Happy New Year.
I don’t know what the weather has been like where you live but here it has been dreadful of late. It has rained and then rained even more. Between Christmas and New Year many areas around here were flooded with record levels being recorded in every river in Lancashire.
To give you some idea of the severity, here is the river that runs past my house. At this point the river is around 15-20 feet wide but only about 6-12 inches deep. This picture shows the river as it came over the top of the retaining wall, about 6 feet higher than usual.
Through this period, I just wasn’t able to do any Photography which is a little depressing. Unfortunately, this encouraged me to take advantage of some of the special offers going around the internet and I bought a few new plug-ins. I’m a sucker for new software and thought I would share some of my purchases with you over the coming weeks.
The first purchase is from Topaz. I finally decided to splash out on their Clarity plug in with the intention of using it on some of my duller Black and White images to give them greater impact. Here you can see the same image twice, where the Clarity adjustment has been applied to the second image but not the first.
I realise this plug in isn’t to everyone’s taste but it can often work with images (especially B&W) where the lighting wasn’t the best.
The Lightweight Photographer 
I’m impressed, a definite improvement all round – I’m intrigued by the dark image in the top left of the frame, I presume it’s a cloud a bit nearer to your viewpoint, it’s an odd shape for a cloud.
Hi Bob, yes it’s a cloud. I actually cropped out some of the sky so what you are seeing is the bottom of the cloud. It’s been made darker by the edge burn in Nik Silver Efex. I chose this particular image as in colour it’s very poor but converted to black and white the Topaz Clarity seems to add something.
No photography, just some weather talk:-) Nothing but rain and dampness here as well, but that seems to go with the reclaimed land we live on. Had I only known this before… it sucks for my health. Local climate differences can be huge, even in a tiny country such as this; it’s snowing in the north now, and there’s ice, while our garden seems to be nothing but rotting away all year. Would love to move to the UK, at least there’s way more open space and nature.
Hi Petra,
It’s funny isn’t it. We always seem to think its better somewhere else. I would love spend more time in the US and South America or Sweden come to think of it. I’m sure I would miss home despite it having rained constantly since early November.
It it weren’t for my parents and my finances, I would leave this country in a heartbeat. Living in the most polluted country in Europe with the kind of hypersensitive airways that I have sure isn’t fun. I cry when we drive back from vacation, which is often in Germany, and when I see the blue sky get more and more murky, nature become less, and the air smelling more and more like the megastables that are still popping up all over this country. I’m also not really a big fan of the often abbrasive and blunt Dutch ways.
After our severe drought in California for the past 4 years, our current deluge of rain brings smiles around here. So “Bad” weather is often “Good,” depending upon where you’re coming from.
Glad to see how you used Topaz Clarity to boost some punch in your B&W image. I, also, just got Topaz, but haven’t used Clarity yet in monochrome. Your result excites me enough to try it on some of my images. Thanks.
Hi Wei Chong. Yes you must try out Clarity. It’s an excellent plug in, especially with something like black and white where you can really push the image hard.
It certainly gives it a lift. I thought that “Efex” did it all but, it seems not.
Can you moderate the amount of application or is it a series of presets? I would be concerned that it might introduce “coarseness” in application.
A Guid New Year tae ye.
Allister
Whilst there are lots of presets you can also adjust these or simply enter your own adjustments as I did. If you enter your own you can also save them to your own preset library. You should check out the free trial on their website. It’s fully functional for 30 days. Visit Topaz Labs website