Topaz Sharpen AI - Compare Modes - Worth the $$$ ?

hey everyone welcome to wildlife inspired i'm your host scott keys remember down at the bottom you'll see my social media contacts and you can always find me on my website s keysimages.com today i'm going to take a hands-on approach to topaz sharpen ai [Music] all right so before we get into sharpen ai i do want to tell you a little bit about my approach i approach all of my tutorials and online help with a very hands-on approach so in other words as i learn i like to get my hands on things and i like to try to show that to the people that are watching so for this video rather than speak in terms of technical detail i'm actually going to try to do the image i'm going to show you the image and show you the results and show you what it looks like before and after using a variety of comparisons now if you saw my video and i'll put a card up here it's on topaz denoise ai which is my favorite piece of the topaz suite you'll see how i did the comparisons for that video showing you each of the processing modes and how they stacked up for this video i'm going to do the same but because sharpen ai works a little bit uniquely in terms of a tool i'm going to actually take two different images one that is fairly sharp out of camera and one that is not necessarily sharp at a camera and i'm just going to show you what they look like now i am an affiliate of topaz but to be honest i give an honest recommendation of all of my products so while i'm an affiliate of theirs and i certainly endorse many of their products if i don't like a product i simply won't endorse it so let's dive right into this first image and i'm going to show you what it looks like this is a snow bunting i captured it the other day pretty close range i shot this with a 400 millimeter lens 2.8 and shot it at 2.8 you can see the colors here are really really soft this was just at sunrise i've been playing a lot around with blue hour so again a little bit higher noise sometimes a little bit slower shutter speed but with these lighter uh exposures exposed to the right you're not going to see a whole lot of the noise in here you may see it around the eyes in the mask on this horn lark but to show you the the sharpened product what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in here a little bit and i'm going to give you an opportunity to just kind of see what the details are now details aren't bad you can see if i were to move it up you'll see some feather details right where my cursor is on the right side of this image up around the head there's some feather detail so i wouldn't say this is a soft image but it's certainly not the super crisp image you'll get with more direct light so the softer light generally does not show the details as well so sometimes we want to sharpen those so out of camera i've got a fairly sharp image it's it's not out of focus there's no motion blur here i shot it with a high quality lens so this is about what you would expect in lower light it's just not going to have the vibrant feather detail that you'll get sometimes with a little bit stronger light but it's a very usable image and i love these soft tones so i just want to sharpen it up a little bit so what i'm going to do um you can by the way you can bring these raw files it will process the raw file you can bring that into topaz sharpen ai i don't find that that is the best solution i will tell you you will read tutorials that tell you to bring it in as early in the stage as possible so what i do in my workflow is i bring it in i make my adjustments in lightroom or camera raw hue exposure saturation things like that so this one has some slight adjustments on those things but i haven't applied any sharpening in lightroom or camera raw so this i i move the sharpen slider all the way to zero now shooting a raw file especially if you've got um depending on the camera body and how the filters are in the camera body you may get a little sharper or a little softer image in the camera body itself so it may not capture all the details so there are other methods of sharpening i actually have another video coming out so if you're watching this early it's probably not out yet but i'm going to put the card up there when it pops up and in that one i'm actually going to compare sharpen ai to a bunch of other sharpening techniques but this one is just about sharpening ai so we can sharpen this a little bit because it does feel like it could use it all right so i've made my lightroom adjustments i bring it over to photoshop i first thing i always do is duplicate the layer so i've always got the background layer protected and with this one i'm simply going to go up the great thing about all of the topaz products is they work as a plug-in both in lightroom and photoshop so there's my topaz ai now i'll be honest as this is loading one of the things i don't love about this sharpening process is the speed of operation for the record i'm running a computer that's about three years old it's a dell pretty standard not a super super high end computer but it's certainly not 10 years old so it's a decent processor i think i've got 32 gigs of ram in here so plenty ram and i've got a dedicated nvidia graphics card so again it's a few years old but it's it's a pretty i would say it's a pretty standard average computer it's it's good it's not the fastest thing in the world it's not built for blazing speed but it's also not a dinosaur so the processing speeds you're going to see here i would say are pretty average so if you've got a super fast computer your processing speed in the application is going