Topaz AI Review for Bird and Wildlife Photography

[Music] this is Greg Vasco coming to you from my side porch here in the islands of Costa Rica and I'd like to kick off this pretty big comprehensive video review of topaz AI products especially denoise ai and sharp an AI and I've done this video concentrating on bird photography and wildlife photography and I'm gonna do another one in a week or so that focuses on nocturnal landscape photography where that could be interesting as well but for now I really wanted to take a look at the Topaz products that have been getting a lot of attention lately I'm just back fairly recently to my house in Costa Rica and like a lot of you around the world I'm gonna be in my house for quite a while so this is a good time to do a review but I didn't really have time to check those out because I was in Costa Rica and Ecuador for almost six weeks doing workshops and some scouting for new locations but I'm back home now and I have a chance to try it out there's been a lot of positive press out there about topaz and I'm actually a topaz affiliate and I've even done some collaborations with them for the marketing and PR in the past and so I think they they're really pushing the envelope in terms of their plugins but that said it remains to be seen whether topaz denoise ai and sharpen AI are going to be part of my regular workflow and I'll tell you what I have a couple of doubts about plugins generally keeping them updated and installed properly every time Adobe does an update to Lightroom or Photoshop can be kind of a pain I also prefer in my workflow to keep my RAW files as my master files and so I do basically all of my processing in Lightroom I go to photoshop mostly for graphic design sort of things or just once in a while if there's something I can't do to a photo in Lightroom and I need to take it over to photoshop so I don't like creating all these different copies TIFF copies and all these things I have my raw file just because it gets clutters up my library and I don't like that and so you know as far as plugins go I think they tend to be more kind of automated especially maybe on the AI side I do a lot of different things in my nature photography birds wildlife macro landscapes all in kind of equal doses and so for me every picture I take is kind of unique I don't use presets or actions in my photos every time I process a picture it's it's kind of a different a different experience and so for those three reasons I've never been big on plugins in general right you'll see how how topaz does in this video review and I think even might not make it in my regular workflow I think it's gonna have its place denoise AI for taking care of difficult noise and sharp an AI for bringing back some detail and photos where maybe the focus is not quite on or maybe there's just a little bit of motion blur but stay tuned for the review I appreciate it if you do decide to purchase these topaz products please use the affiliate links that you see down below and make sure to hit like and subscribe to my youtube channel okay well let's get into it I'm going to jump over to Lightroom where I have a collection that I've built for all the all the photos I'm going to use for for this video review and also some night sky photos some nocturnal landscape photos that I'm going to use for a review coming soon of Dean malaise and sharpen AI for for that kind of photography for landscapes at night so stay tuned for that but let's take a look first at a series of pictures of a capped Heron from the Ecuadorian Amazon that I shot last month and this was a really fleeting moment it was an amazing moment I didn't really get what I wanted out of it but I loved Blackwater and bright subjects like this and so this was in a Blackwater Lagoon and and I really really liked it it was a split split second very dark right after dawn on a cloudy day so I'm shooting ISO 1600 I think maybe 3200 and shutter speed of like one over one sixtieth I'm hand-holding from a moving canoe and the harren we saw for literally maybe three seconds and so I ripped off a quick burst in vertical as the bird was walking along the shoreline and then switched to horizontal really quickly as I saw he was about to fly away so let's take a look quickly at this one and this I've named my my photos accordingly so I can keep track of them as I mentioned I just hate looking at this to be honest all these tips and different versions of files but that that's what we have to do if we're gonna use plugins so this is a version where I've done my normal Lightroom workflow where I've did a little tweak on on the blacks but not very much I've done a little brush work on the aerial roots just to bring them out a bit and I've done a little bit of Lightroom brushwork on the bird to brighten him up a little bit but also to take out the noise reduction that I've applied globally to this photo in Lightroom and here's my result it's not bad you can see I've taken out the noise pretty well over here even in the roots and I've brought back the noise along with a little bit of texture and clarity and things like that that I would load up in Lightroom on the bird and it's okay it's not stellar so I thought well maybe this would be a job for topaz denoise so in this one I've done my Lightroom brushwork except I didn't apply any noise reduction at all in Lightroom I saved that until I took it over to D noise AI and this is the result from D noise AI and that is a pretty good result it got rid of a lot of noise in the background maybe even a little too much on the roots but that's certainly not a criticism and it's done a pretty good job of getting rid of noise in the bird and bringing back some details it's a little uneven the beak is there's a little grungy the back