How to Fix Blurry Images with Topaz Sharpen AI

[Music] hello and welcome to a quick tutorial where we will take you step by step through all of the features of topaz sharpen AI first we're gonna start out with a very very blurry image as you can see from over here and let's first can go ahead and compare the features of sharpen AI with some of the other d blurring technologies that you might be able to find in photoshop so as you can see we have set up three layers here in Photoshop the first one being just the original blurry photo the second one we're gonna run through the latest version of the smart sharpen think chair and Photoshop so this is pretty much as far as you're going to be able to go using Photoshop spilt in abilities of removing out-of-focus images so now we're gonna look at the same functionality and the new topaz sharpen AI so here is now the the same image in sharpen AI and the only thing I'm gonna do is ask for the computer to do this automatically so we got that auto select it and I'm just gonna click on the focus button because it looks like the image is suffering from being out of focus oh my gosh okay this is pretty miraculous because we do a side by side comparison please keep in mind that this is the image that we had started from where as now on the right hand side you could see that sharpen a is machine learning is taking advantage of what it has learned from millions of blurry or out-of-focus photos and it's actually imagining all of the missing details that were in that original photo so if we're happy with the results that we just got just by using the auto function in the focus model we click apply it's gonna apply it to that layer and as a quick comparison here is still past sharpen AI versus the original photo that came out of the camera of course once again here is sharpen a I versus really blurry photo and then finally here is sharpen AI versus what we just did in Photoshop using latest Photoshop smart sharpen so here's smart sharpen versus topaz sharpen AI so now that we've seen how this works inside a Photoshop let's come out of Photoshop for a moment because you gotta remember that topaz sharpen AI does work also as a standalone product as well as a plugin for a Lightroom classic it works with Photoshop even works with topaz studio too so as a standalone application let's run through some of the applications of how you can remove blur from a photo first we're gonna look at just the general functions that are in - app asked sharpen AI starting from the top as we gar way across the interface of course we have the Preferences of sharpen AI that allows you to either send anonymous data collection show product tour on startup which have really really don't need right now since I'm walking you through the demonstration the default save as prefix you can type in any text that you want so every time we save a file that'll be the prefix the defaults save as suffix so in this case every time we save an image from sharpen AI it's gonna put a dash sharpen at the end of the file name append processing mode as suffix now this is a wonderful feature because when you turn that on regardless of which model or what mo do you use when you process images it will take the different model and it will actually include it in your file name which is a great way just by looking at your file name it will remind you how you had repaired that photo and then finally as we come down the list of for the Preferences advanced preferences where we can actually set if we're gonna be using the GPU or not in this case I'm demonstrating on an iMac which does not have a discrete GPU and the computer actually does a wonderful job when you first launch sharpen AI determining if it should use the GPU or not and finally enable Intel open V know this is of course when whenever you have the sixth-generation or later Intel CPUs that have the open vino technology and in this case that is on so we're gonna take advantage of that and use that so that's essentially the preferences as we now make our way across the interface in a moment we're gonna be looking at the masking capabilities of sharpen AI view and means that you could start out just with a single view that will just show you the image in full screen in this particular view every time you hit the spacebar it will show you the before image and the after image in fact you can do the same thing by clicking on the original button here so if I hold the button down on original I could see my original photo and when I let up on it I can now see the processed photo as well again keep in mind that the spacebar is a great way for you did for you to do that and even if you were to hold the mouse button down so if I hold the mouse down I could see the original image and when I let up on it I can see the processed image so that's the first mode of viewing another fun mode of viewing is a split view now before I show you how great split view is let's first make sure that we can really make the sharpened image as best as we can so I'm gonna bring suppress noise all the way down and where it says sharpness I'll bring that up just a little bit more so we get some more sharpness out of it and now because we do have the split view selected over here you'll notice that when you put your cursor in the middle it can just swipe back and forth and see what an amazing job just the default sharpen mode and sharpen AI is doing in sharpening your photograph and then finally the last mode of viewing is side by side which is exactly what it says it is is just gonna put your before image or the original image as it's labeled here in a lower left hand corner on the left and then the preview of what it has processed on the right hand side so now what we've been doing is as we make our way across the interface we could see that you can either look at your interface zoomed in at a hundred percent which is where we are right now of course you can continue to zoom in and that's pretty self-explanatory you can zoom in quite a bit even at four hundred percent and see what that looks like but we'll take it back to just a 100 percent where we were before in the corner we have the undo and redo button so if you had done something wrong and you wanted to go back to the way it was before you can just click on undo or of course you know command C on Mac or ctrl C on Windows does the same thing same applies for redo so those are the typical functions you find in just about every software navigator is a great way for you to just move around your image so instead of using the left window to navigate around this is a great way that if you're zoomed in on a very very high res photo you can just grab the navigation window and move that around as we move further down Auto update preview auto update preview is doing exactly what it says meaning that when you make a change in sharpen AI it's gonna do it the processing and show you the results immediately okay so once again I'll make another change and you'll notice that it's gonna do the