Topaz AI Sharp and AI Gigapixel Review. Is Magnify & Enhance Real?

can you enhance that what if we magnify and enhance I have an idea let's enhance the reflection of the perpetrator from that distant vote for idiot bumper sticker on that old Volkswagen Beetle [Music] hey guys Kevin Sonia with another not long ago I did an admittedly rather scathing review of topaz's jpg - raw AI because quite frankly it didn't feel like AI in our test images it didn't turn them into roz frankly I would say we would have been better off just using the JPEGs and they certainly didn't approach the data dynamic rating to the information that we have in a raw file and so I was a bit negative while at the same time admitting that topaz a company who's been among us for years and is perhaps most noted for its noise reduction software although with the advent of usable ISO 12000 or higher images out of camera maybe we're not using noise reduction software quite as much as we used to be however topaz is still innovating and while jpg to raw AI did not impress me and I think that the term AI is is thrown about a bit much we are seeing advancements in machine learning and things like that and so I thought topaz has made some really good stuff and I need to give them a fair shake let's try a couple of these other AI programs that they're touting is the Topaz AI gigapixel beautiful photo enlargements using machine learning up to six hundred percent preserving image quality saying it's truly intelligent that they've trained this with sample images and those samples are actually gonna be used to give you crisp clear result the other product that goes kind of right beside it is the sharpen AI which again is supposed to be more than just sharpening we've seen resolution and greasing tools whether built into Photoshop or separately for years we've seen sharpening tools for years but both of these are claiming to have a level of artificial intelligence and as we've seen with tools that are supposed to for example stabilize an image in Photoshop while they can be useful they do pretend to produce a lot of artifacts so we're gonna punish both of these just like I did JPG draw AI and we're gonna see if this is really AI or if it's yes we're gonna see if if all the AI stuff is just like what we've seen in the past or if we're truly coming into an era where we can magnify and enhance can you magnify that magnifying an ends let's find out I'm actually gonna start with the sharpening right this is topaz sharpen ai and I have nothing in here just yet let's look at this one and I have kind of looked these over I've selected a few images to try out now this is not a good image and it doesn't pretend to be this is an old image from my first digital camera back in the early 2000s I think it was an olympus or something 3 megapixels I paid like 300 bucks I think I bought it at Staples this is a 2,000 pixel image that it's also blurry it was just for some reason sitting in my archives from years ago because it's digital and we don't delete like mini topaz software tools and you can also do plug-in versions of these but I'm gonna use the standalone spur now it's very simple it's not like the unsharp mask tool where there's a zillion sliders which in a way is good but maybe not sharpen stabilize and focus so I'm just gonna kind of go through and let it render a preview on these okay so I've got all three of these modes now admittedly you're normally not trying to make a great print out of a blurry photo but there are times when we need to do some recovery and we're gonna look up maybe a couple examples of that today okay this is a 200% on this mm this is let's try stabilize I'm just gonna try whoa all right are you seeing this that is absolutely astounding all right Wow look we're not picking someone's face off a distant bumper-sticker but that's more than sharpening that's more than simply blur reduction that's restoration on the level that I got to be honest and I love of gadgets and software gadgets like this and I've been dreaming of magnifying enhance for years that's the closest thing hands down that I've ever seen on this image on this image so the image of the blurry house we're gonna come back to that what I'm gonna do so you guys don't have to wait because some of these take a while to process it's it's using like 90 percent GPU when it runs these I'm gonna stabilize this one each mode you select you have a few sliders on and then it has to render a preview if you want to see a preview for each mode that you change it look at this this is good all right this is not a bad portrait I mean I'm already zoomed in quite a bit this is a usable portrait but I had a little bit of motion blur and it's really bringing in her eyes a little bit too sharp here on the rock but it's easy enough to mask that out right because it doesn't know what I want to be sharp and what I want to be blurry the sharpen is sharpening let's let's take one more because I know this review is kind of geared towards gigapixel AI but I wanted to cover both of these because I think they go hand in hand and you're gonna be using both with certain images this one again a super old photo is money to be skinned from film of my little sister when I was probably I was probably 17 when I made this photo and you know look at the hair there's detail coming into the hair it's not really bringing this back I think it has a little harder time on faces and we could turn it up I mean we could turn it way up we might start introducing more artifacts but you know what it still looks pretty damn good and it's it's improving a lot let's switch to focus and see what's better sharpen and stabilize and focus again you have those three modes so you can use this in a more general way of just a little bit of sharpening on an image or you can go to stabilize in the focus I would say if I'm just gently sharpening I mean I'm sharp mask or something like that works good it's almost worse with focus which is weird because this image is out of focus I think stabilized here is the best these are something I gotta give topes credit for this this is another level okay let's go into this