#TOPAZ LABS PHOTO AI SOFTWARE#
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Topaz Photo AI has upscaled my 20MP Olympus E-P7 to 80MP with remarkably convincing natural looking textures and details – though you still can’t properly make out ‘Shimano’ on the brake caliper. Good reasons include lost originals where you only have a low-res copy, images sent by family, friends or clients who don’t know how resolution works, and component images you need to upscale for multi-layer composites. My problem here is why you would need it.

As I found in my Gigapixel AI review, the results are very impressive, though more with textures than straight lines and man-made objects. The upscaling feature is where, I admit, I have a problem. It’s even better on blurry faces in backgrounds. Topaz Photo AI found these faces automatically and gave them a smooth, processed ‘Facebook’ look. Topaz Photo AI brings out facial features in a fairly obvious ‘processed’ way, but it will definitely please family, friends and fussy clients.

I can see it being useful for people shots where somebody important is slightly out of focus either in the foreground or the background. The face enhancement can be quite remarkable or can be quite ‘plastic’. Yet on images with obvious camera shake or poor focus it didn’t do much at all except draw attention to the issue.

I found that on images that were slightly soft, perhaps from very mild camera shake or diffraction from small lens apertures, it was spectacularly effective. The Sharpen feature is a different story, in a way. It completely fixed/hid the diffraction softness of my MFT lens at f/16 – good job! However, I found it ineffective for all the focus blur or camera shake examples I tried. This is my best result from the Sharpen tool, but even then the Autopilot didn’t pick it up and I had to do it manually.

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I don’t often need to extract the best quality from ultra-high ISO images, but if I did, I wouldn’t use Topaz Photo AI.

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And can I point out that a Topaz Photo AI license costs almost as much as PhotoLab 6 Elite? The Topaz results are not in the same league for detail recovery and yes, I did try all the settings. I thought I’d check it against DxO’s DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD processing, and it was like night and day. It doesn’t create that smudgy watercolor effect you used to see in cheap point and shoot cameras, but it does leave you with disappointingly ‘glassy’ detail. But it doesn’t really leave a lot of detail either. It is spectacularly effective, in that it will leave no vestige of noise whatsoever.

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Also, the ‘before’ example is always a worst-case version and does not reflect what rival software will do. Topaz Photo AI’s noise reduction is impressive, until you compare it to, say, DxO DeepPRIME XD.

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Topaz Photo AI can automatically apply a series of adjustments using its AI technologies to remove noise, sharpen details and fix blur, reveal detail in faces and – if you need it – upscale images to much larger sizes. Topaz Photo AI takes three of its separate programs – DeNoise AI, Gigapixel AI and Sharpen AI, and bundles a simplified version of each into Photo AI, which will analyse your photos and fix what needs fixing with the magic of artificial intelligence, deep learning and neural networking. Its marketing can sound like snake oil, its results can sometimes be impressive. It’s not always easy to figure out how much of this is snake oil and how much is genuinely effective and Topaz Labs – and this is just my opinion – steers carefully down the middle.

It can put expert adjustments in the hands of amateurs. Either that, or it can achieve in seconds what it might have taken us hours to do manually. We’re told AI can work magic where traditional photo editing science has failed. Sharpen can’t fix all blur types, despite the claimsĪI is everywhere in photo editing software right now, from subject recognition and masking, to sky replacement, to noise reduction and detail recovery. Remove Noise doesn’t reveal much (or any) detail Very expensive for something that may help or may not +Noise isn’t just reduced, it’s obliterated

Topaz labs photo ai