Topaz Photo AI 2 Complete Guide for Beginners... Topaz Photo AI 3, link in description

hello everyone Chris Parker here and in this topaz photo AI version 2 tutorial you're going to learn everything you need to know to get the most out of it including how to use it and pro editing tips for fixing out of focus images fixing motion blur removing digital noise sharpening enhancing low-res files upscaling your images and much more you'll find timestamps for easy access to everything this tutorial covers in the description below so if you are ready let's do it alright so the first thing you have to do of course is install topaz photo AI 2 and if you're going to use it as a plug-in make sure to have your editing app closed before installing and if you would like to try out topaz photo AI before buying I've included a free trial link in the description below it is an affiliate link and costs you nothing extra to use it but it will help support my two kids if you decide to buy it so thank you very much to all who have used it all right you can use topaz photo AI as a standalone app or as a plugin with editing software like Photoshop Lightroom Apple photos and Affinity photo so let's take a quick peek at the Standalone app first and then we'll use it as a plugin once you have topaz photo AI open you can add images inside of topaz by clicking and dragging them onto the interface or click this button to navigate to a folder of images to open them up that way you can also access recent images via the right panel here and then down here we have some user guides and some help using the software or just leave a question in the comments below and I'll help you out all right so there's a few ways to open up images when using it as a plugin so in Photoshop you want to go up to filter scroll down to Topaz labs and select topaz photo AI from here and it will launch topaz photo AI however before you do that I recommend duplicating the layer so that your edits are on the new layer in case you want to go back to the original for example if we select this background layer here and use command or Control Plus the letter J we can duplicate it now we can go in and open up topaz photo AI so let's go ahead and do that now we have this thing here called autopilot we'll talk about that in just a second so once it's done applying its edits it's sharpening the image so let's go ahead and remove some noise and just so we can see the edits after the fact let's go ahead and do something I normally wouldn't recommend I'm going to increase the strength to 100 and we're going to save this back to Adobe Photoshop it's going to take a few seconds here to process and then we'll see the edits being applied to that new layer all right let's go ahead and zoom in and you can definitely see it's over sharpened here but that's okay so the edits have been applied to this layer and there's the original layer so this is how you work non-destructively now for Lightroom users if you want to edit your original raw files you can select one or more images so let's go ahead and select all these files here and then you can go up to file scroll down to plug in extras and select process with topaz photo AI From Here and Now personally I'm not using topaz for raw files at this time and would recommend using jpeg or Tiff files instead but you can go ahead and try out the raw process to see how that works once you get through this video tutorial you'll have a better understanding of how all the tools work and then you can decide if you want to use raw or the 10 if or JPEG files now to access that part of the workflow we're going to right click on any image and select edit in topaz photo Ai and then you get this new window here by default it's going to select this top option but then down here at the bottom you have to let topaz know which of these settings you want to use once the edits are applied and saved back into Lightroom now these options I'm going to show you which ones I prefer but they are a personal preference and I like to use Tiff files you have some other options here as well and I like to use 16 bit with profoto RGB and a resolution of 300. now just so you know if you choose these same options the file sizes will be huge they're well over 100 megabytes per file so you can choose 8 Bits instead and that file size will be smaller or if you need something even smaller you can select a JPEG file now the reason I choose these settings here let's go back Tiff 16-bit and the reason why I choose these settings here is they preserve more colors in the image and reduce the chance of banding or pixelization of the image after processing so I'm going to go ahead and jump into topaz photo AI Now by opening up these files inside of topaz and it's preparing the files by creating a tiff file of each of the files that I selected now the first thing you're going to notice when topaz opens is autopilot right here we have this little window it's a status of the progress of autopilot and we're going to talk more about that in just a second but first let's go ahead and take a quick peek around the interface so you know where everything is now the topaz photo AI interface is divided into three sections the largest section displays a preview of your image and there are a couple of ways to view before and afters of the edits that you apply which is located down here and the second part of the interface which is this bottom panel here and then we have a right panel here on the right side all right so I'm going to go ahead and switch over to this image while I show you the before and after option so this first option here is going to apply all the edits and make it visible on the entire image the second option is going to divide it up so the left side is the before the right side is after and for me this particular tool or this preview was a little addicting at first because I couldn't believe how great of a job topaz photo AI was in improving my images and making it sharper and removing noise so if you click on it you can drag it left and right to see the before and after and check out the eyes and the beak and the feathers are much sharper and that noise is gone pretty awesome if you ask me alright so the Third option is just going