Hello dear friends, are you ready for this week’s tip? Today we’ll discuss Amped Replay filters. Also, we’ll give you a quick tip that can make the difference when you need to boost the lights in your images! Keep reading to find out.
Understanding the Role of Filters in Amped Replay
All the loyal Amped users know for sure the basic principle behind Amped FIVE: every filter you apply is part of a processing chain. Your input pixels “pass through” the first filter in the chain, the resulting output becomes the input for the next filter, and so on.
Is this approach adopted also in Amped Replay? The answer is: of course! But there’s a small difference. When you click on Replay’s Enhance tab, you’re shown a panel with some filters. Just click on the name of a filter to enable it.
If you’ve tried Amped FIVE, you may be tempted to drag filter names to change their order: you can’t in Amped Replay. That’s a design choice: since the filter order definitely matters, and since Replay users aren’t expected to be image processing experts, we opted to put filters in a predefined order, that is generally correct for most cases. That is to help the Amped Replay user to maximize the filters’ effects.
Enhancing Images in Amped Replay
Let’s see an example where chain-style processing makes a difference. Suppose we’re given this image and need to understand if someone is sitting in the driver’s seat.
We drag the picture in Replay, scroll the mouse to zoom in on the window, and see this:
Hmm, maybe adjusting lights could help us a bit. So we click on the Enhance tab and turn on the Light filter, and get this with the “Auto” mode (which applies histogram equalization on the input pixels):
We hoped for something better, didn’t we? Of course, we can set the filter to Manual mode and find a better tuning, but this is not the point! The point is: we used the Light filter in Auto mode on the whole image, which means that histogram equalization was computed to optimize levels globally, not just in the region we needed. That’s because we did not tell Replay that we were interested in the car only. To do so, let’s just click on “Crop“, and select the car side. Doing so, the Light filter will only “see” the cropped region, and optimize levels for that. This is the result:
Much, much better! Now we could add a final touch of Sharpening and we’re done.
Conclusion
This week takeaway is two-fold:
- Don’t underestimate the importance of cropping your image! With proper cropping, you may get better results, and for sure you’ll save computation time.
- Amped Replay will never replace Amped FIVE. They are different tools for different users. Everything in Replay is available in FIVE but not everything in FIVE is available in Replay.
This quick tutorial proves just how important it is to activate the right filters, and in the right order, when working in Amped Replay. From cropping to sharpening, every small adjustment can make a big impact on clarity.
