Topaz Studio 2: Introduction and Workflow for Beginners

introduction and workflow tutorial ->| Introduction | 01 | 02| 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 |
| digital painting examples | resources | about | impressionist painters | contact-questions |

Part 5: Understanding presets and the impression filter

Man impressionist painting-like effects are achieved in part or wholly by presets employing the “Impression” filter, sometimes alone and sometimes coupled with other filters. A preset is comprised of one or more filters with adjustments made to the various filters to achieve its effect.

Among my favourite starting point presets is "MI Impressionist". If you search for it with the magnifying glass, you can likely find it among your presets. Below is what I get on my search. I got MI Impressionist to show up on my list of presets by setting both the "Look Category" and "Sort by" menus to "All", where "all" refers to all the filters that came with TS2:

Note that I've not yet clicked on "apply". I get to see the MI Impressionist effect by simply running my cursor over it. Also note that I've added the filter to my favourites collection by clicking on the heart. I'm also tempted to click on the hearts on two of the other presets: "Expressionism" and "Impression 5" because both strike me as potentially useful starting points for the type of impressionist image I'm interested in. Note that a preset that's a good starting point for one image may not work well for another? It has to do with the density, color, content types (water, sky, land, buildings, etc) and structure of the original image.

Next click on the blue "Apply" button to see the set o filters that make up the "MPI" preset. My result is shown below. There are four filters, with a repeat of "texture". Note the stacking of filters. As you move up from the image at the bottom of the stack, you first find a basic adjustment, then a texture, next an "Impression" (as promised - many impressionist effect presets contain the filter "Impression", and finally at the top another texture. I'm not sure why the creator of this preset made it with 4 filters, I just know that it seems to produce what I've learned is a potentially good starting point to reach an effect I want. To be clear, this isn't the final effect I want, and it's likely that none of the presets in the TS2 collection will produce a final effect that satisfies my impressionist-wanting eyes.

Before we start work on the impressionist filter which is but one filter that produces the current effect, let's explore preset filter sets a bit. Some presets come with only 1 filter, some come with two or several or many. Each filter in a set is collectively contributing to the effect that we see, which again, may not be the final effect I want for my tigerlily image.

To learn more and gain control of presets and filters, note the 3 controls that come with the MPI preset. If you click on the mask, you will get a variety of masking devices including the usual paintbrush. You can use the paintbrush to lessen the effect on all or parts of the image. The second is what it looks like ... click on it and the preset will disappear. The third is an on/off switch operating the entire preset. If you click on the line where each filter appears, the same three controls will appear and you can mask and change the effects of each filter, trash it, or turn it off. You'll not lose it because you can turn the eye back on.

To further understand how multi-filter presets work, give this a try:

1. Turn the eyes off for each of the 4 filters, so that none are operating on the original image. But DO NOT turn the eye off for the preset. Now the original image should showing.

2. Then turn each filter eye on as it appears in the stack from the bottom up until they're all on again.

3. Next turn them all off and turn them on one at a time, with all the others off and click on that filter's line. When you do that, you'll see the set of adjustment sliders used to create that slider's contribution to the overall effect. The sliders operate much like the adjustment sliders that you use in other post processing softwares like photoshop and lightroom. When you finish looking at one at one slider, turn the eye off and go up the stack and turn the next on and examine its sliders.

On the next part 6 step, we're going to isolate the impression filter and learn how to operate its adjustment sliders. That will be the a key move that enables you to create an impressionist effect on your own images.