EASILY Fix Blurry Photos In Lightroom & Photoshop (Topaz Sharpen AI)

so about a year ago I started getting these ads from a plug-in called topaz sharpen Ai and I was super skeptical about it because it was showing these insane before and afters that I was like there's no way that that is real it's impossible they were basically showing motion blurred photos that were then sharpened with their tool of course as a photographer who shoots a lot of action photography with like mountain biking skateboarding snowboarding those kind of things sometimes my shutter isn't perfect I do have a bit of motion blur and I unfortunately have to reject that photo just get rid of it can't use it and because of that this program really piqued my interest because it was totally up my alley and if it could save a few photos that I would have thrown out might as well give it a try so I ended up getting my hands on it and for the last six months I've been using this tool and I honestly can say it is by far my favorite tool for Lightroom in Photoshop and it's a plug-in that can be used within either program super easily so in this video I want to walk you through why I love this tool show you a few examples of images that I've fixed with this tool as well as cover some pros and cons figure out if it's right for you and just open your eyes to the possibilities of this insane plug-in that's way better than the sharpening tools that are available in Lightroom or photoshop in my opinion so I was recently in Japan and I have a ton of Street photos that I took there and this was the perfect time for this tool to shine because I was just shooting from the hip I wasn't really taking care of my settings and sometimes I ended up with photos like this where my subjects were completely blurred now in this particular case I wanted to get a shutter drag of the train going by but I obviously didn't want these two people to be blurred too so previously I would have just thrown out this photo because it's unusable but with the help of topaz sharpen AI we can fix that so to access this tool all I need to do is right click go to edit in and then topaz sharpen AI then it will open up for you it also keeps all of your Lightroom adjustments so it's like just for sharpening at least that's how I use it once it opens up the process of it is pretty easy because if you have the automatic model parameters enabled it will just automatically find the best sharpening version for your photo now you can go through these different sharpening models depending on your particular image so for example this photo here would be motion blurred and very blurry so the sharpening model is pretty good however I often like to see a few comparisons so I'll click on the comparison View and then it shows me a couple different models so I have motion blur very noisy motion blur very blurry out of focused normal and too soft normal so I'll just move these previews down a bit so we can see a better view of our subjects or the main things we want to sharpen so looking across all of these models here I actually really like the look of the motion blur very blurry model compared to all these other ones you can see the pretty insane difference that it has so I'm going to click on this model here and then I'm going to go back to my comparison view so my original and then the new updated model as you can see here obviously our subjects are much sharper than before but the problem is is that this applies to the whole photo so the train for example that I wanted to look blurry is now trying to be sharpened by this tool and that is an issue that I don't really like with Creative Photography however there's an OP option here called the select feature that we can actually create a mask of our subject so that only the areas we want to be sharpened are sharpened to use this tool literally just turn it on and then it will Auto Select your subjects if you've used Photoshop before and the automatic selection tools there it's very similar to that in the sense that it automatically detects your subjects and applies them to a layer mask type thing so anything that's white is going to be sharpened in your image now in this case looking at the back of this man's head it wasn't sharpened so the mask messed up a little bit I can click refine and here anything that is red is being affected by our sharpening adjustments so I'll click on the add brush and then I'll go and paint around the edges of my subject's head that I missed go around shoulders like so and even though it spills off the edges a little since it is a sharpening adjustment and it's quite subtle even when it spills off the edge of a subject I find it doesn't really make that big of a difference but I'm going to go ahead and sharpen the entire foreground here all the cement and stuff on the ground I'll sharpen over this subject here as well and I'll even sharpen the sign and these traffic lights or these train lights I guess up on the top there so now everything we have here in red is being sharpened with that motion blur model I'll click update to apply those changes now you can see our mask is updated and looking at our new image our subject is sharper the cement is much sharper looking at that before and after again along with our secondary subject and the Train sign here the lights are much sharper as well but the motion blur of the train is left unaffected so we've essentially totally recovered this photo so with all this good I'll click apply and then it saves it back into Lightroom with my original on this side in my updated version here it's almost hard to believe