to show you the before and after side by side before is on the left the edited is on the right we also have some options here to zoom in and out as needed and then we have these thumbnails and the bottom panel as well if you're not seeing these go ahead and click right here to show or hide as needed now these thumbnails are providing some information about them in regards to what edits were being applied if any and there's a hidden menu in there for batch processing so let's check this out before we move into the editing tools so if we take a look at this first image here there's two icons and the one next to it has none so this first one here has edits applied to it and this one has not this one has and then these last three have no edits applied now each one of them has a green pilot which basically means that autopilot is already taking a look ahead and kind of deciding what type of edits it should apply to make your image better now when we go into the right panel here you're going to see those green dots as well indicating that autopilot had applied specific types of edits and it's just kind of showing you which edits it's applying and we'll see that in just a moment now the other thing you'll see when you hover over a thumbnail is the actual edits being applied and the percentages used for each editing tool so in this case we have remove noise and sharpen sharpen is in green and that means that was the autopilot setting that it suggested for this particular image in regards to sharpening it didn't think noise reduction was needed so it didn't apply that automatically I added that after now if you take a look at sharpen we have lens blur and two percentages and it's in white and that's because I applied these settings manually if I hadn't they would be in green as well now the hidden menu is in these three dots if we click on it we'll get this pop-up menu here and there's some different options here now under apply we have current settings to all this is your batch processing tool that will take all the edits for that particular image and apply it to all the other images that are open which is perfect when you want to copy edits from one to another when you have images that were shot at the same location with the same lighting and the same camera settings and this way you can process multiple images much faster versus doing them one at a time pretty awesome all right now in the right panel here we have a navigator window let's go ahead and go back to this screen here and you can see we have a rectangle which indicates where we are currently zoomed in in the image preview now if you need to navigate to another part of the image you can either click on your image and drag and you'll notice that this rectangle box will update as well with that new location you can also click and drag the Box this way if you need to review a different part of your image those are all the two different ways that you can do it and then under that we have three little icons here we have a crop tool we have our select subject and then it's showing whether or not faces were detected it's currently grayed out so no faces were detected and if it does detect a face it's going to apply different edit settings down here now we're going to go into all three of these in more detail in just a second now before we get into the rest of these tools let's talk a little bit about autopilot because it's a very important part of topaz photo AI it's basically the brains of autopilot so let's take a deep dive into autopilot first all right so the purpose of autopilot is to analyze your image with its built-in AI to determine how much noise to remove sharpen it and make your image better overall and it will automatically do this as soon as you open an image like I showed you before or when you click on a thumbnail in the panel down here in the bottom and of course you're going to have to wait for autopilot to analyze your image and apply each edit before you can manually edit the image now as part of analyzing your image it's also looking for any subjects in your image like people pets Wildlife or something else and if it finds a person again like I mentioned before it will turn on the face detected feature and will apply any edits to improve those faces it can also detect multiple faces now the cool thing is you can customize autopilot for your own needs for example let's say you like a specific type of adjustment and find you're using it all the time but autopilot consistently picks something else well you can go into preferences right up here in the top here click on topaz photo AI click on preferences and then you can tell it well your preferences now there are three sections here and the third one is for shortcuts so this is going to show you all the different shortcuts available in topaz photo Ai and then we have a general section which has some basic options and you can leave these settings on the defaults for now later you may want to adjust these as you learn more about topaz photo Ai and how you'll use it and then you can adjust anything relevant to your workflow now the autopilot section is going to give you the Precision and control over how it applies these edits Auto magically now you may want to consider setting your default subject type here to portraits or Landscapes if you shoot those primarily personally I shoot a little bit of both and I have mine set to the default option all right after that there's a few more options here and they're either going to have a slider or a menu or actually both and this will give you more precision and control over how autopilot decides which image quality models to use so each has additional choices via this drop down menu and some will have this slider that will control how aggressive the AI is now if you're new to Topaz photo AI I recommend leaving these settings at the default for now and as you discover which settings work best with your images you can then fine tune autopilot to match your expected results and this will increase your productivity now if you do change anything make sure you come down here and click on save to save those changes all right now let's dive back into topaz photo Ai and check out each of these image editing tools