Wonderful effects can be achieved in this section! The large Mask window is very useful to see what is being affected in your image. I particularly like this Brush tab to remove the painterly effect and enhance the detail in your focal point. It appears that only one Mask can be used for each Impression layer. This is a wonderful way to add detail to your Focal Point of your image. Use the Color Aware tool to create a clean mask along edges of your subject. The Brush Mask – Can brush the effect in and out, and touch up edges around your subject.It create detailed effects on light sources and glowing parts of image. The Luminosity Mask – Uses luminosity values to determine edges for the mask and create it.The Color Mask – Uses color value differences to create a mask that is great for images clearly defined by color edges.It is somewhat like the Radial Filter in Lightroom or the Camera Raw filter. The Spot Mask – Create a soft vignette effect, a subtle transition.My favorite new feature is the Masking section where there are four different masks with different sliders to make your image totally unique.New sliders and buttons have been added to the Stroke section – Number of strokes, Large Brush Volume to adjust large areas of color, and Rotation Variation to add randomness to the stroke effects and in the Lighting section – new Highlight and Shadow sliders.And the layers can now be set to all the Blend Modes inside the plug-in. According to Denise over at the Topaz Labs blog, there are now over 30 new loaded presets plus those that will be available in the Community library.This has totally hooked me on Texture Effects, so the possibilities are endless as the Impression Community of presets are added.

It is now much more similar to Topaz Texture Effects, which started out with this new interface that includes a Community where you can download presets when something different is needed.(For more info on post-processing on all images, check out the end of blog – this will give you a feel how many different filters and plug-ins can work together to get these effects.) If you own Topaz Impression version 1, this update is free!!! Best deal around – all of Topaz Labs’s plug-in updates are always free once you own it! What’s New? I call it SJ WC Like Effect-modified preset and can be downloaded in the Community Library. I am surprised how much more they added to what I considered already a fabulous program! The image above used the a Watercolor II preset with some changes created in version 1 and still works great in the newer version. Know you will see lots about this on the internet, but I am enjoying using it so much I wanted to share some of my initial responses to the program. Totally psyched that Topaz (for website link see my Tidbits Blog sidebar) Impression updated their plug-in to Version 2.

Update topaz texture effects 2