gigapixel a so gigapixel well it does have some some noise and blur reduction built into it is not the same as the sharpening AI tool and so when we go into gigapixel here we're gonna see this image this is from the Twin Cities it's an HDR there's nothing wrong with it and I think that's the key here that I want to look at and gigapixel also is not only the ability to enhance damaged images or take really low res images and increase them but to take images that are good this is a five thousand pixel image but if I wanted to print this at a hundred inches say and I do love large prints let's increase this for time so you can say how much you want to resize it by up to six times seems to be the max there's a few settings noise and blur reduction output settings all that kind of stuff and here is it's just look wow here's the original on the left and it's just kind of rendering previews look at this and very mind we're really zooming in a 4x upscale on this makes this a 21,000 pixel image so two hundred and seventy three megapixels is a 4x increase in this look at the textures on the buildings I mean when you upscale this normally this is just blurring it right it's just kind of blending those pixels together it's actually putting information that didn't exist in guys that's magnify and enhance that is magnified enhance alright okay let's be serious though you can't magnify enhance everything we've seen with the sharpening tool that there are some limitations in the face it seems to really do good with textures I'm gonna run a bunch of these I mean we can see that this is pretty wild I'm gonna I'm gonna run some combinations of sharpen AI and gigapixel AI and process them let the GPU do its work and then I'm gonna open those files one on top of the other in Photoshop and we're just gonna examine them straight up no BS you know what in the name of this is gigapixel AI gigapixels gigapixels a thousand megapixels that's a that's a pretty bold claim we're gonna try and before the end hang around to the end even though it's maybe completely pointless we're gonna see what happens if we try to make a gigapixel or something approaching okay look I've done a ton the render II and I've practiced with some images I've saved them out I've stacked them up in Photoshop so that you guys don't have to watch me tinker with this for hours on end let's look and see what we got I've got the image I'm gonna explain each step of what we did along the way so you understand but this way you don't have to watch me do every single one of these okay so what I've done here on these sample images is I've brought in the original and I've combined so on the house image first I ran the sharpen then I ran gigapixel to increase the resolution because remember it was only an old 2000 pix limits it was three megapixels and so I've increased this to seven thousand I've increased this to like 30-plus megapixels I've done it two ways and so that's the size of my canvas and what I did is I was very consistent in the rules of how I did this I would process if needed in sharpening I then go to gigapixel AI to resize then save it out and bring it into Photoshop and stack it on top of an image that was resized to the exact same pixel dimensions using standard photoshop and I would just use the automatic standard Photoshop upscaling which is upscaling goes is pretty good for years I've mostly used that because it's been pretty well as good as whatever else is out there what we're looking at is a 3 megapixel image up scaled in Photoshop right here and there's nothing I mean it's a garbage image like there's blurry people there's blurry stuff there's nothing good about this image in any way this is topaz sharpen AI until pass data pixel oh my goodness now look there it's creating information here from whatever database it's using right there's some weird texture maybe that could be grass I mean it's interpreting things look at the people like you could tell it's blurry guys it putting the telephone poles it's putting in like hair a hat like you can actually tell that they're walking away from me versus toward me and you really couldn't even see that before the mailbox the wheel it can't really prett the numbers and letters because I guess there's not enough right you can the machine learning the AI only goes so far right but Wow okay so this is just a Wow example I mean just look at the detail now for point of reference I ran this also you see how there's a layer here that says red sharp with red sharp I uh pressed it first in gigapixel and then did the sharpening 2d blur it in sharpened AI it's not as good it's a lot more pasty see this here is if I uh pressed it first so for some reason it's working better Wow I mean this isn't cut it's absolutely unbelievable and everybody I've showed it to is like whoa now he's there weird distortions but yeah but it's following the line this isn't like patch tool in Photoshop where it might work amazing and it might just put a random face in the middle of your image that says vote for stupid all right it's not gonna put a random piece of text that says magnifying enhanced this isn't doing that this is putting texture of objects doors snow but it's keeping it's not just replacing it with a random image of snow it's keeping it true to the position and texture and somehow blending all of that together that's amazing I could sit here and look at this because this is the closest thing I have ever seen in my life other than like Star Trek right so magnifying enhance it's one thing to see it on Star Trek or CSI or something like that but this is real this is something you can go download a trial of right now remember I said that HDR right this one I upscaled 220 1000 pixels all right which is what we were just looking at a few minutes ago now why would you do this well this doesn't matter for those of us like myself that might print 60 70 80 90 inch prints right and we're using cameras like like the a7r series that are 40-plus megapixels they look great but it's still not as much as we had like on 4 by 5 sheet film back in the day right the sensors aren't there yet so if you did a beautiful