to be a little faster if you've got a dinosaur might be two or three times slower now i'm going to walk you through a sharpen ai so if you can follow my cursor up here to the top left you're not going to see a lot of options up here so under file you'll see preferences i only want to take you to one setting in here and that is i don't want to allow anonymous data collection uh it's actually down here under the performance enable discrete gpu if you turn that on it will allow use of your dedicated um processing or your your graphics card so i keep that on um but there's really not a whole lot else to do here you will see allow graphic memory consumption i keep that on medium it does say that you may have issues if you move to high moving it to low is more stable but a little bit slower so again i'm trying to keep everything down the middle here everything is neutral in in middle so not a whole lot under preferences so you can see there's not a whole lot happening here in terms of adjustments that you can make when you look over on the right side of the screen we'll spend a little bit more time here but you'll see sharpen stabilize and focus these are the three different modes that it uses to render your image or sharpen your image we'll get to those because we're going to spend more time there down at the bottom you're going to see a filter for mask now this is a powerful filter i will tell you for this tutorial i'm not going to use it i will show you quickly what it does and as with any mask it simply applies the sharpening where you want it so if i click on the mask you'll see it's going to take a minute here to detect it says detecting objects so it's found what it wants to mask the overlay option will simply show you where the mask is going to be applied so now anything in red it's going to apply the mask only there if i want to remove that mask i can come over here and click subtract and you'll see the minus sign and as i paint it will remove the mask there's a couple other things in here i'll touch on quickly there's a thing in here that says fixed object bird it's going to try to if you do that it's going to try to determine the subject now it doesn't do a phenomenal job it certainly found the subject but i think if you mask it yourself you'll probably get a better um kind of a better ability to to get the fine details in there i also don't like to mask over my subjects i typically am conservative and i mask on the inside borders so that the areas inside the borders are sharp but i'm always hesitant to go above those you'll see another option here for edge aware now edge aware let me make sure i'm adding edge aware is going to try to take you'll notice i'm going over the subject a little bit and it's going to try to take and just determine where that edge is so you can see it did a pretty good job up here and it missed a little bit over here generally speaking if there's a nice separation it does a pretty good job the closer you get the better so if i just go a little bit over here it normally will find that edge pretty nicely all right the only other things down here you can adjust are the radius which is how big the brush is the threshold which think of that as the hardness so it's either a hard brush or a soft brush it's the amount of distance from the the hard edge to the soft edge of that brush and then opacity pretty standard i keep that at 100 generally speaking i keep the radius around 50 threshold around 50. um and if you need to be more detailed you can certainly tighten this threshold up and what you'll notice is is the um the brush itself let me go the other way will get tighter so now you can see the edge is tighter to the middle so that's what that threshold will do at 100 it's the softest possible so now it's very feathered we would call that feathered all right so that's what the mask does i'm not going to use this so i'm actually just going to remove the mask and get back into the the view so i can apply the sharpening now the great thing about the newest versions of um sharpen ai and i'm actually on version 2.2.4 this is as of march 2021 the latest version that they have out we can go into single view so if we just want to look at one of the sharpening modes we can do that we could compare a split view so we can use this slider to go back and forth and that'll show you what the before and after was in the mode that you selected we could also do a side by side so it will show you the original unsharpened plus the mode that you're working in the one i normally like to use and the one i'm going to use for this is comparison and this brings up in the top left top left-hand corner we'll have the original version and then the other three windows will contain the sharpened versions now there's three modes that we use i mentioned this before sharpen stabilize and focus and in those three versions there's some adjustments that you can make now what i did is i went ahead and standardized all of these so in my noise suppression i'm adding no noise to this at all so i'm going to turn that down to zero i'm gonna start with just a sharpness around 50 and i'm going to go to the first window which is sharpen typically when you have a sharp image topaz will recommend that you use the sharpen filter to make it a little sharper stabilize is a little more applicable for motion blur so if you've got a little motion blur in there they would recommend that you try stabilize and focus is for those images that are slightly out of focus it's a stronger algorithm and it's going to try to tighten up pixels and bring them closer together so is there a difference