The video tutorials are nice- but lacking in many ways. It would help if there were some sort of written tutorials, (or a manual) that people could follow step by step. I am still having problems with creating composite pictures even though i have viewed the video tutorial many times over- and i know i must be missing something!
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I would also like to see a written manual. I donāt always have time to sit through hours of video (particularly as I am at present archiving years of slides!). Sometmes I just want to know how to do one specific thing & it is not always easy (or possible) to find it in the myriad videos on YouTube.
Photoshop & Aurora both have printed manuals. There is also plenty of independent written material on those products, and aslo Photomatix. But there is no comprehensive reference material for Topaz.
Written manuals require skills often lacking in photographers and programmers, so it probably requires some degree of āoutsourcingā. In addition, it is difficult to write a manual that is truly useful to the wide range of knowledge and learning styles among the users.
The best manuals I have seen were written in the 1980ās for word processors. That was made possible by the high prices ($300 for a DOS wordprocessing program such as XyWrite), and by the fact that word processors were working with a well understood set of tasks. While Adobe has maintained the high prices (and hence resources to spend on documentation), it has allowed Photoshop to balloon into such a monster of functions and arcane terms that it is often difficult to guess how to find the information you need. It is a pity that it drifted so far from the processes and language developed over many years by film/darkroom workers.
A well thought out set of help screens is often all I need, but even Adobe, with all of its resources, does a terrible job at this, largely because of unintuitive language and functional complexity.
Writing a manual for a program like Topaz Studio would be very difficult if it went much beyond the function of each slider.
There are so many combinations with a huge number of effects available that it would be a uge book that would not be to useful.
I would like some sort of āhow toā, also. I havenāt been able to change the brush size in a mask (first try at a mask), and Iāve got some fairly complicated areas into which my brush is too large to effectively create the mask. Canāt find anything under tip, either.
OK, so a manual is probably not appropriate. But there should be detailed videos plus built in Help on each adjustment and specialities (i.e., clarity, detail, impression & simplify).
Check out Affinity Photo videos - Affinity PHOTO: Video Tutorials
I love Topaz Studio but I am clueless regarding 35% of the adjustments plus specialities. I try to figure them out basically by reverse engineering them.
Topaz have said there will be a manual - but itās pointless them writing one now while the product is still growing and evolving. Itās the same with videos, so weāll just all have to be patient.
At least youāve gotten a mask to work
I keep trying to mask ( like a sky) and then replace the sky, but I canāt seem to get the mask to work
I concur re developing a manual until the product is complete, but videos are one-offs.
To change the size use the radius slider.
OH! Thanks, John811! Alice
Thanks, Paul! I tried it, but I apparently donāt know diddly about masks. I actually made one mask, which seemed to work. Then I wanted to do something to the lower half of the image, and did a copy/tried to paste, and the curves Iād created for the first mask disappeared. Lots of trial and error for me. Alice
