depends on how one uses the plugin, and based on which preprocessing it has to do its thing. It's not a desaturated color cast look, it just doesn't create a color cast like other products do. On top of that it allows to adjust Hue/Saturation/Luminance, and even do that locally (with intelligent masks).
It is certainly not simply increasing a bit of the mid range contrast the way the "clarity" slider in Adobe Camera RAW does. The intellicolor feature seems interesting and learning about it has helped me understand why the Topaz Clarity contrast sliders have such a dramatic *add or remove black* effect with little saturation response.
Intellicolor as a technology is hugely important to give the user control over all aspects of contrast. Separating luminance from chromaticity is something that more plugin makers should offer, and only few do.
I find that using the clarity parameter in Adobe Camera RAW is helpful and I was hoping to find something very similar for use at later stages in a Photoshop processing. I don't think I have found what I was hoping for yet.
The Topaz Clarity processing seems clunky and slow so it seems impossible to slide through a range of adjustment while looking for a sweet spot. It feels more like hunt and peck or set and wait, but I remain interested in exploring the ability to work with the different contrast sliders. It probably works better with smaller files than I am using.
This sounds odd to me, since the response on my computers is almost real-time, which allows to fine-tune the sliders on the go.
The other thing that I find less than ideal is the lengthy menu of sliders whereby small adjustments that I have made get hidden from view. I think I'd like to be able to see all or most of the sliders at once and would gladly trade the display area on the left which is for preset lists for a double column of sliders in the right margin so I could see all the parameters at once.
I agree tha t at times it would be useful to have more sliders available without having to collaps/unfold sub categories, but that is typically a GUI improvement that requires a lot of thought and feedback, because it depends on one's display/font size as well. The higher the display resolution, the more sliders will fit, but not everybody has the highest display resolutions on all of their systems.
At times it seems like using it is more of an exercise in exploring change as a diversion rather than as a vehicle to get to where I want to go. I guess the easiest way to describe how I feel is that I would be just as happy to pay for a simple algorithm as some people are happy to pay for a complex stack of them.
Again, maybe depending on hardware and GPU acceleration, I do not experience any sluggishness, so I see instant feedback which helps the creative process. I doubt whether the complexity of adjusting Clarity with multiple contrast levels, and HSL controls, and separate masking for each, can be done with a simple algorithm.
Cheers,
Bart
