Hi, I’ve been using Studio and trying to get a certain effect (with images that have varying levels of noise) only to encounter numerous frustrating problems that seem to be a staple of Topaz products. I’ve created a custom “LOOK” using the smudge, blur and impression presets for this. The main issue is that the preview in Topaz Studio shows a smooth image and a different image to what you get when returning to Photoshop (see attached screencaps). You will notice in Photoshop a much rough image with very visible as well as less visible artifacts which don’t appear at all in Studio. I have tried this both by using Studio as a plugin and as a standalone both with exactly the same result. Also, when using it as a plugin it would sometimes (maybe 1 out of every 10 or 20 times) render a completely different image when returning to Photoshop - by which I mean it produced an image that looked like it had had all of the “LOOKS” applied to it ie looked very bad/ugly. This last issue requires undoing Studio’s render and going back in to redo the image.
The other main issue is that in Photoshop when I would create a copy of the main image to load into Studio the final Studio file would result in an image output with less than 100% opacity ie it had some transparency, which for obvious reasons is unwanted. After trying several different things including settings and some default “LOOKS”, none of which worked, the only solution was to simply use the original “background” image - this seems the only way to avoid the unwanted transparency issue.
All of this is really frustrating and time consuming. I notice there has been no significant update for Studio for some time so assume this product too will just fall by the wayside. It’s another Topaz tool (one of it seems increasingly too many in number) with some unique and excellent features that has disappointingly not been properly tested/finished and is simply left in the ether. Either way for now any help/suggestions would be appreciated since just the other day before running into these newest major and frustrating problems I paid the upgrade subscription.
Details below:
Application & Version: Topaz Studio 2 Version 2.3.1
Operating System: Windows 10 (10.0)
Graphics Hardware: GeForce GTX 1650/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL Driver: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 452.06
CPU RAM: 32684 MB
Video RAM: 4096 MB Total, 2338 MB In Use
Preview Limit: 4805 Pixels