same thing whereas in contrast if I turn auto update preview off now when I make a change nothing happens what's great about this mode is oftentimes you want to be able to make a few changes and you don't want to constantly wait for the computer to update the screen every time you make a change that's kind of sometimes really slowed you down so what I recommend is you turn that auto update preview off the mitt you make the changes that you need then once you're satisfied with the way you got your settings you click update the computer that's is processing and it gives you your final image and that's really what auto update preview is all about now in this particular image the speed of the computer and updating the image is really fast so we'll go ahead and keep that on coming further down on the interface select model we started out with just a sharpen model and in the moment we're gonna look at you know how we use the stabilized model or the focus model and then finally below that select mode so when we first launched our sharpen AI I intentionally chose the auto mode Auto is great if you just don't want to worry about it if you just want the computer using the AI where it has learned from all these photos to just do the right thing for you and you can see the based on the results that we're getting so there is the before and there's the after auto actually does a pretty remarkable job most of the time but then if you do need to go in and tweak it until you get it exactly right that's why the manual modes are here keep in mind that when you are in manual if you make a change and you want to go back to the default place where that slider was just by double clicking on the word suppress noise here for example it's gonna take you back or if I move sharpness to a level which is a little too low once again just double click on the word sharpness and it will take you to the default so that double-clicking on the word is a great shortcut of going back to just the default position for those sliders finally at the lower right hand corner of the screen we have save image so now we're happy with the way that our image looks we want to save that out so this is where you would click on the save image button it brings up the requestor as far as what kind of file format we would like to use for saving I'm just gonna stay with the JPEG which is the original format where we had loaded keep in mind that sharpen AI does accept RAW images as well that come directly from your camera quality this allows us to set the quality of the JPEG and the maximum of ten is fine but of course you can go in here and decide exactly what quality you want to save it to and I'm really picky about the quality of this image so we're gonna go ahead and leave it at the maximum file name here is green reptile sharpen the directory is where it should save it to so in this case I want to have it saved to exactly where the image came from which is the source directory but of course you can click on custom and you can then change the directory to any directory that you want which is gonna be for the output so in this particular case I'll just go ahead and leave it back at source and but I'm happy with the results I click Save and computer goes ahead and does the processing as we can see here across the top with that blue progress bar moving across and we're done now do we've seen the sharpen model let's open up another image and look at stabilize so now instead of just staying with the select model at sharpen we'll go ahead and go back to the auto mode which I love using it first and just click stabilize let's see what happens Wow all right now I can see that the image on the left-hand side we've got the wheel is turning the wagon is shaking there's motion blur that's happening from multiple different sources whereas on the image on the right it looks like it has basically stabilized the photograph I love what it's doing with Auto but I think that if I was to switch over to the manual mode I can push this image just a little further first I do notice that there's a bit of noise that's on the wheels so if I was to bring up suppress noise okay we could see if that's gonna clean that up wow that looks a lot better and then finally if I want to get greater amount of sharpness I can bring up the sharpness slider a little bit more and that's gonna give us a little more sharpness too so I like the way that the image looks right now so if I'm happy with the results I'll go ahead and pan around just to make sure that some of the other parts of the image look great as well so for example here's another corner of the photo so if you're happy with the image of course just like before you click on the save image button let's do that again when it comes to photographs that suffer from motion blur let's look at a portrait as we could see the image on the left we do have a problem where the child was moving when the photograph was being taken and that's why there's motion blur now you can really see that very very well when you zoom in and look into her eyes or you could see that kind of like this linear pattern of the motion blur in the eyes whenever you're trying to determine motion blur highlights in the eyes probably one of the best places to look to see if there's actually motion blur there or not so now instead of using the sharpen mode we're gonna switch over now to stabilize which was specifically trained for oh my gosh doing exactly what you're seeing on the screen right now which is correcting motion blur problems so the next time you have your camera without a tripod and there's not enough light for you to have a fast shutter speed you can rest assured that even if your photograph is just a little blurry sharpen a eye is going to rescue your photo just for one last experimental thing that we can do with this photograph as I continue to play with it one of the things that I like doing with photos is playing with the different modes that are available in sharpen AI it might be that stabilized is the correct solution or the correct model to use but I never want to assume that I like to play with some of the other models just to see what kind of results I can get so now when I click on focus and once it's done yeah we could see that focus unfortunately is not the right model for this image and we can still see the motion blur in our eyes last let's just try sharpen and we could see that of course with sharpen it's still not really fixing the motion blur problem in the photo whereas when we go back to stabilize it looks amazing for the last feature we're gonna be using is for focus let's try this photograph right here all right let me first show you what the photograph looks like just in its entirety and as you can see the subject of the photo which is the little girl right here in the original photograph unfortunately she is kind of soft it looks like the camera failed to focus on the subject of the photo and what we want to be able to do in the final photograph is for the young man in the