Best Way to Use Sharpen AI as a STANDALONE App

hi everyone Anthony moriganti here this is another video in the series of videos I'm doing on topaz Labs software specifically denoise AI sharpen Ai gigapixel Ai and photo AI I've already done five videos in the series and I'll have all those videos in a playlist listed in the description of this video and in this video I'm going to talk about the best way to use topaz Labs sharpen AI as a standalone application as you can see I have it open I'm going to browse images and you can see on my desktop I have a dng image and you can see the name of the dng image has this underscore DSC 4488 then it has Dash denoise AI Dash clear that's because I recommend that you do not sharpen your images early in your workflow sharpen later in your workflow as a matter of fact one of the first things you should should do is remove noise from the image so as you can see this specific file was sent through denoise AI first happened to use the clear AI model on this specific image to remove the noise then I exported or I saved it out of the noise I used to noise AI as a standalone app and I saved it from denoise AI as a dng it was originally a Nikon raw file and these apps can read raw files so I could open a Nikon raw file or any type of raw file for that matter up into sharpen AI directly but I recommend you don't because you should remove noise first before you sharpen it that way the apps work better they just work more effectively specifically to noise AI it more effectively removes noise before you sharpen the image when you sharpen the image you're enhancing the noise and you're making it more difficult to be removed so I took a raw file Nikon raw file I ran it through the noise AI ended up with this dng file I wanted to keep it raw so I saved it as a dng file I'm going to open it up into sharpen AI now it really hasn't been processed otherwise and you can see it's of a tiger and if you just glance here before it updates you can see it's kind of blurry um I was shooting through thick Plexiglas and the tiger was swimming toward me I had a very long lens it was a 200 to 500 lens but I didn't have it zoomed out all the way it was only like around 200. memory serves 277 millimeters so um it was rather awkward to hold and I really didn't nail Focus now you could see that um if you look over at the right at the sharpen AA model I have it set to Auto and it shows autofocus very noisy which is unusual because I already removed the noise and I've mentioned in previous videos on sharpen AI that I do not like to use this Auto method meaning it's going to automatically pick the model for sharpening because in my experience it rarely picks the best model there's other models that will be better than this and obviously I already moved the noise so it's not very noisy so I'm not sure why it picked this one but if I do a before after just by clicking right on the image and holding in the left Mouse button there's before there's after there's before there's after you can see there's a nominal Improvement on the image so what I'm going to do is instead I'm going to look at all of the uh sharpen models at one time and to do that I'm going to at least see four of them at one time by clicking on comparison view right here and now you could see um and I can move this Navigator window around to see uh best now I'm going to put it right on the Tiger's face because that's what's most important you can see in the top left hand corner I have the standard model and I mentioned many times in these videos I like to compare things as equally as possible to one another meaning in this case I want to make sure that model parameters are set to Auto as well so the standard model parameter is set to Auto and that that means for standard these three sliders will be adjusted as denoise or I'm sorry as sharpen AI thinks they should be adjusted also it shows the lens blur blur type over the motion blur blur type now to the right of that I have motion blur very blurry that is on auto and you can look at that one see what that does in the lower left hand corner I have autofocus very blurry that is on auto so we're good to go there and then in the lower right hand corner I have autofocus normal and that is on um Auto as well so we're comparing Apples to Apples oranges to oranges we're looking at these four different sharpened models all on auto looking at them the worst one is the lower right hand corner one out of focus normal so what I do is I determine which one is worst it's this then I'll swap it out with a different one one that isn't being shown already in this case I'm going to go to out of focus very blurry because that one oh no it is shown in the lower left hand corner so I'm going to go with two soft very blurry because that one isn't shown so I'll click on that one let it render and see what that looks like and there's before and there's after and that one is a nominal Improvement now just looking at the mitt first the top two look very sharp they as a matter of fact look too sharp they're over sharpened the lower left hand corner one is kind of odd it seems to have some parts that are over sharpened like the cheeks of the Tiger but parts of the eyes don't seem like they're sharp enough so this is kind of a dilemma like which way should you go so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to now I could keep swapping out too I should I'm getting ahead of myself this uh two soft very blurry is still the worst one I could still try different ones like too soft normal or just try other ones that aren't shown and all you got to do is make sure you have the one you want to swap out as the active sharpened model by clicking on it and then just going up here on the right and clicking on the one you want to swap it out with let's try standard motion blur now that one we can't put on auto because Auto would is lens blur but you can see that one looks overly sharp too so as I was saying we have a dilemma here because this lower left hand one looks okay a little bit but the eyes aren't sharp enough the cheeks are too sharp uh the top two are both overly too sharp so what I tend to do is take one of the ones that are overly two sharplets too sharp let's take motion blur very blurry and click on it so that's active then what I'll do is I'll go to single view so we're seeing it all by itself we have to wait for it to update and render so we could see it okay because now it's pretty obvious right it's it's just too sharp there's before and there's after so it's on auto what I'll do is I'll just pull it off auto there's no noise because I already got rid of the noise into noise AI so I'll take that right down then remove blur when it was on auto was at 68 so let's just have it around get it around half like around 34. let it render and see what that looks like all right and that looks a little bit too sharp as well so again