how good of a difference that is like this updated version actually looks like the photo I took was sharp which it clearly was not as you can see here it does a really good job to sharpen up a lot of the details here and this is now a photo that I can actually save and share but before I would have just had to thrown it out even though I liked the composition of the photo so this is just one quick view of this tool but let's go through a couple different examples to see how this tool Compares in other types of images and where it starts to struggle and not work very well now here in this next example we have a photo of a snowboarder and there's a little bit of motion blur and it gets slightly out of focus as well in this photo but then with the automatic model parameters set from the sharpen AI plug-in it seems to not do the best job so I'm going to turn off the sharpen model automatic adjustment and I'm going to choose my own which I think will be the motion blur very blurry option the issue here is he kind of looks like he's has the clarity cranked up to 100 on his body so I'm going to bring down the blur a little bit as well as increase the suppressed noise option playing around with these sliders you can kind of get a more refined result than what the base settings are so then you can end up with something that at least looks reasonably good for your particular photo now looking at his helmet and his eyes and stuff this looks a lot better in my opinion however I don't really like how it's adjusted the trees and stuff as well as the gloves and the little details of the warding on his jacket so I'm going to once again go to the select option and it will automatically select my subject for me now you can see the background isn't as sharpened anymore but we still have some of those issues around our subject so you could go and refine those just by subtracting them from the mask here but overall because this is a more wide angle photo I think this works pretty good for my needs now one thing that you might have noticed there that I've mentioned is it made the words look a little bit weird it didn't correct them perfectly and that's an issue that I've been finding frequently with this tool is that with very small details such as lettering on a toque or a hat or clothing or even like small tree branches in the background I find that when those are blurred out it has a hard time to reconstruct them in a reasonable way usually there's like a little bit of ghosting or something like that and it doesn't always look the best let me show you another example to highlight what I mean in this other example I've just gone ahead and cranked the remove blur up almost equals to 100 which does make the photo look a little bit like over Clarity if that's a word but the point I'm trying to prove here is that the wording of the Smith goggles here they just don't look quite right they still have a little bit of ghosting and things just aren't looking perfect you could say the same about some of his face and things however I feel like the sharpness of his jacket if we just brought down the remove blur amount and the suppressed noise sliders we could get a more reasonable result here however the wording is a dead giveaway that something crazy has been adjusted on this photo and in these types of cases I find that this tool doesn't work super well when there's those really small details such as wording like I said that it just does funny things now even looking at the tree branches in the background here there's a lot of really small tiny details and this is where the tool will struggle once again it kind of does this weird Parallax looking effect in the background but obviously it's significantly better than the original it's just something that is a side effect of the tool I guess you could say I think because of this that's where these selection options become so so helpful but to change gears a bit there's one more example I want to show you which is reconstructing a blurry portrait that I think is really impressive and I think you'll enjoy seeing too now in this photo my subject is a little bit too blurry because it was really low light and I had too slow of a shutter I got the wrong settings on this particular shot however I really like the composition I love the way it looks and everything and I didn't have another similar frame like that so I was like okay I need to figure out how to save this one brought it into topaz sharpen Ai and here we are so what it does a really good job of is reconstructing facial features such as eyes mouth nose and those types of things so for example looking at her eyes here with the motion blur very blurry model selected and just a few custom model parameters here that I've done with the sliders you can see that her face is definitely sharp at least passable enough to share online and this is now looking reasonable enough for me to want to share this photo and not just have to reject it one thing that I do notice with this tool is with teeth for example in the original here there's not a lot of detail between her teeth because it's kind of all blurred into one and so because of that we kind of have some weird looking teeth when we look up close and after this particular example but I think depending on your photo and how the pose of your model is this might not always be an issue but in this particular photo it is kind of something funny that happened you could go and touch this up in Photoshop with some brushes but it really is up to you and how crazy you want to go with it the point I'm trying to make here is that