![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9ct75w6AFPq6wl4tApiO-bXOeaBXnByFSHslAjZxIO6Iekhc5q4aAE3BkULs3cFo5haKfslZVSW2hy4p06XQMdzSntaf2ke3qzCzk-pNQckyy645UzGbsDwP6Rs_0kCCsKVC3si119LAa/s400/Tennessee-Barn.jpg)
I've downloaded several free plug-ins and tried some with 30
day trials, but haven't bought too many.
For one thing it's an ROI (Return on Investment) thing with me. A plug-in that costs $199.00 better be
something I'll use on a daily basis. A
$100.00 plug-in would have to used at least a couple times a month. Something costing less than $50.00 falls into
the category of something to play with.
I don't know how it is today, but a buddy of mine was an engineer for
National Semiconductor back in the 70s. He
said they had a hierarchy of being able to buy equipment to make
semiconductors. If the payback was
within one week, no problem. Two weeks
and it would take several levels of approval.
A month and forget about it.
That's not pots and pans we're talking about. That was machines costing hundreds of
thousands of dollars. That's kind of a
high bar to cross. Same (to me) with
plug-ins. Unless I can quickly justify
it, I'll stick with getting there with CS5 itself.
Today's image bounced around pretty good before getting to
where it ended up. It started in Adobe
Photoshop Lightroom 3 for initial adjustments.
Then it went to CS5 for straightening.
It was straightened there rather than in LR3 because I wanted to add to
the size using Content Aware Fill rather than cropping it after squaring it up. Next it was back to LR3 for more fine
tuning. Back to CS5 to remove some power
lines running through the image.
Next came the plug-in.
Topaz Labs' Topaz Adjust. They
recently had it on sale for $39.XX, so it fell into the "play with
it" range of justification. And
play with it was what I did. I'd take a
look at one of the Presets and figure out how I might be able to get close to
what the Preset was showing. For most, I
thought I could come pretty close. A
couple stumped me, but looked pretty interesting. I finally settle in on one called Dynamic
Brightness in their HDR Collection. I
thought it gave the scene a nice "pop". I looked around to see if I wanted to add
another effect, but was pretty happy with what I saw with the one Preset.
Then it was back to CS5 and a bounce back over to LR3. In LR3 I used the Adjustment Brush to do some
selective shading of the image to create a path for the eye to follow. I also increased the contrast in the roof,
brought up the reads and oranges a little and sharpened specific parts to add
emphasis. Once that was done it was back
to global adjustments with overall sharpening and putting on a vignette.
The last part divides, depending on what was to be done with
the image. To print it for framing it
went directly to the Print Module in LR3.
For output for today's post it went back to CS5 and to File/Save for web
and devices. The control of the output
is finer there than in LR3 (IMHO).
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