I've talked a lot about my 4x5 playing with 4x5 in the past if you a beautiful image and scan it perfectly on four by five it's a lot of work by the way to get it that good but everything comes together you can get hundreds of megapixels and our sensors just start doing that and and you might think that doesn't matter and know if you're printing a by tens but if you're putting art on the wall that's big that scale to walls like the painters did you want that resolution let's zoom in I'm gonna go to one-to-one and okay so you can see this is Photoshop upscale remember rather than just starting and having to wait for all this I've loaded the original 550 500 pixel image in I up scaled it to 20 1468 here in Photoshop and now I'm gonna turn on the gigapixel layer and we're just gonna see whoa and here's the thing now here's an image I like the house image that's already good there's nothing wrong with this image and so the question is at what point is it pointless to keep resizing at what point is it pointless to sharpen I could take the image that I uploaded up scaled in Photoshop right and I could sharpen just for the sake of speed let's just use an unsharp mask because it's pretty good it's gonna be slow let's just do a little bit of sharpening heck let's do a lot of sharpening see if we can you know bring it in yeah there's some detail okay let's sharpen it to upscale and sharpen a little bit to try and really compete okay I mean we got a good sharp clean image but let's turn on the AI layer unbelievable look at this this is a hundred percent two hundred plus two hundred and seventy three megapixel image 100% there's a little bit of noise and but I do notice like sometimes in the texture in the grass area is it kind of is interpolating right so on an image like this where it starts out already really detailed it's doing really well it's not having to do a lot of guesswork I mean if I was printing this huge look at this look at the old machinery it's just bringing detailing guys and I don't know how it's doing it I didn't even I don't even know the software yeah I downloaded a trial topaz didn't even give it to me I'm not remember my last review of their software was scathing and notice it almost looks like Arabic on this sign when it's not it can't interpolate letters relief if there's not enough letter there to form it but oh my goodness okay remember this is photoshop and sharpening upscaling Photoshop standard upscaling and sharpening this is AI okay I'm gonna keep moving I don't wanna make this too long this one I export it now again now I'm trying to punish it right I'm torturing and I exported this like 1200 pixels it was a pretty clean file I'm gonna show you the clean file as well I exported this at like 1200 pixels up scaled it to 4800 so that was 4x upscale right this is in Photoshop okay so now we're taking an image that lacks information right maybe you've got an image from the web you're trying to enhance this could be a big deal with forensics work things like that right not just in photography so we're kind of looking at both sides we're looking at taking images that are broken and need to be fixed and taking images that are not broken and we're just trying to maximize the quality and see if it works for both and so far it kind of does and you can see it's blurry it's an upscaled image this is topaz gigapixel Wow now bear in mind this second one I'm turning on is upscale to 4800 from 1204 times look at the difference now it's not putting faces super clear because it it's kind of a texture it seems that the AI is largely texture based but that's a start and it is still enhancing the face right you can notice like on this poster here though it's kind of almost makes it look like abstract now I'm gonna turn on the original file this is an actual 48 100 pixel export from Lightroom of the file that I shot boom now that's a little different now right now you're seeing faces on posters you're seeing details so when you compare to the Topaz a I know it's not that great compared to photoshop yeah I mean if if a 1200 pixel image is all you have and you're trying to for whatever reason increase the size of it this is really something okay let's well this is this is just ridiculous okay let's let me show you this I'm being ridiculous here this is another 4800 pixel image but I exported this one at 800 pixels alright so if you know had the full res file we're torturing it here I exported this at 800 up scaled it in Photoshop here to 4800 and then here's the 4x top scale from topaz okay it still kind of looks like it's a phone image but like we're going from a big blurry mass that was 800 800 pixels right number 800 pixels is like this little phone image zooming in okay look at these lights completely blurry of course it's like it put a city in the background and here's the original fault right so you can see like it is interpolating information here it's doing it's saying hey there's lights there so I'm gonna use a pattern of lights that matches that Shanee now when I say the full I mean I exported the actual quality file at resolution and I'm laying it over but Wow coming back again to AI sharp and kind of bouncing back and forth because these these are so synonymous I almost feel like if you're gonna get one you should get both this is the original okay not a bad image let's zoom out not a bad image but a little bit soft I should have done better around those eyes here's photoshop's if I were to go up and sharpen and use shake reduction okay and I almost never do it I know if you're in a pinch you can kind of dial it in and play with it but it just makes it look ugly in hi past this is topaz this looks like this is a photograph I mean I would print this this would actually be an enhancement to my print wow that's that's really cool I can't get this with sharpening guys I just can't it won't work it ain't gonna happen look if I here to take the original just run a bunch of unsharp mask it's just again kind of like kind of like the shake reduction a little bit different see what I mean though it's just you but the Topaz yeah and I could turn it up turn it down I masked