of the neck but and there's some some things down over here that are a little bit weird so uneven but I would say just on first pass probably a better result than my Lightroom work so let's take a look at the next one and that was just a split second later as the Heron was walking along so again this is my best effort in Lightroom as my selected brushwork applying noise reduction globally in light in Lightroom and then brushing out that noise reduction on the bird to bring back some of the detail and on that brush I've also applied like I said a little bit of sharpening a little bit of clarity a little bit of texture and here's what this one looks like okay not not too bad but I thought it could be better so what I did is I created a virtual copy of this file and I left my brush work on the bird except for the fact that I didn't apply any noise reduction at all in Lightroom so this is how the noise looked straight out of the camera with just a little bit of of kind of contrast and exposure brushwork on the bird and I took that over next into denoise AI and it did a pretty good job as on the previous one a little bit uneven take a look at the at his neck here and maybe along the the feathers that give him his name the capped heron and along the beak and back here but a pretty good job and you know I'm also dealing with some movement his head's moving a little bit maybe I didn't nail the focus quite again it was a tough very fleeting moment so I'll forgive myself so I thought let's take this file where I've applied denoise and that was looking pretty good and take it over into sharpen AI and see what it can do and it did a pretty good job I would say but again quite uneven if you look at the the back of his neck over here and again along the beak some of the areas here and so it's a I think it's certainly better if we take a look at a comparison of my Lightroom brushwork and Lightroom selective noise reduction versus the final result were added noise reduction in D noise and added sharpen ai and let's go over into compare and take a look on the left here is my Lightroom version and on the right is the Topaz version and I would say the topaz version is better no doubt about it but it's not perfect maybe I could work with that a little bit in Lightroom and even out some of these areas but it is an improvement and so it has potential in this kind of shot where it says it's a special image and it could certainly be better than what Lightroom and my normal processing workflow would offer now again there are these uneven areas and sharpening I just recently released a new version an updated version of the plugin that has some selective sharpening tools where you can apply it only to certain areas of the image or mask out areas of the image to which you don't want additional sharpening applied and we're gonna see an example of some buff tailed coronet hummingbirds down here later where that could could be interesting but overall the win for topaz but probably not an aim and let's take one last look where I had high hopes given some of the hype I've seen surrounding especially sharpen AI I had high hopes that sharpen could could save me in this case because I didn't get what I wanted but I had this where the bird was taking off and I don't mind blur in the wings at all in a flight shot but I wish the bird itself had been a little a little sharper maybe I quote didn't quite hit focus again the boats moving I have very low shutter speed and it was a tall order I didn't nail it let's be honest but I hoped our pan could could save my buck now let's take a look again at my best effort with my Lightroom workflow global noise reduction and then some brushwork on the bird and brushing out the noise reduction on the bird and it's something it's not very sharp at all and it's still pretty noisy so I wasn't really able to bring back any detail at all by leaving in some of the noise on the bird I tried leaving in less or applying more of the noise reduction on the bird but then I just couldn't really get any detail back and again this guy's out of focus he's out of the plane of focus and he's also moving so I have some tough challenges to deal with let's see how denoise dealt with it I would say that's better in terms of the noise standpoint but again I could have achieved this in Lightroom right just wiping out all the noise and ergo all the detail as well so that's it's okay I decided to take this denoise photo in to sharpen and hopefully sharpen could work those those miracles that we've kind of been hearing about and maybe even seen about but unfortunately it didn't it didn't work a miracle it's a little better I guess but this stuff in here just looks bizarre the beak looks weird there's no detail any name any of this and maybe the feet are a little better but it certainly didn't do what I hoped and like I said maybe my expectations were too high let's just take one more quick little comparison of my Lightroom version versus the Topaz denoise and sharpen version on the left is my Lightroom version and on the right the sharpened denoise version so it certainly tried and it did some things well but it did a lot of things not very well and so maybe it's just not able to work the kind of miracles we might have hoped for so let's go ahead and move on to a few other photos and see how topaz denoise and sharpen a I worked on those this is a blue-crowned or now it's called lessons motmot that i photographed in my backyard a few months ago and this is the full frame shot actually it was quite close he comes to her our feeders in our yard and I used a high ISO ISO 2500 and this was the very last light of the day as you'll see by the catch light in the eye in just a second I bumped the ISO mostly because I was doing a tight