we'll find out i'm going to try to apply the same settings to all three and then compare them in lightroom so let's first we have to click update so that we'll get the preview now there isn't a mode up here for auto update and what that means is every time you move the image it's going to re-render that will take a lot of time so what i do is i get it where i want it and i simply click update that way i'm only rendering when i've got it where i want it and if i accidentally moved it i'm not wasting time you could see that rendering process was fairly quick i'm going to go down to stabilize leaving the exact same settings 50 0 and no grain grain adds a little bit of noise or noise like grain back into the object i normally do not add noise back in or grain back in but there are applications where you may want to do that okay so now i've got my sharpen and that one's done and i've got stabilize and that one's done and now i'm going to go down to focus now again i've got a fairly sharp image that i started with so we would assume that the best one to use is sharpen but we'll see how all of these went i use this this slider before i started recording and i just wanted to play around and see like what setting kind of gave me the best results all right now for this tutorial what i'm going to do is actually build these in layers in photoshop so i'll start with sharpen i'm just going to re-update that make sure it's good and now i'm going to apply it now here's where the processing time is going to take place for the first run-through i'm going to let it run and we'll see how long it takes this can get a little painful depending on how big the file is and what mode you're using this is the fastest of the three modes in terms of processing times so i'm just estimating in my head it's been about 10 seconds probably about 20 seconds you may hear my fan kicking in so that's that processing time and sometimes the video will even slow down when i'm recording i'm guessing 30 35 40 seconds somewhere in that range 30 to 40 seconds and then i'll just go ahead before i forget and i'm going to rename this layer let me just double click on it and i'll rename this sharpen and that was at 50 with zero and zero so zero noise reduction and zero green all right now in order to save time i'm just going to go ahead and duplicate these layers and i'm going to run them through topaz in the other modes so i'm going to run it through focus and stabilize i'm going to pause this video so that i don't have to so you just don't have to watch it process and then i'll come back and we'll compare them so here's the pause and i will be back okay so what i did is i basically re-ran the program and down here it's going to be a little small for you to see but in my layers i actually recorded the mode the settings and the time that it took so sharpen was 50 0 0 at 35 seconds so let's compare first let's just start with sharpen and we'll just see how it how it you know how it stacks up i'm going to zoom in here i'm at 130 150 somewhere around there okay so this is the original right here it appears as though i may have put a little black dot in my image somewhere i think that was me when i was messing around uh so i'll take that little black dot off okay so this first uh setting was for sharpen 50 50 and again that took 35 seconds to run that's the original image that's the sharpen it 50 i will tell you it looks like there's not a whole lot that happened i'm going to zoom in now i'm really tight at 300 just so you can see that it did do some sharpening okay before and after i'm going to zoom out now here's the stabilize let me take this off this is the original and they're stabilized now that you should have seen it tighten up the pixels right away so i'll do it again original and stabilize so you can see it tighten up the pixels when i zoom in to stabilize you're going to see however it added more texture in the background with masking we can remove that so i'm not worried about you know where that is in the background right now i applied no noise reduction to this here's the original and this is stabilizing again this is the one that tries to correct motion blur so it really tightens pixels together and anticipates where motion blur may have occurred and then tightens those pixels up against it let's compare sharpen now to stabilize so they're sharpened and they're stabilized you can see stabilize on the screen especially on youtube it may appear that it's a a better sharpener but i will tell you when you're looking close it actually looks like there's some more artifacts in there as well so yes it looks sharper from a distance but a little more artifacting and let's see how those stack up to focus again at 50 50 the recording time on focus was 110 seconds versus 35 for sharpen now on focus one of the things you got to look at out here is what happened to the background in here it added a lot of noise you can actually see it it it made this anomaly out here where there may have been some patterns and it tried to sharpen them but it shouldn't have it should have left it smooth again remember zero noise reduction so that may have compensated for some of that and when i when i dive in close here again looks sharpened but there's a lot of little stuff happening in these feather details some blues got introduced some cyans got introduced so let me run it through all three this is the original sharpen stabilize and focus between stabilize and focus stabilize was the most inconsistent in terms of leaving some noise in there a focus was the most inconsistent stabilize appeared to sharpen it the most but also had