There are two main drop down menus below the thumbnail image. They're titled Clarity and Hue/Sat/Lum. Clarity adjusts the contrast of the image in six stages: They're separated into two sections of three called Dynamics and Tone Level. Dynamics alters the contrast in shadow, mid-tones and highlights and also has a Micro contrast slider. The Tone Level sliders adjust the tones – obviously. Each tab has a Mask option for more localised adjustments.

One of the better features of Topaz Clarity is the lack of haloing that occurs when the contrast is messed around with. We loaded an image in and, for the purposes of the test, ramped up the contrast on Clarity and in Camera Raw in CS4. We certainly got haloing from Photoshop, but none from Clarity, which is great.

Masking

Variable Strength Masking

The new mask tool is very intelligent. We only had to run lightly over the image areas we wanted to adjust and the edge aware tool made sure it kept certain parts out. If it misses areas you want doing, you can change it from Edge Aware to Normal or Colour Aware or simply run over it again. The best way we found to do it was to make the adjustments, switch to Mask, click Reveal then mask off the areas we wanted to add contrast to. The contrast was painted in as we brushed over the areas.

Once all your adjustments have been made, you simply press ok and the image will load back into Photoshop for you to save, make further changes or, if you really want to, load back into Clarity to make further adjustments.

Performance

One of the key issues for photographers these days is speed. Now, while Topaz Clarity is by no means the slowest system around to use, it can be very slow for such a dedicated system. The sliders used to adjust contrast and HSL aren't real time. They're a bit like Photoshop when you load in the noise reduction or Liquify – for example – it takes a while to load in. It's certainly faster than these, though and miles faster than Paint Shop Pro. It has a delay of around 1-2 seconds for each action which isn't a lot, but when it's loading in multiple pre-sets it can get tedious.

The UI is clean and easy to use and the instructions are thorough. We like the idea of placing the menu at the bottom as it takes it away from you until you need it. We would've liked to have seen more split screen options, such as four pre-sets shown by splitting one image into quarters, but it's a wish list, more than a failing on Topaz Labs' side. We certainly won't mark them down for it. However, while the pop up previews are useful, they can start to get in the way a bit after a while and we'd prefer to just see them as a thumbnail under the list or as the aforementioned split screen.

Conclusion

It's interesting that Topaz Labs considered the field of contrast to be something worth releasing a dedicated program for. However, if you're like us and enjoy having your pictures really punchy and not at all HDR-like, then Topaz Clarity is a really useful program to use.

Actually, just for the lack of haloing alone, it could be a worthy investment. But aside from that, the amount of scope you have, the mass of pre-sets for different genres and the localised control thanks to the masking are all benefits to having Clarity in your Filters. Not to mention the amount of fun you can have.

The only real let down is the time it takes to make the adjustments. As we mentioned before, it's not like Topaz Clarity is super slow or anything, but it takes time to load in the pre-sets and it takes time to load in adjustments from the masks and it takes time to load the finished image in to Photoshop. On their own, they don't pose a problem, but if you have a massive amount of work to get through, it could take a while. You could set up a Batch process by using the “last used filter” in the Filter tab but it would be cleaner and more thoughtful to have a batch process built in to Clarity. Maybe that's something for the next version?

Ratings (out of 5)
Features	4
Ease-of-use	4
Value for money	4.5

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