Ghosting in Topaz Studio 2.31

Before I consider this a bug, I want to see if others can verify this ghosting for me. I’m including links to all files that I used so that if it’s on my end or something I’m doing, someone might catch it. Here’s the issue…

When I load a high-contrast picture, Crop it, and then filter it with a Brightness Contrast filter in which I have add a mask using the Luma option (accept defaults), and finally-- adjust the brightness up pretty good… with a little Contrast to taste, I get a ghosting affect off to the side of the picture.

Here is a link to the directory with three files. The one labeled Testoutput.jpg is one that I’ve done the above procedure on and you can see the ghosting of the eagle to the left of the original (look at the top left of the picture and you’ll see a ghosting of the eagle’s wing). I’ve included the Nikon Raw file so that one can look at that for any possible errors. The remaining file is just the one I use in my work progress and was the one the ghosting was taken from. For those that are curious, my work flow is to take take all my raw files and run them through Denoise AI (Batch processed with Auto settings) and output to a JPG file. Those JPG files are then what I use to edit in Studio or Photoshop CS6 to get my final picture.

What I want to know is if anyone else out there can replicate on their system what I’m seeing on mine? Can we ascertain what is causing this? I have verified that this happens on other mask settings as well. I suspect that if it’s happening so I can see it on this picture, it is happening on all my pictures and I just don’t adjust the Brightness/Contrast enough for me to catch it.

Here’s the steps to replicate…

  1. Open the Denoise.jpg file from the above link in Studio
  2. Crop the picture around the eagle
  3. Select the Brightness/Contrast filter
  4. Click on the Mask option of the Brightness/Contrast filter
  5. Select “Luma” as your mask type (default all other mask settings).
  6. Adjust the Brightness slider to the right fairly steeply.
  7. Adjust the Contrast slider to the right just a little.

You should now be able to see ghosting if your system is doing the same as mine.