TOPAZ GIGAPIXEL AI: Best Workflow for Extreme Cropping (Lightroom)

on today's episode i want to go over my workflow for using gigapixel ai when you uh aggressively crop your images what is the best workflow for that stay tuned and find out hello everyone and welcome to the joy of editing with dave kelly so today i'm going to show you my best workflow for working with gigapixel ai when you really want to crop into your images now i'm starting out in lightroom today and this is generally the way i do things i always like to start out in lightroom so far in this image i've made some basic adjustments as you can see right here now if i go to detail you'll notice i have no sharpening the only thing i use is color noise reduction i leave it at the default setting for lightroom i find i get the best results when i do it that way the other thing i've done is under lens corrections i have my remove chromatic aberrations checked on and my enable profile correction is checked i do that for all of my images the next step for me now is to either denoise or sharpen my image this is important do not crop your image first do your denoising and your sharpening on an entire full-size image file to me that is very important or you won't get uh satisfactory results and i've tried it both ways and i'm telling you i'm speaking from experience you will get the best results if you do your denoising and sharpening before you ever go into gigapixel ai however if you have an image that is relatively sharp like this particular image is not it's a little on the soft side but if your image is sharp to begin with and it has really low noise from your camera because you shot at a low iso you could go right into gigapixel and do your cropping right there you can skip the whole denoising and sharpening step because dino or gigapixel will give you adequate denoising and sharpening okay this image however suffers from a sharpening issue it's a little bit soft so i need to use uh sharpen ai we can see the iso was 320 and at this iso level i'll have very low noise so i can just get away with sharpen ai for denoising and sharpening i placed the note up on the screen you may want to pause this video and read this note this is my recommendation for using sharpen ai denoise ai or both and i have one more note that i'm going to place up on the screen read it and it's my reasoning for not using uh sharpen ai or denoise ai as a batch processor processing raw files it's very important to pause and read my note if you're interested in seeing some examples of what i just explained in my note i'd be happy to show you that in a tutorial if i get enough people wanting me to do that so please let me know about that in the comments section below i apologize for taking this extra time at the beginning of this tutorial but i'm not really because i really want you to understand why i do the things i do in my workflow in case you forgot what i was doing i almost forgot what i was doing and that is i want to take this image here which is slightly out of focus i need to sharpen it and sharpen ai i'm going to go ahead and do that i'm going to bring it back into lightroom and then send it off to gigapixel for some cropping because i'm going to crop in pretty tight on it so let's go ahead and send this into topaz sharpen ai i'm going to right click on my image and go to edit in sharpen a i now i can only send this out as a copy with lightroom adjustments remember it's a raw file i'm going to send it out as a tiff file now i have choices here i can send it as a tiff uh jpeg or psd but i want tiff remember that's a lossless file i'm going to use profoto the highest color space because that's just what i use 16 bits for the bit depth i'm going to do a resolution of 300 uh compression of none i'll go ahead and click edit and that'll send us into topaz sharpen ai i'm going to move quickly and sharpen ai because i already have a bunch of videos on my youtube channel showing how to use sharpen ai now in the auto mode it tells me too soft is what i should use but i find if i go to motion blur and give it a second here to render itself out render out the preview here takes a second or two for it to render out now if i zoomed in a little tighter it would be a little bit quicker for me and this uh varies from uh computer to computer but yeah that looks a lot sharper with the um with the motion blur setting here and i've tried the out of focus before but the motion blur gives me the best results so i'm going to go ahead and accept that and uh let's zoom in a little bit tighter and i'll show you when i zoom into like 200 watch it'll it'll render out that preview a lot quicker and as you can see my noise is gone my image is sharp let me just drag this over it'll render it out again and yeah that looks really good i'm happy with that all i have to do now is click apply and we'll be sent right back into lightroom and here we are back in lightroom i paused the video when i brought it back into lightroom it took like 15 seconds to process out now let me go ahead and select both of these images and we'll do a little pixel peeping here i'm going to click on xy comparison i'm in the library module here let's zoom in the image on the left is the sharpened image with sharpen ai the image on the right is the original but as you can clearly see here that image on the left is super sharp i'm zoomed in to 300 percent but look how sharp and there's no noise whatsoever in the image now remember the image started out at iso 320 so i had no need to send this into uh denoise