alright so this image I created around 20 years ago with my Fuji S2 and autopilot has upscaled the image to around 12 megapixels so if your image is below that size it will automatically upscale to that size around 12 megapixels now in the process of upscaling topaz photo AI will generate new pixels and will also remove Some Noise some blur and compression artifacts now you can also upscale your image up to 6X with Max or type in a number number right here based on your needs now you have some options to fine-tune the upscale for best results which includes four different AI models now according to the developers of photo AI standard works great with images from older cameras like this image and smartphones High Fidelity is better for high quality images from Modern cameras and smartphones and then Graphics is perfect for art or AI generated images and then low resolution is ideal for low quality images now for best results you'll have to try each of them and after you edit some images you'll have a better idea of which of the four works best for your images also for a quick reminder of which one does what just hover over this little icon here and then you're going to get that pop-up menu telling you which each of the models does now just below those four AI models you have these three sliders here for additional control if you're not happy with the auto edit all right let's go ahead and check out removing noise next so removing noise is the one tool that I used on all my high ISO images and it comes in three flavors normal strong and extreme now you might be wondering why I use topaz photo AI for denoise instead of lightroom's AI noise reduction well photo AI has the advantage by providing three different AI models versus lightrooms one and we have more control and precision over the strength some minor to blur and recover original detail with these three sliders here and all of this is going to result in a higher quality image with no noise so let's go ahead and take a look at three different images and apply some denoise to them so this first image here I created at an ISO of 1000 and in this case the normal AI model is ideal for that ISO setting or lower now strong is better suited for images with a higher ISO like 1600 and a little higher like for this image here which I created at an ISO of 4 000. now this next image here I created this one at an ISO of 8 000 so in that case you might find that extreme works better however this AI noise reduction model is really aggressive and it will remove fine details if you notice this try using the recover original detail slider to bring back some of that detail now if you find it's too aggressive and you're losing too much detail I would go with strong instead now for me personally I like to use normal the majority of the time because it works for the majority of my images and I will typically increase or decrease the strength accordingly all right as of this recording the sharpen AI models comes with five options so we have the standard V2 or version 2 which is going to replace version one in the near future if you still see both standard V2 is supposed to create a higher quality sharpen and what you need to do until one replaces the other you want to experiment with both to see which gives you the desired results in essence the standard AI sharpening models are designed for images with low to medium blur and then strong is better for medium to high blur now here's the thing a low to medium to high amount of blur is subjective and you'll have to experiment with all of these to see which provides the right amount of sharpening for your images now my favorites are lens blur and motion blur and I use them for we're at 90 percent of my images so check this out here's an image of my daughter where I misplaced the focus point which ended up on her nose instead of her eye resulting in an out of focus image at least for the eye and you always want to make sure the eyes are sharpest for portraits and Wildlife now once I created this image and I brought it into Lightroom I noticed my mistake and was disappointed until I brought it into topaz photo Ai and applied the lens blur check this out it fixed it how cool is that I love it alright next we have motion blur let's go ahead and switch over to another image of my daughter let's go ahead and fit inside the window and I used a very slow shutter speed or one that wasn't fast enough to freeze the action which resulted in some motion blur which you can see along her sneaker here her clothing along her face and her hair and with motion blur it's going to improve it drastically it's not going to get rid of all of the motion blur but enough to wear her skin her eyes and her clothing are much more defined than they were before applying motion blur and like before we have a couple of Sliders here to further refine the amount of sharpening in our images now another vital tool to use when using denoise and sharpening is the masking tool so let's go ahead and check that out alright so previously I mentioned that autopilot will search for a subject in your image and when it does it will auto magically create a mask around the subject I'm going to go ahead and go back to this image here and if we go up here to this icon right here and hover over it you're going to see this red overlay that represents the mask now there's only one problem it's not perfect so you'll have to adjust it as needed or maybe you only want to Target the eyes and the eyebrows like I want for this particular image because the sharpening applied to her skin makes it look unnatural so let's go ahead and move this over here like so and I want to remove the mask or the sharpening on her skin and I just want to Target her eye and eyebrows and to do that all we have to do is click on this select subject icon and that will reveal this new window here alright so the first option here is to change the subject for autopilot to search for and then it will update the mask accordingly and if I select portrait I don't think it's going to do any better than it already did it's selected all of her and didn't select the background or the leaves so I'm just going to leave it at default but what I do like to do is to increase the