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Last year there was some discussion and lament over the demise of Fo2Pix and their buZZ 3 filter set. A month or so ago I discovered a similar filter by Topaz Labs <http://www.topazlabs.com/topazlabs/03products/topaz_simplify/>. While not exactly the same it does produce a similar effect to the Simplifier 1. There's also a nice edge filter effect and some effects which have no equivalent in any other plug-in that I've seen. It is new and still at the introductory price of $39.95 (US) as I type. I don't know how much longer that price is in effect. Oh, and it works in 16 bit mode.
ADK Jim
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That's interesting. I use Buzz quite a lot - but it only works in 8 bit mode and doesn't work at all with quite large files. I would like to see some examples - Buzz's effect is quite subtle (particularly when fade back to 50%) and really quite lovely.
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Thanks for the info. Its an interesting comparison - Buzz is about 10 years old now so I would expect improvements in modern algorithms. Topaz seems to have boosted contrast as well as saturation in your example - overall the effect is much the same.
...and yes - Simplifier 1 works better on large files. I had the same RAM problems using Simplifier 2 or 3 on large files that you mention. Sometimes I work in layers, but I *think* that S2 and S3 just allocate too much RAM - layers or not. At the time that Buzz was created, nobody had 4GB of RAM.