corner to be blurry so we want to make her sharp but we want to make him blurry so the model that we're gonna try for fixing this photo is going to be the focus mom Wow there it is as you can see from the original photo as we toggle back and forth I'll switch over to the split view so we can swipe back and forth in the original photo we got blur actually the young man is blurry now he's sharp the little girl is blurry but now she has become sharp as well I'm gonna make a few other tweaks just to get this exact we right so we're gonna switch back over here to the side-by-side view in fact we will zoom in just a little bit more as we work on this photograph will bring suppressed noise all the way down and I usually like to start with suppressed noise all the way down because whenever you do bring suppressed noise all the way down sharpen AI is gonna do the best that it can and sharpening your photos without having to consider removing noise from your photos so if we were to bring sharpness all the way down you'll notice that of course nothing happens in your after photo but as we start nudging that slider up yeah you're gonna get adjust at a right spot where it's gonna remove the blur from the photo now make sure that you don't exaggerate so if you were to take sharpness too far out to one direction like if I was to take it all the way to one side okay it looks good but in my for my taste some of the crazy colors and some of the over sharpening makes it look a little artificial so what I really like to do is I like to bring it back just to the point where we get rid of the blurriness of the photo but we still have some remnants of the natural photograph still there so I like the way that the photo looks but the only problem that we have now is if we go back to the single view and we zoom out all the way the young man here in the corner is still sharp whereas in the original photograph he was blurry so now we want to be able to selectively mask out the areas that we want sharpen AI to work on and that can be done with the new masking feature so with the new masking feature we're gonna start out with just having the brush be a little bigger and so when you put your cursor right on the radius you can control how big or how small you want that brush to be and you can also control the softness of that brush so let's make the brush just a little bit softer and we'll do a quick little brush over here across our subject I like it once you've done that you can now click apply mask because now as we toggle back and forth between the original photo where was blurry and the after photo in fact if we were to use a split view you'll notice that in the original the young man is blurry but now when you look at the after the young man is still blurry in the background but the focus of our photograph which is the little girl is perfectly sharp at last let's talk about the batch processing features in sharpen AI so when you click the Open button make sure that you take all of your blurry photos before you start and put them in some folder or somewhere now of course they can be scattered all across your hard drive but it's nice to just gather up all your blurry photos and put it in a folder in this case I have a folder called blurry photos I'm gonna select all these photos and click open so now all of the photographs have been brought in to sharpen AI now by default sharpen AI is going to select all of the photos and what that means is if I was to select a photograph and if I make a couple of changes to it so let's say we choose the sharpen model and we choose Auto you'll notice that since all of the photos are selected every photo that's in our batch process list has the sharpen model with the auto setting applied now you can also do the same thing where you can turn off select all and you can multi select multiple photos so let's say for example I wanted to choose the in the water photo I wanted to choose the brown textile photo here or one other photograph let's try the jellyfish photo right now once I've got all of these photos selected I'm basically multi selecting the photos that I would like to apply a certain setting to so I do the same thing I choose sharpen in this case I'll go to manual and make a couple of minor adjustments just to make make it exact right level of sharpness and what I'm happy there I've now essentially applied these settings to the selected photos and then finally I love to end examine each photo and make the proper settings for each one so if I was to select this last photograph here as we could see this lady is dancing which means she is the photograph is suffering from motion blur I'll choose stabilize and we can bring up the suppress noise just a little bit higher I'll bring the sharpness down a bit and once I'm happy with the results that is the setting now that has been applied to just that one photograph so this is a great way for you to either individually select your photos one at a time from your list and just apply exactly what's necessary to fix that one particular photograph or you can just leave sharpen AI to do the magic of auto correction just select all of your photos choose sharpen and auto and sharpen a is gonna do an incredible job sharpening all of your photos without you having to go manually one by one through each one of them once you're satisfied with the results and once you've made the proper settings for all your photos down the lower right-hand corner you click on the start batch processing button here you can maintain the original format of your images so you don't have to necessarily choose what file format the output image should be for the file name we're just gonna leave it on auto which is fine of course you can select Custom and make sure that each file name is gonna be exactly the way that you want to file name it the save directory some people like to have their destination images or their final images be in the same source folder as their blurry photos I personally love choosing the custom feature here I can click on the Change button and choose the directory where I would like to have my sharpen AI output so you could see that I've created another folder just for the output of my images and I click open there and once I'm happy with these settings you click start and now after a few minutes of processing all of the images have been sharpened to perfection so now it's really easy to just click on any one of these in just like the little icon over here it shows you exactly where the image is where you can just hit the spacebar and see the results of sharp and AI and that concludes this short tutorial for topaz sharpen AI so to learn more or to download your free trial visit our website at topaz labs comm forward slash sharpen - ai

Channel: Topaz Labs

Views: 102,318

Keywords: Topaz Labs, Topaz Sharpen AI, Sharpen AI, photo sharpening, sharpen a photo, image sharpening, sharpen an image, fix missed photo, motion blur

Id: yeazDIaAKfw

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020