even though the tool may not do the most amazing job with really small details like text or small tree branches it really shines with big objects such as someone's face their facial features someone's entire body even a hair as we saw in our first example it does a super good job at reconstructing that even if it was out of focus or blurry so because of that for me in particular this tool is so helpful because I shoot a lot of people in motion essentially with my photos so now that you understand what this tool is about let's talk about some pros and cons about this tool to see if it's actually going to suit you and your photography now the first thing that I love about this tool is that it integrates seamlessly into my workflow in Lightroom and Photoshop I don't feel like I'm having to go to a totally different platform and it's not an awkward integration it's just super seamless it feels like another adjustment within one of the Adobe programs my second favorite thing about this tool is the fact that it's a one-time fee it's 80 US Dollars and you have it for life no subscriptions no any of that stuff that we all have to pay for everything now apparently so that's something that I really do appreciate although it might be a little bit of a steep price if you're kind of just getting into photography or if you're not 100 sure that you'd have the right type of photos for this tool now the third thing I really enjoy about this plugin is the fact that it's so easy to learn and use like from the first day that I started using it I didn't feel overwhelmed by the tools it all felt super straightforward board and I wasn't like spending a ton of time to learn a new program like it can feel with like say luminar or learning Photoshop or something like that it feels a little bit more overwhelming with those types of programs where you're like oh my God there's a million tools right now but in sharpen AI it's super straightforward you can pretty much pick up the program and start getting good results with it without having to watch like hours of tutorials online ultimately I think that this tool is super super useful if you shoot portraits Sports Wildlife anything in low light or of course street photography where you're just shooting from the hip and you're not always having a close eye on your settings you might end up with a bit of motion blur now with all those great things said there are a few downsides that are worth noting like I've showed you earlier in this video there's like the little details like wording and small tree branches that I don't think it does the best job with but luckily with the masking tools you can kind of mitigate that by just not sharpening those areas that look weird and then only sharpening parts of your subject that look the best and look good with the Deep blurring or the sharpening effects now the second issue is that if you have a slower computer you might have a pretty painful time working through the updates because every time you zoom in or move the photo it has to update the model parameters again and if you don't have enough processing power it can kind of be a slow and painful process so like on my laptop for example which is way slower than my desktop which I'm on now it can take a few more seconds which over like 100 or 200 photos it does add up over time so that's something to consider but I'll leave a link down in the description below for the system requirements of this program if you're interested or you're not sure if your computer is up to the task now finally the third downside of this tool is that the masking adjustments like where you paint the brush around the areas you want to sharpen there's not a ton of super specific tools like it's say in Photoshop where you can select a edge really nicely you basically just have a general brush tool within topaz sharpen AI that is a little bit harder to get perfectly around the edges of a subject however I find that this doesn't really make too big of a difference because since it's just a sharpening adjustment having it extend past the edge of your subject is in the end of the world and it's hardly noticeable when you're zoomed out so ultimately if you take a lot of photos particularly of things in motion whether it be people or animals I definitely recommend checking out this program and you can even get a seven day free trial for the program down below now if you did enjoy this video and you're interested in supporting this channel I'll also leave my affiliate link down below if you're interested I'll get a commission from your purchase at no extra cost but it does help to support this channel make more videos like this one I appreciate you if you choose to do that if not it's all good so basically after six months those are all my thoughts of what I love and don't love about this tool hopefully that helped you to decide whether or not this is something you'll be interested in and with that that's all I have for you for today if you're interested in Lightroom and Photoshop of course make sure to hit that subscribe button down below because that's all I talk about on this channel and I love photo editing so if you do too let's hang out hit that subscribe button and I'll catch you in the next video see you then

Channel: Brendan Williams

Views: 22,599

Keywords: topaz sharpen ai review, sharpening tools lightroom, sharpen image photoshop, sharpen photos, best tools for photography, photography photo editing plugins, photo editing plugin, photo editing software, fix blurry photos

Id: FLUfoH4ZGnQ

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023