head-and-shoulders portrait and I wanted to use a smaller aperture f10 so I got a little more depth of field on the bird and my background was super far away so there was no adverse effect on the background by stopping down and I wanted to keep around one three twentieth of a second the wind was blowing that's why his feathers are kind of ruffled up and so I shot at ISO 2500 I'm gonna compare the two so this is my raw file that I've processed using my normal Lightroom workflow global noise reduction throughout the picture and then a brush to brush some exposure and sharpness and things like that a little contrast a little clarity onto the bird open up the shadows just a tiny bit although I want to keep the shadows from the side lighting no I don't want to even things out and brushing away the noise reduction on the bird and here's what this looks like 100% but while we're waiting for it to load check out the catch light in the eye here and you can see that the Sun was just going down and it's off to the left of the bird so this is what I did with my brush work and this is a hundred percent again as i zoom in I can see that I've got a little bit of a a little bit of where I've gone outside the line so I'm gonna go in to develop quickly and I'm going to take a look at my brush and so I want to select this brush and then I'm gonna zoom back in again and I'm going to brush out in the Alt key and I'm just gonna brush that away how long is beak it's not really important for this video but it's bothering me so I'm in it I'm gonna get rid of it really quick and there we go so here's the before and after of my brush yeah that was with Lightroom applying noise reduction globally throughout the picture and as you can see it wiped out all the feather detail in the bird now again with my brush work I brought that back by taking the noise reduction slider almost all the way down and doing a couple of other things cranking up the texture a little bit a little bit of exposure brightening up the shadows a little bit tiny bit of saturation but basically I'm brushing away the noise reduction that's the important thing I have another brush here where I left some of the noise reduction in the bird because I don't need I don't need to have all that grain and texture in the eye of a bird okay so that's what I did and now let's take a look at what topaz denoise a I did with this picture I'm gonna jump back in the light in the library module and here's D noises take and it did quite a good job of removing noise in the background but leaving the bird pretty much relatively untouched and I think that looks quite good does it look that much better than my take in Lightroom and I would say the difference is not that great go back and forth one more time it's it's there's still a little more noise certainly in my Lightroom work where I brought the noise back but the detail to me it looks pretty similar I don't think there's a clear clear winner in this case and if I wanted to I could even go back quickly and take a look at my brush again my main brush and maybe I want to leave a little bit of the noise reduction in and hopefully that won't flatten out the detail but those are all things I can do and and so in this one I would say there's not a clear winner and my preference personally on pictures in general is to stay within Lightroom and not have to create another TIFF to have my raw file as my master file and that that's how I would normally work so that one maybe about a tie let's go back into my collection that I worked up for this video and take a look at another one this is a red howler monkey in the Ecuadorian Amazon that I took and again I sold 2500 and the light was quite a bit lower here than the motmot picture it's a cloudy day in the rainforest so I'm shooting F 6.3 my widest aperture on my signal 150 to 600 millimeter lens and my shutter speed is still only one one sixtieth so this is low light and it's a good test and so what I wanted to see is how my standard Lightroom workflow again you know it reduced noise globally and then do some brushwork on the monkey to bring back the original noise and that's what I got there it's okay it's not bad so I took it in 2d noise and I took it in to sharpen after that and I would say it did quite a bit better job on the face of the monkey again this is my Lightroom take and this is with D noise and sharpen but it's interesting that towpath sharpen did not do a good job on mammal fur and so what I had to do in this picture I'll take this one over in to develop this is the one I developed first taking it into D noise and then into topaz sharpen ai and I ended up having to make a brush in Lightroom so that I could brush in some extra sharpness and I'm going to show you what it looks like with and without that brush so this is after running it through sharpen and it did a pretty good job on the face but look it didn't really bring back any of the detail that denoise smoothed out and the noise reduction process by bringing it back into Lightroom and using a brush to brush in some added sharpness you can see here 34 and also some texture I was able to bring back quite a bit of detail once again before and after so that was one where sharpen didn't really do the trick I don't know if I can make a blanket statement that it doesn't work well with mammal fur based on a sample size of one but that was certainly the experience in this case and let's look at two more pictures quickly and one that I want to show you is a pair of buff tailed cornets that were facing off last year in Ecuador about a year ago in a cloud forest and again I have pretty low light conditions I was shooting with my canon I was shooting Canon at that point Canon 300 millimeter F 2.8 lens and I was using a 4 to get a little more depth