Feathering from the default of 50 to 100 so I have a nice soft Edge from where the edit is being applied to where it's not being applied so we can use our refinement brush to add or subtract from The Mask so we can increase the brush size here to cover a larger area and I'm going to go ahead and zoom out here just to show you real quick how this works I'm going to click on subtract and let's increase the brush size so I can cover a larger area faster so what I would do is I would come in and I would paint over the area where it should be removed from the edit like so and then I would go in here with a smaller brush around her eye and her eyebrow to Target that area more specifically there is an AI brush that is supposed to be intelligent and it's supposed to Target different areas of the image as you paint but I don't find it to be very intelligent which is why I prefer a regular brush once you're happy with your adjustments here maybe you need to add back you can do that as well but once you're happy go ahead and click apply and then that mask will be updated and then those edits will only be applied to that area of where that mask is currently located all right now let's check out recover faces and recover faces works best with low-res files now this is a high-res file so I'm going to go back to this image here because it is lores and it also works well with upscaling so if you upscale an image and have faces try checking out recover faces to see if you can improve them even further with this AI model here so once you have it turned on you have a slider here for strength which will increase or decrease the intensity of that enhancement of the face or faces and if we take a look at the before and after you can definitely see it's much cleaner and sharper than it was before I think it needs to be just a little bit sharper so I'm going to turn on lens blur and we now have more definition in our eyebrows her eyelashes are separated a little bit more and her face is overall sharper and cleaner than it was before without recover faces so make sure to check that out if you have low-res files next we have preserve text so if you have any text in your images you can enhance that text to make it more legible if it's a little blurry or pixelated however topaz photo AI doesn't automagically locate that text in the image you have to give it a little bit of help so we're going to turn on preserve text and once you turn it on you're going to get this little menu of options here to either add or subtract to the mask that you need to apply to your image we have a brush size here so all we have to do is paint over the text to let topaz know this is where the text is and enhance this text for me please go ahead and click on apply and topaz photo AI will do its magic and you have two AI models to choose from low resolution noisy compressed and then a strength slider to increase or decrease the intensity of that enhancement all right I'm going to go back to this image one more time we have two more editing tools and then we're going to take a look at the crop tool so adjusting lighting and balance color are both in beta mode right now they're not 100 perfect yet but let's take a quick look at what these tools do so you can see how they work and maybe you can use them for your images maybe not you can also give feedback while they're in beta mode to help the developers make these two editing tools even better so adjusting lighting is going to to fix the exposure and the image to make your image either brighter or darker so to the left here it's going to make your image brighter to the right it's going to make it darker all right I'm going to go ahead and turn that off for now next we have balance color so if you have a color cast in your image you can try and remove that with the temperature slider here if you have a yellow color cast slide it to the left to reduce that color cast and vice versa if you have a blue color cast slide it to the right to add a little bit of yellow to compensate for that color cast and then if it's too intense you can lower the opacity to tone it down just a little bit all right now let's check out the crop tool I'm going to go ahead and navigate to another image here and to activate the crop tool go ahead and click on this icon right here and you'll get this interface with this nine grid box that will help us with composing our image after cropping so we have some options here to to change the aspect ratio with this drop down menu here you can type in a custom amount here or if you want to use one of these pre-made presets here you can use that these are pretty common types of aspect ratios so if you want a four by five or an 8 by 10 you can choose that one or maybe a five by seven now if you want to convert this to horizontal versus vertical just click on this Center icon right here and it will switch it around for you then you can grab a side or a corner to resize that to crop it as needed click inside to drag around your image to reposition your subject as needed you can also click on this little icon here to use free transform which simply means you can click and then resize the crop or the aspect ratio to a custom setting based on your image so maybe I want something more cinematic like that and then once you're happy with your new crop go ahead and click on apply and then topaz will adjust your image based on that crop now the last thing we have to do before we quit the program is we need to click on this button down here to save all the images back into Lightroom and it's going to Auto magically do that for us once you click on that and then all these images will be saved into Lightroom for further processing or exporting as needed for more tips on using topaz photo Ai and pro editing video tutorials check out this playlist next

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 44,450

Keywords: topaz photo ai, topaz labs, photo editing, topaz photo ai tutorial, topaz photo ai for beginners, photo ai, photoshop plug-ins, lightroom plug-ins, topaz photo ai guide, topaz photo ai beginners, topaz photo ai 2, topaz photo ai 2.0, photo ai 2, topaz photo ai 2 complete guide

Id: Rtk8O5QjQZU

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023