I'm going to come in and what I'll do is I'll have it again half of 34 is 17. so I'll get it around 17. and let that render and that one um that one looks actually pretty decent that one looks pretty decent now you could click right on it I've been doing this in all of these videos to get it before after by clicking right on the image before after before after instead of that what you could do is you could go up here and click on this original just click and hold in there's before after it's the same as clicking on the image itself okay so looking at it at 17 the eyes look okay the nose looks good but it's still kind of too sharp in the ear area here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a mask and I'm going to selectively sharpen this image where I want to sharpened so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn this on and it's going to find the subject automatically in this case it will find the head that's all that's showing really the head of the tiger now wherever is white on the mask that is where the sharpening is being applied and wherever is black there's no Sharpening at all being applied there and I don't need any sharpening done to the water we don't want the water sharp for the water to be kind of blurry and not distinguishable we want to see the the tiger so what I'm going to do is I'm going to refine the mass though what I'm going to do here is something and you can see the mask is right there showing what's being sharpened so I'm going to do something that I haven't done in previous videos is this time I'm going to change the opacity of the Mask so what I'm going to do is I'm going to subtract from The Mask but I don't want to subtract all the sharpening from like the ears and the sides of the face I just want to subtract most of the sharpening so I'm going to turn the opacity down to like 20. now I'm not going to worry about Edge aware because we're not adding any sharpening to the edge we're removing it so I'm just going to come in I could get a bigger brush too something like this and I'll come in and I'll just subtract some of that sharpening that I had over there now it's hard to tell it doesn't really give you a lighter kind of red look to it so what you could do is you could just update it and take a look at what it looks like and it looks actually pretty decent I probably could have did more at the top of the uh tiger set and maybe a little more over here and if you look at the mask carefully you'll see how parts of the white are now gray and that's because I took away some of the sharping but I didn't take away all of the sharpening so I'm going to refine this again I'm going to stay with it subtract brush and I am going to keep opacity at maybe around just turn it up just a little bit and I'm going to commit it here and remove it from up in here a little bit remove a little more around the cheeks over there and get a smaller brush and come in here a little more around the cheeks there and get a smaller brush and come in here kind of look kind of funky a little bit do that and then we'll turn off the overlay take a look and that actually looks pretty good there's before and there's after there's before and there's after much much better and we'll click update all right that's something I haven't shown before how to use the mask refine tools to partially remove some of the sharpening from an area you of course could add to it and partially add sharpening to an area as well if you wanted to do that now right now I I'm kind of happy with it so I'm ready to save the image now we are using sharpen AI as a standalone app so we're just going to click on Save and it's going to give us the option of the image format we want to save it as you have two different spellings of jpeg so jpg or jpeg two different spellings a tiff so those two file types or you could do a PNG or a dng now I like to keep my raw format throughout my workflow because my next step would be to send this into an editor maybe I'll send it into Photoshop or something like that and and process the image properly then what I'll do is I'll keep it raw so I'll do D and G and I'll save it as that and you can see where it's saving up here and it's saved now it overwrote what I did I don't know it didn't it added I'm sorry it has right here is the new one right here here is the former one so if I now double click on this it will open up because I have my system set up to open up raw files by default in Photoshop so it'll open this up in Photoshop and then I could continue my editing here now you can see where it opens up because it is a raw file in camera raw it is now sharp we'll just uh oh edit it from here what I'll probably do is take exposure down a little bit add a little bit of contrast bring in those highlights a little more open up those Shadows just to touch get a white and black point hold in the option key or Alt key on my computer and come in and do that and just add a little Vibrance and there I'm done so there's my edited raw file like that I could click open and open it up into Photoshop proper if I wanted to do something here so that's how you go about using topaz lab sharpen AI is a standalone app the important thing I want you to take away from this video is don't do sharpen AI early in your workflow do it later in your workflow you definitely want to remove noise first so if you're using these apps as Standalone apps take your raw file before you do anything to it and send it to the noise AI get rid of the noise at that point if you want you could open it up into an application like camera raw and do some editing on it some tone and color editing if you want avoid doing any sharpening if you plan to send it to sharpen AI because as you saw sharpen AI could very easily over sharpen the image so don't do any Sharpening at that point just do your tone editing in my case I didn't do that I just sent it to denoise AI remove noise then I sent it into sharpen AI to sharpen it then I sent it into camera raw to do editing on it it those you know doesn't really matter what order you do those last two things just make sure you remove noise early in your workflow preferably first do that first then later on in your workflow sharpen it like I did here thank you everyone who watches my videos I really do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 6,994

Keywords: adobe, lightroom, photoshop, on1, on1 photo raw, on1 photo raw 2021, exposure software, capture one, capture 1, luminar, luminar ai, luminar 4, sharpen ai, gigapixel ai, denoise ai, skylum, skylum software, dxo, pureraw, photolab, photolab 4, dxo photolab 4, lightroom alternative, topaz denoise ai, topaz sharpen ai, lightroom plug-ins, photoshop plug-ins, luminar tutorial, photo ai, topaz photo ai, restore old photos, restore old pictures, fix old photos, fix old pictures

Id: 4OKK4vQTkQ8

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023