Topaz Star Effects Adds Sparkle to Your Work

Creating sunstars or added stars to your photos just became much easier thanks to the folks at Topaz Labs. Personally, I do a lot of shooting with the sun in the composition and love to create sunstars when possible. When people ask me how I do it, my response has always been, ‘it’s not photoshop, it’s physics’. Well, as of 2012, adding adding Star Effects is simple and easy. Topaz Labs has created a powerful plugin called Star Effects that lets you to not only create sunstars, but add sparkle to just about any type of photo, including adding that ‘catch-light’ to make eyes sparkle, create candle-like effects, and much more. There are numerous presets, as well as manual controls to let you do everything from determining the type of star, number of rays, color, halos, single or multiple stars... Above is a landscape captured at dawn, shortly before sunrise. I decided to give Star Effects a try and was easily able to turn it into, what appears to, be a sunrise capture. Will I now abandon my quest to create sunstars using physics? No, because for me part of the fun is working out composition and ideal conditions including the timing and position of the sun, to create this effect. However, it will get used, and not just for my landscape work. Topaz suite of plugins are the only plugins I use - Yes, I do use specialized software for panoramas and HDR’s. But aside form that, Topaz DeNoise, Simplify, B&W Effects, Detail, and of course their most well known plugin- Adjust, are a few of my favorite things. If you are not familiar with Topaz plugins, check out their website ...