Someone from Topaz Labs kindly contacted the VintLabs CEO - yeah, he passed by the receptionist and communications manager, wonder how he did that - and asked if we would include his Topaz Vivacity plugin in one of our tutorials. She ordered our VintLabs Rats to work and they soon found out that this Photoshop plugin is great at cleaning up and smoothing skin without loosing any details in the edges: Vint’s human now has a skin that make her look come out of a fashion magazine. But our CEO was not that enthusiastic. ‘We spend ages on making sure our skin textures, eye textures, clothing textures, … are as detailed as possible‘, says Vint. ‘You futile Vint Labs employees will only blur those lovely details over my Ruthed body!‘

Bugger. So we answered Eric Yang from Topaz Labs that we really love his plugin, but the boss only cares about easily getting rid of the so-called ‘jagged edges’ that are so typical to Second Life snapshots. To our surprise - and saviour probably, Vint was still furious about our blur suggestion - Mr. Yang told us that was an interesting question, and Topaz Clean(YCrDb) could probably do the trick.

So the VintLab Rats set back to work, trying the settings suggested. It was a beautiful moment, when suddenly screams of joy erupted from the labs. Scream that enthusiastic that our - beloved, may I add - CEO came to see what was going on. Proudly the VintLab Rats showed her the latest results: tests done with both the Topaz Clean and Photoshop Blur. Pointing at the dagger on the testing picture they whispered: ‘Look, Your Majesty, Topaz Clean gets rid of the jagged edges better and loses less detail than Photoshop Blur does.‘

Silence fell. After a few minutes Miss Falken spoke: ‘Yes, yes, so I see. But what’s wrong with manually blurring them all?‘ Despite her criticism and old-skool suggestion, we saw in her eyes that she was proud of our great discovery and thought we did well at further exploring the Topaz Vivacity path.

Later that day, a memo went around that Vint would take us all - even the VintLabs Rats - shopping for shoes this evening. So I think we really found out something great, and that although she would not say this out loud, the discovery of this plugin was a glorious day for VintLabs.

If you know of other ways to - easily - get rid of jagged edges, feel free to share that precious information. We will suggest them to Miss Falken, and who knows, maybe we will get two pair of shoes tonight! (You’ll just get the VintLab Rats’ eternal gratitude and stuff. ;)

If you want to try this plugin yourself, you can find a 30 day trial of Topaz Vivacity at Topaz Labs. It works with Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP. Topaz Labs also has a freebie DeJPEG plugin to get rid of JPEG artifacts available. The settings we used for Topaz Clean(YCbCr):

• Treshold: 1.19
• Clean Radius: 3.73
• Sharpness: 0.77
• Sharpness radius: 1
• Line accent: 1
• Iterations: 1

Keep your paws off the other settings! ;) And here are the test files we showed to Miss Falken:

Update: Miss Falken told us to mention that, of course, in the first place you need to take care about getting as few jagged lines as possible when shooting in Second Life. The best way to do that is - besides shopping for great graphic gear with anti aliasing functionality and stuff - shoot your SL photographs in as high a resolution as your client will bear. Shorly summarized: the bigger the resolution & filesize, the smaller the chance your photograph will suffer from jagged edges.

Tags: jagged edges, photography, plugin, tips and tricks, vintlabs

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