With the recent kitchen sink sale that Topaz had, it got me curious about some of the other plugins on offer.  I love DeNoise, Clarity and ReMask, but what about all these other cool, quirky plugins?  Topaz Star Effects allows a user controlled enhancement for any point of light in your image, and through the month of December, it is on sale at 50% off for $14.99 here at Topazlabs.com when using the code “decstar” at checkout.  Well, if you have an extra few bucks lying around, and would like to enhance any points of light in your images, check this out…

The interface is intuitive and pretty simple.  Just playing around with it for a few minutes, I was able to understand, and control what I was wanting to do.  It is a very simple concept, but one that can offer a very effective result when using it to enhance product shots, landscape shots, or anything where a point, or points of light are key to the composition.

As seen in the screenshot above, the presets live on the left.  Starting off with one that suits the image you’re working on allows for you to then further tweak the appearance of the starburst effect via the adjustment sliders on the right.  One very nice feature is to essentially turn off the actual image and work directly on the star bursts alone like this (click to see larger):

This gives you the ability to manipulate the intensity, size and color of the stars themselves while also allowing you to mask, or paint out the areas you’d like to exclude which is very handy seeing that any highlight in the image essentially will want to produce a star effect.

Able to be added as a plugin for Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop or Elements, iPhoto, PhotoFX Lab, Serif Photo Plus, Irfanview or Corel Paint Shop Pro, it is a low cost, fun and handy plugin that can add that little bit of visual enhancement to polish off an already great shot.  It requires OS 10.6 or later, Windows 7 or later and 4GB of RAM.

For $15, it is a pretty awesome deal, and will stay on sale through the end of this month via TopazLabs website (click here) when using the code “decstar” when checking out.  Have a look, and try the free trial to see if it works for you.  I’ve certainly been enjoying it!

Happy holidays and happy shooting,

Tyson