ai all right so let me go ahead and go back to a single image view and we'll see the full frame here now i'm going to send this into gigapixel ai and i'll do the cropping in gigapixel ai this is the way i like to do it i like to do the cropping right in gigapixel now we need to send the full size tiff image into gigapixel ai so right now they're both selected so i'm going to command or control click the uh dng raw file and i'm only going to be sending in the tiff file which has the sharpening applied to it from sharpen ai so i'm going to right click it i'm going to go to edit in and i'm going to go to gigapixel ai and now i have choices here i can send it in as a copy with lightroom adjustments as a copy edit as a copy or edit the original in this case i want to edit the original because i've already denoised it and sharpened it and just to save space in my computer i'm going to send it in as the original okay because remember i still have the original raw file so i'm going to send in this tiff file as an original that'll save up a little space so i don't have to do anything as far as settings here i just have to click edit it'll open up gigapixel ai and we'll get started by the way at the time i'm making this video the latest version is 5.5.2 so if you don't have that version go ahead and download that one okay so i'm in the side by side view right here and i'm just going to use the standard ai model for now and let's see let's go to crop we're going to go ahead and crop the image i'm going to keep the original aspect ratio the original ratio and i'm going to crop pretty darn tight on this image and gigapixel does a great job at upsizing it upscaling the image and i think a crop right around there looks pretty sweet i think i think that's good i'm happy with that all i need to do is click apply that'll apply the crop give it a few seconds here to render out at the smaller size it takes a little bit longer but it's really really quick now it has to process here wait for it it is almost done but there we go so the image on the left is the original and the image on the right is the gigapixel preview and it cropped down to 25.85 by 1723. up converted twice it's up to a 5170 by 34 34 46 pixels so let's uh bump that up to a 4x i just want to go a little bigger this would actually be a little larger well a good bit larger than my original camera pixel count okay and as you can see the image on the left again is the original image on the right is the preview with gigapixel it is super sharp and the preview renders out really quick and that's at 37 percent and the only thing i need to do is decide do i need any extra noise reduction i might just pull that back a little bit because remember it already had noise removal from sharpen ai and remove blur i'm just going to pull that back as well because i don't think i need to have it quite as sharp because it's already been sharpened with sharpen ai i think standard is going to be fine so i'm not going to play around with any of these other models standard is going to be great and i generally use standard i'll be honest with you but i always tell you look around your image and i've already done this i've looked around my image just to make sure there's no weird things going on in the image like some weird kind of an artifact or something that's happening but just go around and say you know just look at it just assure yourself that everything is good and everything looks good to me so once you're satisfied with it go ahead and click apply and that'll send you right back into lightroom i'm just letting this run in real time so you see how long this takes and it's going to take roughly like 15 seconds now right after this there's a little i think there's a little bug here so stay tuned and i'll explain what i mean by that after the image is done processing a gigapixel was not quitting itself so you'll notice when i go back to lightroom my image is not there yet so all you need to do is after gigapixel is done if you're experiencing this problem which i think is a bug if you're listening topaz let us know if this is a bug and fix it if it is i just click on quit gigapixel and then i'll be sent right back into lightroom with my processed image from gigapixel and as you can see now my image is cropped but it's uh 10 340 pixels by 68.92 pixels actually bigger than the original file was because the original file was 5616 by 3744 now i didn't have to make that large but that's just the size i made it up on the screen right now i have my gigapixel ai best workflow for cropping images notes for you so you may want to pause the video read through those notes and i find this is the best workflow that i've come up with thus far well there it is everyone that's my lightroom gigapixel ai best workflow for cropping images i hope you enjoyed this one if you did please give it a like share it with your friends if you're not yet a subscriber to my channel please subscribe click that bell notification icon then every time i upload a new tutorial you'll be notified about it i want to thank each and every one of you for joining me in the joy of editing with dave kelly i'll see you all right here next time but until then happy editing

Channel: The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Views: 4,256

Keywords: Topaz, Topaz Labs, Topaz GigaPixel, GigaPixel Ai, Ai, Upscaling, Resize, Lightroom, Photography, Photo Editing, Crop, Crop Image, Extreme Cropping, Promo Code, davidkelly

Id: TRoAN4Ud-gI

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021