Topaz Sharpen AI Blows Me Away, Every Time!

hey guys welcome back today i'm in topaz sharpen ai and first thing i'm going to do is admit that i don't sharpen my photos a whole lot but something prompted me to open sharpen ai and take a couple photos in there and have a look and it's just like every time i open sharpen ai i realize that i don't use this product enough it does such an incredible job sharpening photos with these ai algorithms or whatever you want to call them they just work so here's a photo this is just some flowers that i shot years ago and um you know i honestly i thought it looked good and i was happy with it and i thought hey this is a nice looking photo it's sharp you know i was focused in here this is nice and crisp i thought it looked great but the truth is when i got it in sharpen ai i kind of realized it's not very sharp at all that's what's so interesting is that this product does such an incredible job of sharpening photos they just get really crisp and frankly beautiful now because it's an ai product it does take a moment as you can see to kind of churn through it consumes some resources during the processing and then if you move around in the photo and things like that it has to reprocess but the results trust me and the weight are worth it and there you go let me show you the before and after if you look especially at this flower right here kind of in the center there's the original and there it is with sharpen ai and i didn't do anything except load the photo all the settings on the right hand side which by the way you can adjust i've got it on auto mode so it's going to automatically just make an assumption about which is the best model there's a motion blur and out of focus and a too soft and various settings as you can see and this is obviously not a full tutorial but i just allowed it to run in auto and i have to say that the results are super impressive again there it is before and there it is after i mean these things are sharper honestly it's it's kind of mind-blowing how good it is i've got a couple of other photos i want to demonstrate as well let me show you some more examples okay here's another one now this is obviously a portrait but this is one that i shot wide open at 1.8 50 millimeter and you can see the original photo in the upper right hand corner and the navigator but i'm zoomed in let's see 142 which you can adjust here i honestly looked at the original photo which looks like that and i thought i nailed it man her eyes in focus looks good looks nice and crisp and then i add uh it to sharpen ai and i think oh gosh it's not really sharp at all now in this one i wanted to point something out this is a cool feature that comes in really handy if you look at some of this is a little bit too much it's actually picking up a little bit of a color shift in some parts of her hair where it's a little bit lighter it almost looks a little bit yellow or kind of green and that's you know maybe it's a little too overdone right so not only can you adjust the settings on the right hand side but they have masking so you can click down here and you can choose edge aware and add and you can also adjust opacity so i might come in and say well i want to do like you know 80 opacity or so on her face and just come in and paint that in and take care of that so you basically can selectively sharpen without having to go to some other tool that has masking built in because there's masking built in here which is super super convenient so i've just done a quick kind of sloppy job of masking in some of that sharpening around her face at an 80 opacity but the the hair i liked it to be a little bit sharper but not that 100 so i can come back change the opacity maybe i want to drop it to 50 and then mask that into some of her hair so that she does get some of that extra little bit of crispness out of the sharpening but without getting some of that kind of color shift that seemed to be happening that you know it's it appeared to be basically a little bit over sharp so you know i recommend a best practice is and i'm kind of trying to uh paint this in while i'm talking to you as well but there you go that looks a little bit better i recommend a best practice would be a combination of experimenting with the tools on the right hand side and experimenting with masking in at various opacities just to see what works best for you but in this image you can look there's the before and there's the current state i like that quite a bit i think it's nice and sharp in the areas i wanted it to be sharp which i was able to choose again because i used the masking the interesting thing to me in this one was as i said at the beginning of this photo i felt like i nailed focus her eye was sharp and i was like perfectly in focus but interestingly the mode that it chose is called out of focus and so i found that kind of funny that it actually thought hey jim you didn't really nail focus as well as you thought you did so that's the beauty of this software these machines are smarter than i am clearly so there it is before and there it is now again season to taste adjust as you see fit mask in to be specific where you feel like you need to do so i've got one more photo example which is a very typical photo for me and i'm going to show you how powerful this product is on that shot okay and here's a very typical shot for me this was shot in paris one evening one of the things i love to do is wander around in cities at night with a single prime lens shoot wide open and just capture you know either large kind of wide street scenes or intimate scenes like this one you can see in the upright corner what the image looks like but it's a gentleman looking in the window of a bookstore in paris and honestly once again felt like i nailed focus and it was nice and sharp but once i ran it through sharpen ai i found out what sharpness sharpness really looks like on this image and there you go so there's the original and there it is sharpened and one of the things i really want to point out is this sign such a massive difference and you can read the sign like winner of the man booker prize the luminaries all this stuff it's quite easy to read but it's not very sharp and once it runs through sharpen ai honestly it's a bit mind-blowing how crisp it is and there you go i mean look at that it just looks fantastic so once again the original there it is less sharp and you know frankly a little bit blurry and in fact the mode chosen once again is out of focus and here we go sharp crisp and frankly i think beautiful and so this video was really all about sharpen ai and the kind of photos it can work on and the kind of dramatic results and improvements it can have on your photos so whether it's a floral or a portrait or like a street scene like this it would also work on landscapes it doesn't really matter it's going to work on any kind of photo but what i found is that i don't use this product near enough it's that good that i feel like okay i need to actually pay more attention to what my sharpening looks like in my photos because it's not something that i do a lot of as i said at the beginning of this video but running things through sharpen ai really causes me to want to look at them differently look at them closer and run it in here to see how the results you know turn out in each photo because honestly it's pretty significant so if you haven't tried sharpen ai you can get a free trial at the link down below and if you purchase off that link you can use coupon code gymnext to save 15 on your purchase that is an affiliate link they pay me a referral commission if you use it but your cost is the same in fact it's 15 less if you use my coupon code bottom line sharpen ai fantastic product i don't frankly use it enough every time i get in here and use it i think golly i need to use this on more photos because the results are just fantastic i think speak for themselves and the fact that it has various modes you can adjust with various sliders notice i'm just using the standard settings and all these i didn't even go into any customization but you can do all that plus mask really gives you a lot of control over how and where the effects are applied in your photos that's it for this one my friends thanks for watching i really appreciate it you guys take care of yourselves i'll see you in the next video and until then adios

Channel: Jim Nix

Views: 2,060

Keywords: Jim Nix, travel, photography, post processing, editing, training, tutorial, photo editor, photo editing, Topaz, Sharpen AI

Id: 9wRXlY4tcqE

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021