In this tutorial I will teach you something about the Topaz Vivacity filter. Topaz Vivacity is a Photoshop plugin that can be used to achieve some great looking effects seen in many tags. First of all, make sure you have the addon installed (when you install the plugin, make sure you select the :AdobeAdobe Photoshop CS4Plug-ins folder, or wherever you have your plugin folder selected). Lets get started:

Topaz Filters

Topaz comes with a few filter options (You might have 2 or 3 more that are somewhat the same as the ones listed):

• TopazClean
• TopazDeJPG
• TopazDenoise
• TopazEnlarge
• TopazSharpening

I’m going to show you the difference between TopazSharpening and Photoshops default sharpening filter with this wallpaper I found on gamewallpapers:

This wallpaper is rather blurry, so its a good image we can use. First, I’m going to use the default Filter > Sharpen with default settings:

As you can see, some parts look pretty good. Other parts however look kind of messy. Take a look at their pistols for example, they don’t look that great. I’m going to use the topaz filter now:

our result:

It can be a bit hard to compare the two images, however you can see quite a difference on the pistols, they’re a little less edgy. Topaz has some other cool functions to fix an image however:

Topaz Clean Filter

We’re going to go back to the wallpaper we started with, and apply my favourite topaz effect. Our original wallpaper:

We’re going to apply the TopazClean filter to create a smooth dreamy effect (though this image doesn’t quite compliment its effect to be fair):

First, select Filter > Topaz Vivacity > Clean, and play around with the settings. I used the custom settings (You can select these by pressing the reset button):

my result:

If you compare this with the Photoshops own sharpen filter:

If you’re trying to create a dreamy sort of fake vectorized look, this is definitely a good filter to use. I hope you’ve enjoyed this small article, if you have any suggestions or tips about using Topaz, please use the comments below to tell us!