it away here on that on the wall so it didn't make the wall look weird see if I turn the mask off all right I said we try to put its name to the test gigapixel I'm gonna do this I'm gonna take this image here taken down in San Luis Potosi state 7600 pixels this is an a7 or mark 2 file on a 24 millimeter prime TSE mark 2 it is razor sharp it's it's one of my favorite images from from Mako and we're gonna try and give a pixel it okay the max I can do is 4x so I'll do some math I'm not gonna make you sit here and watch the processing I'm gonna run these load them both in Photoshop and we're gonna do a side-by-side we've seen some pretty amazing stuff tonight let's just see if there's a benefit and going gigapixel okay guys I'm running a beast of a machine with 11 gigabyte GPU and that GPU is being pushed to like 90% and it probably took it still probably only took five or six minutes but we six xed just so you can see what I did I put my 7600 I put it into here it's not actually six AK seen it looks like at the moment it has a hard limit of 32,000 let me try manually yeah it'll only go to 32,000 pixels so it's actually more like 5x Enoch this is not quite a gigapixel in this case so I guess it's a little unfair I mean if I really want to nitpick right it seems that 32,000 is the max and I'm getting my calculator okay 32,000 square if I had a square image is 1024 so technically yes this maxes out at a gigapixel in this case because it's not a square image we have 32 and 19 which is 32 19 608 megapixels about 609 let's zoom into a hundred percent this is ridiculous like okay I print big but I don't know if there'd be much benefit here this remember I mean it actually looks shockingly good this was a 42 megapixel original raw file cropped a little bit it's like 36 razor-sharp this is 100% 600 megapixels from Photoshop what happens if I turn on give it pixel AI okay I mean there's no denying you can't do that with sharpening it's bringing detail back onto the rope bear in mind we're looking at 600 megapixels now is the detail perfect like my native file at normal resolution zoomed one-to-one no but were one-to-one we're at a hundred percent on a 4k display of 609 megapixels effectively if it was square it would be a gigapixel this is this is the Photoshop upscaled right not just dragged or or like actually gone in an upscaled it in Photoshop with control command I using automatic which presumably is choosing the best resampling mode and I've had pretty good luck with it here's the water I mean it does look a little sharpened but again how much are we at right look at the moss and the water here it is just upscaled there's a difference is this shocking on an image that's already so clear as it was like on the old house right when we combine the sharpening and the gigapixel but if I was printing 400 inches yeah heck yeah I would want this because it look at the detail on the leaves and stuff it is improving those details by honestly quite a fair margin all right I think we've seen enough I mean starting with with this guy from a boring nothing 3 megapixel image from 20 years ago to this I mean I'm still not gonna print this but wow I've never seen anything like it to more practical things like this to portraits cleaning those up using sharpen AI to this now very mind most of the images we looked at here if I use sharpen AI I told you like the portrait image I didn't even upscale that I was just showing you sharpen AI so this was kind of a combo review but I feel like sharpening eye backs up gigapixel AI because gigapixel is is resizing and at some point depending on how perfect your image was you may actually need some extra sharpening or if you're doing restorations this could be phenomenal sharpening I phenomenal for restorations really both of them you know if you're restoring an old four by five team type or something you want to bring detail back in the faces there is some lack it's not perfect if it's really bad right it'll sharpen it up it'll clear up the eyes sharpen AI will but it's not it's not gonna take either one of them is not gonna take a face where it's black right it's torn off and just interpolated that we don't have that level of AI yet but I'll be honest this is more of an AI than anything I've ever seen this actually is okay this photo of this old house when I first ran this my jaw dropped this maybe early stages but this is magnifying enhance so what are my thoughts what's my final thoughts after my last scathing topaz review of of jpg to raw AI where I just wasn't that excited what are my thoughts on this on unreal unreal guys if for no other reason just go pull up some old photos and download trials and play with this I will probably have to buy this because there's nothing else that even comes close and while I may not need this much resolution or that much restoration power every day this is the business I mean and these are tools that we can use this is not just another sharpening tool and it's not just another upscaling tool these are doing things that we've never seen before and I know they've got some kind of database thing going on and stuff behind the scenes is that really an AI we could debate that but the point is we are magnifying and enhancing to to a large degree I'm giving these a resounding thumbs up and topaz didn't even ask me to review these I mean after my last review I definitely would but both of these products I'd like I'm being paid but I'm truly astounded by what both of these can do go play with them because if you've been I don't care how long you've been in this business you've never seen anything like this and at least go download the trials maybe you don't need it but go play with it topaz labs you've impressed thank you

Channel: Seim

Views: 73,586

Keywords: gavin seim photography tips photographic school zones system, luminosity masking, photo tips, photos hands on, getting it in camera, Magnify & Enhnace, topaz labs, topaz review, AI Sharp, Gigapixel Review, the best image sharpening, photo restoration software, enhance that image, image enhnacemnet AI

Id: Tr8eGOXPv7I

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019