hi alex 💛 i'm sorry to bother you and i'm not sure if you use topaz clean but if so, would you mind sharing some little tips for it? or do you know anyone who has a post abt it or something? i'm asking this here because i don't really know any post with topaz help or anything like that 😣 i don't wanna go too strong with topaz because it gets kinda weird and it has those weird lines around objects but i don't know how to "control" the plugin and idk where to learn... thank you so much 💌

Hello, anonie! ♥ You’re not bothering at all! :) I do use Topaz Clean, and have been for a few years now. I’ll try to tell you about the things I’ve understood about it but don’t take my words for certain because I actually never read anything about it and only messed with it since I started using it. So maybe my words won’t be the right ones and I will explain shit but that’s how I see things- Anyway! I’ll try to be organized fiehzgih

I hope this is going to help ;; ♥

First I’d recommand to focus exclusively on the Edges category (Accent, Radius & Sharpness). After trying multiple times to make sense of the Clean and Texture categories, I came to the conclusion that it really was of no use when you make gifs. (I might be wrong, I’m no professional, but I literally never use these.) I’d say the Accent settings are to your liking, I personally never go higher than 3. Radius will change a lot of things and I think that’s what creates the weird lines you talk about. I never go higher than 2.50. But depending on the original quality you might want to keep it a bit low so you get to lose some of this crappy quality Clean is so useful against! Sharpness, well… The sharpness of Clean is SO GROSS to me, I think it never looks good fdeuzfgehg I never go higher than 0.30 with this but again that depends a lot on the original quality. When it’s shit quality I keep it to 0 or just add like 0.05 for good measure.

So the first point actually makes sense because I always applied Clean BEFORE resizing, which makes a very big difference to me. Keeps things more natural looking (when I don’t fuck it up fizhirg LMAO) I’m still trying to understand how you can use it after resizing without it looking like plastic fiehzgihr. I did it a few times recently to counter the very bad quality like here but as you can see it’s weird af and blurry and dfizehigh so yeah. Still need to figure this out. My advice is to apply it before you resize. So for example, I want to make a 268px gif : I crop to my liking, I resize to 500px, I apply Clean to it, I resize to 268px, and I do the rest of the gif.

Now about the weird lines you talk about. They appear almost everytime after I sharpen my gifs and I think it’s almost inevitable… I think it happens to most people who use Clean. To reduce it, it’s just about knowing how to sharpen according to it. I’d advise trying to play with the blurr option and its opacity. (like don’t keep it to 100% opacity. sometimes just 20% of opacity for that layer of blurr is enough to change things).

And finally, I just want to say that I change my settings for every gifset because Clean is about making the quality better and so it’s inevitably going to depend on the original quality of the file, as I said before. I just think it’s something you need to get used to. Keep using it, keep trying different things, take your time on a gif to see what does what on it. The possibilities are endless with Clean. You’ll know how to use this pluggin the more you mess with it, like I said a few times about coloring anyway. That’s also why I don’t really know how to help you because someone’s settings are pretty personal as it contributes to the gif style of that person and also it’s about what they like. You can think someone’s Clean settings are good and another person will think it’s bad. So yeah… It’s all about how you want your gifs to be and what you like! I tried to tell you what I think is essential, but that’s just ME, you know. ;o; I’m sure the amazing gifmakers out there would probably tell you differently fizheghieg