Feature: Topaz Vivacity does smart sharpening through selective smoothing
Motivation: Sharpening often leads to smart smoothing, especially with this filter

Sharpening is one of the hardest things to do well in photo editing. Given the move to more telephoto lenses with high basic f-stop settings, slightly blurred images are closer to the norm in mid to low-light shooting conditions - especially action shots which just invite camera shake.

Now the new crop of digital cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Pentax all have image stabilization systems built into them that work fairly well giving users 1 1/2 to 3 stops of better sharpness. But that still does not mean there won't be a need for better sharpening software - nudge, nudge - know what I mean. And so there has been a wave of new plugins offering improved sharpening software.

Topaz with its Vivacity has taken the same smart software approach as Fo2Pix with its Artmaster Pro - use what wavelets and numeric photo processing theory provide - the ability to identify the edges, lines and broad tonal areas of an image and use this information to intelligently a)sharpen an image in the case of Topaz Vivacity or b)stylize an image in the case ArtMaster Pro. As we shall see these two aims are not mutually exclusive.

The Problem

Night shots introduce three sources of photo sharpening problems. First, noise because of reciprocity differences under low lighting conditions; second, jitter and camera shake even on a tripod; and third, time lapse blur at low shutter speed. This photo of the reflections of one of the Toronto Chinese Lantern Festival exhibits off the water at Ontario Place Harbor shows the first two problems. There is noise and blur especially in the lighter/whiter colors and despite a monopod, there is a bit of shake on a telephoto image.

To get rid of the noise I use the Topaz DeNoise/EQ filter which is a separate review in itself - but assume that is done. So now we use Topaz Vivacity to idenify/define the water ripples edges and accentuate/sharpen them. This is simple to say but nard to do I learned this in spades after trying the new Smart Sharpen and classic Unsharp filters in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Corel PaintShop Pro to no avail. The filters tended to introduce new noise or artifacts negating the effectiveness of the sharpening. So I must admit I did not have much expectations for the Vivacity filter.


Vivacity has three tabs which allow the user to progressively refine their sharpening efforts. Here is what I saw on the first tab of Vivacity . The filter is actaull working in a different color space, YCbCr rather than the common RGB. This color space allows more sophisticated edge detection and noise finding algorithms to be employed. The Main tab employs what look like the same controls as say Corel Unsharp Mask. But in fact it is operating in a different colorspace. The result is that the Clean Radius control does not ramp up non-linearly like the Unsharp mask but rather interacts with the Threshold and Sharpness settings in more of peaking fashion - either side of which the sharpening effectiveness drops off.

Users are encouraged to read the Help and turn on the "Enable help Popup" . These hints are valuable in getting the settings on target quickly. But good old friends, Trial and Error, will also tell a lot. But Vivacity has done one thing right - the controls are in the right order. Main generally provides the most definition of the right edges and areas to sharpen - then the next tab, Advanced, allows users to smooth and disentangle for better over all sharpening.

Here is the the advanced tab in action:

I found the Advanced tab allowed me to do what the Unsharp and Smart Sharpening filters in Photoshop and PaintShop Pro could not do - disentangle false edges and smooth out sharpening artifacts and/or photo noise. Line Accent used with Sharpness Radius allowed me to eliminate many of the false edges/line detections that Unsharp filters refused to give up. Again, Mr Trial and Error will be great aids in getting things bang on.

Iterations on the other hand allowed the filter to smooth out and highlight the accented areas and edges. Again, this exactly what you want to do with clasic filter and can with several iterations between Edge Preserving Smmoth and the Unshapr filters in Corel PaintShop Pro (or the the Smart Sharpen and Smart Smoothing filters in Adobe Photoshop). the difference is the convenience and relative speed of doing it right away in Topaz Vivacity.

Now I said speed - but be advised, choosing just two iterations nearly doubles the filter execution time - from 3-5 seconds to 6-10 seconds. And as you can see from the screenshot, I used 4 iterations (and rather routinely) in my sharpening operations.

The Results:

The final filter results(no additional processing done other than to down size the image for web use)can be seen above. The image is not only cleaner, but smoother. A good shot has been turned in to a much better shot - and that is the purpose of sharpening.

But a caution here. Sharpening out of focus or camera blurred shots can extract penalties by either introducing artifacts, smoothing out colors plus good mini-lines as well as bad blur lines.

A final word - note how important smoothing is to sharpening and the unique styling that Vivacity can bring to an image. I have found myselk using Vivacity just for straight smoothing purposes rather than Smart Smooth and Edge Preserving Smooth filters. Again advantage Vivacity for the fine control it brings to smoothing as well.