more artifacts and blues introduced around here and then sharpen had the least amount of that but it also did apply the least amount of sharpening remember i did these at default settings so what i did now is i went back into topaz sharpen and i tried to get optimal settings what can i do to make this image look the best the interesting thing is it was back at sharpening and here i just had to go a little deeper with the sharpening so there's the original and i went 80 on the sharpening and 30 on the noise reduction took a processing time of 35 seconds so again it was a faster processing time and i seem to get the best compromise of results here so here you'll see this is off and now i'm turning it on you can see it sharpened the image without adding a lot of artifacting and if i look through the image very consistent noise pattern in the background so i didn't have these random odd noise patterns floating around so i'm zoomed in now 500 so you're really getting details this is the original and there's the sharpened so it does a really nice job not a lot of artifacting around edges not a lot of anomalies so a fairly sharp image out of camera when i got the settings dialed in right seemed to do a pretty good job so this felt value added now i'm going to go over and show you another image real quick we're going to do the same process on another image which is soft and see if any of these sharpening tools work for a soft image this is a gad wall and i photographed this and if when i zoomed in i loved the light here by the way i had some pre-dawn color here a little bit of light just starting to get on its head but the clouds kind of kept these cool tones so i love this mixed lights my favorite time of day the sun is just coming over the horizon and again a little more noise sometimes a little softer image a couple things affect sharpness and one of them is heat diffraction and you're like scott it's this day it was 20 degrees out what are you talking about heat this isn't like heat hitting a black cement and coming up well kind of is it's just an air temperature difference from the surface of the water to the air and often if you shoot at sunrise in the winter at low angle the lower you are the worse it is that's where all the diffraction is right at the surface you get soft images and people always tell me my camera's not focusing yet it's struggling because of that diffraction so if we zoom in on this i have an image that i like but i'm thinking man this is not where i want to be in terms let me just get this to 100 you know this is not where i want to be in terms of image quality so maybe you can see this maybe i'll have to get in a little tighter okay so what i did is i started with this image which again let me get in a little tighter here all right i started with an image that was a little soft let me even get in tighter so you can see it started with an image it was a little soft but i liked the tones and the colors and i am not such a technical freak that i'm going to throw out i oh listen artistic ability light composition always trumps for me technical perfection now that is my there are video tutorials out there to show you how to be technically perfect to me a technically perfect image in bad light is crap so i will every day of the week take something that has a little bit of softness or a little slight imperfection somewhere that is in gorgeous light i personally this is again it's very subjective i will always take that but if i can take it and make it a little better that's what i'm really looking for so i'm going to take this i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to run it through stabilize focus and sharpen and let's see if they perform differently on an image that is slightly off that is slightly soft or slightly out of focus so i'll pause the video come right back and i'll show you what i come up with okay so i ran it through now the the processing time was very similar in terms of sharpen being the faster and stabilize and focus both being about twice as slow to process i told you there's some benefits and the downsides to sharpen ai the one thing i'll say is the the main downfall for me is the speed of processing it just it can feel cumbersome and because you're dealing with sliders and you're making these uh let me adjust it a little more here and let me turn a little bit of this up and turn a little bit down each time you do that it renders it's a slower process and then finally you update it's another let's say a minute on average to update and while it's not the end of the world if you've got other stuff to do or if you've got that time it's great but it does it can feel a little slow at times the upside is it works like it absolutely sharpens the image so let me show you kind of what i came up with now on this one for this because it was a little softer i bumped all of the settings up to 75 so i went 75 0 0 and then i found what i thought to be the best of all the sharpening was so this is sharpen i'm just going to stack them right on top of each other so this is sharpen the original sharpen it's 75 no noise reduction stabilize you could see much this one actually got a little crunchy at 75 so this one tried to recover um and again a little more artifacts than sharpen but definitely tightened it up more focus focus went nuts again on me it it again it went up into this area i don't have the noise reduction on so it it went up into this area and tried to sharpen something up there so this one got a little a little wonky on me now remember you can also mask in the sharpening in photoshop or over in in topaz so most of the