Topaz Impression – Turn Your Photos into Works of Art

Topaz Impression Oil Painting II Preset (Above Photo)

Topaz Impression is a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom that will help turn your photographs into works of art.

Topaz Impression has over 100 presets to get you started in creating a painted look to your photographs.  These 100+ presets are organized into six collections in Topaz Impression:  Ancient, Modern, Impressionistic, Painting, Pencil, Charcoal, and Pastel.

Topaz Impression Presets

On the Presets Page, there are over 100 presets to choose from to start your work in transforming photos to a paintings.  You can also adjust the preset strength and change the blend mode like in Photoshop to further tailor your image.

Topaz Impression Selective Parameters

Click on the icon in the middle of the Preset to modify additional Selective Parameters to further fine tune your work of art.

In the Selective Parameters panel, you can change the brush and stroke characteristics.  You can also change the hue, saturation, and lightness of each individual color in the photo.

In the lighting section, you can modify the brightness, contrast, and add a vignette to the photo.  You can also move the center of the vignette and change the direction of the lighting.

Warm Haze I Preset

At the bottom of the detail page, there is also a selection of textures that can be applied to your art.

Once you finish modifying your work of art, you can save it as a preset to apply to additional images.

On either screen, you can change the screen view so you can see the original and modified image side by side, top and bottom, and with a slider to see how the changes are applied to the image.

Summary

There are several plugins on the market that give your photographs a painted effect.  I found Topaz Impression to be a well written piece of software.  Here are some of the things that I like most about Topaz Impression and a few features that may be missing from the software.

What I Like About Topaz Impression

• A lots of preset.  Over 100 presets come with Topaz Impression that can give you a head start on transforming your photo.
• Performance.  I found the performance of Impression to be very fast.  Painting the screen with selected presets, applying adjustments to the photo, and saving the image and returning to Photoshop are all performed quickly.
• Amount of parameters you can change.  Topaz Impression has a ton of adjustments that you can make to your images including changing the brush, blending mode, color, and textures.

Improvement Ideas

• There are so many presets in Topaz Impression, a feature to compare selected presets would aid in deciding which preset to apply to your photograph.
• When saving your own preset, it would be nice to add your own collections instead of only using the existing collections.

More Topaz Impression Preset Examples

Original

Pastel II Preset

Degas Dancer I

Cracked Fresco

Written by Martin Belan

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