Help with Photos and Plug-ins

[Sheryl Haley]

Has anyone used any of Topazlabs plug-ins? If so,what are your opinions about the plug-ins getting a photo laser ready?

Also, are there any other invaluable plug-ins that make your job easier (photos or other)?

Thanks, Sheryl Haley

I have Corel Draw X5, Corel Photo-Paint X5, & Adobe Photoshop Elements 7

[Larry Bratton]

Might be nice but I doubt it would be worth $400 bucks as far as laser prep. There are several canned programs out there such as Photograv that supposedly make the task simple, but they all have their advocates and opponents. It is my feeling that if you have a decent photo, and that is what you need to start, that the work can be done in either Photopaint or Photoshop. I personally like Photopaint as it interfaces with Corel Draw, has all the tools needed and allows a dithering pattern to be added upon conversion to black and white. Just my two cents worth.

[Frank Corker]

I agree with Larry. Photograv is customed made for images and lasers. If you do a lot of images, then I think it's worth the money and it's so simple to use. For the cost of some of the plugins photograv would have paid for itself and there is much less to have to concern yourself with.

[Sheryl Haley]

Thank You Larry & Frank,
I really appreciate both of your input. It's great to hear from those with more expertise.
Sheryl Haley

[Martin Boekers]

Sheryl,

I'm more familiar with PS than PP, but PS has all the tools you need to clean up images to get them prepped to engrave.
If you look at it this way, all these plug-ins do is tell the host program, Photo Shop what to do. Take some time to explore PS & PP. It will be time well spent. Lots of FREE tutorials out there

PS under the adjustments drop down has a highlight and shadow adjustment (maybe not in Elements you'll have to check)
It is as close an easy one step fix as you will find. Not sure if PP has it also.

Then next thing to explore, if your interested, is there are tons of FREE yes FREE actions out there for PS just google and you'll
find them. These are nice if you are looking to do special effects, convert to higher end B&W, change to a painted effect etc.

Hope this helps

[Scott Shepherd]

I recently tried out the remask plugin from them for Photoshop. I liked it. I bought it. I've used it a couple of times and found it's pretty darn good for removing backgrounds, etc. Worth the $50 I paid for it.

That's the only thing I have used from them, but I have my eye on the one they have that takes a blurry photo and makes it clear. The demo looks outstanding.

[Martin Boekers]

I recently tried out the remask plugin from them for Photoshop. I liked it. I bought it. I've used it a couple of times and found it's pretty darn good for removing backgrounds, etc. Worth the $50 I paid for it.

That's the only thing I have used from them, but I have my eye on the one they have that takes a blurry photo and makes it clear. The demo looks outstanding.

Scott how does it compare with the extract function in PS? I use that for difficult masking and seems to work well.

I checked out the You Tubes on Topazlabs and they seem real similar on how the masking works. A tip I thought was
neat is after you get the mask finished duplicate that layer, then change the layer style to "overlay" or "screen" then
adjust the opacity to 50%-70% seems to help!

I believe in the past Corel had a masking tool called "Knockout" which was pretty good, don't know though if it is in PP.