of field for the two of them I needed one eight hundredths of a second because they're fighting they're they're jostling and moving around and so I had iso 2000 so I have some noise to deal with right and so I did that just fine using my regular workflow there's a little bit of noise in the background but I'm not too worried about it sharpness is good on that guy but the main thing I wanted to look at here is that you know what actually I didn't do any noise reduction on this picture at all I did hardly anything to this picture this was basically straight out of the camera and that's fine but you can see that this guy on the left with his beak open is not as sharp as the guy on the right and so I thought well let's take that in to sharpen and see what it could do where you have I think this is not sharp basically due to depth of field issues just a little bit behind the plane of focus that this goes on and you can tell that by the way the branch is angled a little bit so I took it over in 2d noise and sharpen and this is what I got denoise did a nice job taking out noise from the background you can see that and leaving detail in the bird and this is what sharpen did for that other bird that other buff tail Coronet and take a look that's quite a bit better and this is before sharpen a eye and this is after sharpen a eye but take a look at what it did to this guy he's way over sharpen now whereas in the original picture he looked just fine and so that could be a problem that's something to be aware of that you're gonna need to have a way whether it's within topaz itself or using the plugin not out of Lightroom but out of Photoshop so that you can selectively unsharpened things that don't need extra sharpening and so there's that and the last thing I wanted to look at is now what I consider to be a successful implementation of of topaz denoise and topaz sharpen AI which will often be used in combination I imagine for most of us nature photographers negative nature photographers wildlife photographers this is a almost full frame shot of a bear throated tiger heron I took a couple months ago here in Costa Rica and a Blackwater Lagoon and I really love this shot because I like the deep surroundings the light hitting only the bird and I like just these elements of vegetation that framed him and I waited till he preen in this exact position and so again this is you can see from the name of the file tiger heron standard lightroom brushwork dot in EF it's a nikon raw file i shot it at 1600 with the d 850 and I was hand-holding and I was sweating and there were a lot of mosquitoes so I didn't really nail the sharpness quite as much as I would have liked to on this photo in fact I hate to show you this but it's a little disappointing but that's what it looked like at 100% and so I haven't applied any extra sharpening in Lightroom I haven't done anything but to me it's a photo that it would still make it because it's really it's about the bird but it's about the bird and its surroundings but it could certainly be better and so I took it into topaz sharpen and look what it did for this one that is actually much better it's a little crunchy I might work a little bit in Lightroom with a brush maybe just smooth some of that out but it certainly did a pretty good job and I would consider this a success well we've covered a lot of ground in this video review and you might be wondering now what is my final conclusion as far as the utility of topaz Dino is a I and sharpen AI as you can tell I think it gives mixed results I really don't think even though I get it free as an affiliate and I appreciate their efforts I'm not gonna make it a standard part of my workflow but I do think it would be nice to have you know in my in my tool kit for those images that I really really like but maybe through my own fault or just through challenging conditions the sharpness and maybe the noise and everything did become quite altogether like I wanted and so I think topaz Dino is AI and sharpen AI will be able to save some photos for me and I think they'll be able to do the same thing for you so I invite you to try it out they have trial versions but you can also again buy it through the affiliate links I hope you enjoyed this video review and of course there's a blog post linked right below on my website and my blog where you can see kind of a text version of this video review but I hope you enjoyed my take on topaz Dino's ai and sharpen ai and I hope you also learned maybe a few lightroom tricks along the way because i showed you a little bit about my behind-the-scenes processing I have a big ebook and video series called Lightroom for the nature photographer that I produced with my friend Keith Bauer a few years ago and we're keeping it current with new updates to Lightroom so if you enjoyed that part of the video please see the link below and you can check out that ebook and video series it has over three hours of video where Keith and I walk you through how we process different sorts of nature pictures but thanks for your time thanks for your attention and again be sure to subscribe to me here on YouTube I'm going to be doing a lot more videos in the future it's a new initiative the mine is to really get my youtube channel going and more videos out in the field and so I hope you'll stay in touch with me there and follow me on Instagram and Facebook I post photos every few days with shooting data usually some Natural History info and also some photo tips so thanks a lot stay safe and take care everybody [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Deep Green Photography

Views: 21,078

Keywords: topaz ai, lightroom, bird photography, wildlife photography

Id: dDEtllY6ieM

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020