time if i was sharpening i would just put a mask on so let's say i was dealing with this focus layer very easy and if you don't know how to make masks there's a million tutorials on it but you can simply put the the mask that you want on and then just paint in and i'm going to paint in white so i've got a black mask and i'm painting in white and i'm just painting in the areas where i want it and with this for sharpening i'm not crazy with detail the same way i am with the noise i'm just i'm just kind of putting it in here and there sometimes i'll even turn down the opacity and just add a little bit to get some of a balance on the subject but i'm not really worried about perfect edges i'm just mostly worried about getting the feather details up in here so that's that's the type of masking you can do so while that one got real wonky by using the mask i eliminate that and i just put it on here so let's just compare the head now so here's sharpen 75 stabilize 75 you can see that big dramatic jump and then focus 75. so focus did a pretty good job in some areas but again it went crazy on the outsides of the borders now to optimize this let me try to find the best setting what i thought what i personally thought was the best setting was sharpen sharpen 95 with 30 noise reduction and here the effect wasn't as dramatic as some of the others so there's focus and they're sharpened but without using any masks it actually did a nice job recognizing the background and reducing a little bit of that noise without introducing a lot of the cyans or blues that i saw in stabilize here and if you look into some of these details around the bill you'll see some some cyans and blues being introduced but here's one of the things i wanted to also show you i'm going to put on the best sharpening that i found and oh by the way i have a link at the bottom so if you've if you've made it this thought far through the video please see the link there's actually a link to this product and at the end i am going to tell you my recommendation and my endorsement so hang on to the end or fast forward to the end but see the link uh down there there's a coupon code use the coupon code with the link you'll get the savings so if you like the product take advantage obviously you can see it works it's just which one is the best now i'm going to refer you back to that video on denoise what happens if i take denoise ai and just run it through one of the features called clear ai and clear ai is kind of like a one stop shop it's it's included in the denoise ai software but it absolutely adds a little sharpening and a little noise reduction all at the same time it does not have the adjustments of the sliders um it's almost to me a standalone it's almost like it should be its own software because it's a it's like a hybrid of sharpening and denoise but they put it into the denoise suite in my opinion they could have easily added it into the sharpening suite watch what happens here this is the best sharpening that i could come up with now i'm going to use denoise and again remember this is not a sharpening program it's it's marketed as a denoise program notice the eye here i'm going to go to the original that's the original here's the denoise it absolutely sharpened in all of these areas there's no mask applied here it did not sharpen around the edges so it left the background smooth i applied medium noise reduction to this there's the original it doesn't look like it actually touched the noise much at all but up here in the eye you'll see it went from a little softer to a little tighter and it did a pretty good job it didn't add a lot of extra gunk in there the settings for that were on medium noise reduction and high sharpening let's go back to that horn lark let's see if the same thing applies here this is the original that's the best sharpening that i could get with the sharpened filter in topaz ai now let's check ai clear ai clear on the medium setting for sharpening actually sharpened this image more than the sharpen setting did so that's that's odd right it's included in the denoise suite did it also deal with the background here's the sharpen with a 30 noise reduction in background and then denoise removed a little bit more noise in here as well here's the sharpen here's the denoise so again it feels like it actually denoise ai or i'm sorry the ai clear mode of denoise did a did more sharpening or as much sharpening as the 80 slider on the sharpened filter of topaz sharpen ai i think i got that right so while i say topaz denoise is a great one-stop shop because that ai clear mode is kind of like a jack of all trades a little bit of noise reduction a little bit of sharpening but there are times when it it just isn't going to give you what you need in terms of sharpening so here's why i say if you've got the extra money and you can afford it here's a good tool and this image i took the other day and i wanted to include it in this video because it's a great example of how sometimes one product may work for one thing but not another so it's all very and again i like to be really hands on with this stuff and show you exactly how it works so watch this i took this image and i thought oh you know what this is pretty good right it's i got this beautiful light point blank by the way this is almost uncropped this is basically out of camera with a couple of tweaks in camera raw and i brought it over to photoshop and then i got in here and i wanted to look at noise and sharpness and i thought it's not great so does it take away from the overall no printed you know smallish this is going to look great viewed on the web