Topaz Fusion Express for Lightroom!

[MarkR]

Honestly, I dont get paid by TopazLabs. But I probably should!:rofl

At any rate they have just released an application for Mac users that will allow any of the Topaz Lab programs to be called without having to go through Photoshop. It's called Topaz Fusion Express, it's a free download, and it works with Aperture, Lightroom, and iPhoto. Linky HERE. (http://topazlabs.com/fusion) I suspect a Windows version will work its way out eventually.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it seems nice. On the other hand, if I'm going to have to generate a TIFF file anyway, I'd rather do it in PS so that I can mask or fade the effects as necessary. It'll be interesting to try out tonight.

[arodney]

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it seems nice. On the other hand, if I'm going to have to generate a TIFF file anyway, I'd rather do it in PS so that I can mask or fade the effects as necessary. It'll be interesting to try out tonight.

Its only useful if you don't have Photoshop. Otherwise as you point out, a TIFF gets rendered and the plug-in is applied. So its not happening within the Develop engine as no such plug-in's have access to the Raw data (same in Aperture).

[MarkR]

... and it doesn't seem to understand ProPhoto RGB color space. Which is weird because it behaves nicely as a PS plugin using that same color space. :dunno

Doesn't really seem to have any special batching capabilities either. I'll stick with PS. Hopefully the users of Aperture and iPhoto will get some use out of it. Oh well ...

EDIT: Doesn't seem to understand sRGB color space, as near as I can tell! Something funky is going on. Images are very desaturated and dark when I open them in Fusion.

EDIT EDIT: Denoise understands sRGB but Adjust does not. I think this one needs to bake for a little while longer. Luckily, the PS plugins appear to still be working fine.