nobody's going to see the lack of clarity in the eye but what happens if i wanted to print this bigger which honestly this is a pretty pretty nice image this may be something that i want to print or somebody may ask to be printed or i may submit this into a contest and in that case under scrutiny i don't want this to be thrown out against somebody else's who might be technically a little bit more sharper or a little bit more precise so so i took it over to denoise and apples for apples with the denoise only run i used ai clear on the high high setting and here's what i got now a little better there's without it there's with it slight improvement took out a little bit of noise like i said the one stop shop a little bit of sharpness a little bit of noise reduction but these were the highest settings available it didn't make it quite what i wanted so i thought oh shoot let me see what sharpen might do with this so let me pull up what i took a screenshot of sharpen and these were the final settings that i played around with now again with time it took a while to get there because i had to process and process and process so this quick edit which was really nice that a camera started to turn into a much longer process but look at the difference in these four screenshots or these four modes you see the original versus the three processing modes and look at that bottom one now i didn't use focus in the original video example that i made for this but here's an example where i think focus did a great job but there are a couple little issues over there and those issues are falling around kind of that where the where the white meets the black it's over sharpening those areas so while the eye looks pretty good those other areas don't so what do we do well let me show you i'm going to bring it back now into photoshop and i'm going to okay here we go i'm going to first run it through denoise because i want to get rid of the noise with the cleanest software that i have so i ran it through denoise and i don't need my images to be glassy clean so you can see there's some noise reduction in here it's a little bit better let me show you the original so there's the original and there's the noise reduction i ran it with eighty percent um noise reduction twenty percent sharpness and thirty percent recover details and that keeps a little bit of that grain back in there so that that's for me that's fine but again the eye's not where i want it to be so then i took and i ran it through that sharpen ai focus at 100 with a 35 noise reduction let's look at that bang look at that thing now it also because i had some noise reduction it also removed a lot of the noise in the background there's some color noise back here so but notice the areas i had problems with right here so the eye i liked some of this bill i like but but real close you could see a little bit of artifacting around edges so it's got some really good and some really bad so what do you do well in photoshop once you become proficient in it it's very easy to start blending bits and pieces from one image to another so what i'm going to do is actually use a layer mask and you can drag it down here or you can just click the button and i'm going to use the mask on and off so i'm going to turn it off right now and then i'm going to selectively paint in where i want it so the way these layers work if you by the way on my i i do these tutorials this isn't a tutorial about mask but i just want to show you the the uh what you can achieve by using these bits and pieces so i've used both topaz softwares in this edit got the mask on and now i'm going to paint but i'm not going to paint it 100 i'm going to paint down here let's say 50 around the eye and what this is going to do is it's going to slowly bring that edit from the sharpen so i'm slowly going to add the sharpening over the denoise and i may get it up to around 100 here but notice the eye look sharp but now the other areas look a little softer so i'm going to go to 20 opacity and i'm going to start blending out from the eye to the hood this is going to slowly introduce the sharpening that's on top of that noise reduction layer i'm going to paint a little bit around here now here's where those one of that those problem areas were so i'm going to go easy in here again i'm just 20 i'm not 100 and if i see an in an issue i can i can take it off i can switch it over to black and i can use the mask i'm going to go up a little stronger here and notice i'm staying away from edges i don't want to go over those edges i'm going to let the edges kind of fade out and that's why i'm using this softer brush with lower opacity i don't know that i need it up here but oh wow it did a really nice job up around that edge so it really did a nice job there and be careful when i get up along the top here again these are a little bit out of focus so i'm not too worried about that but that hood well that really did a nice job there and then i'll show you the before and after so i'm building that sharpening in where i want it very very selective and i could pick other parts of the image so if i went into here and i thought let me see what it does in here i could paint some of that in to the wings get some of this detail back it may introduce a little bit of noise so you just want to be careful when you're in these shadows especially that you oh it did a nice job in here i don't need detail everywhere i'm just and if it doesn't look good i'll take it off so now i've selectively sharpened did a really nice job like this did a really really this is a great example that's why i wanted to include it in the video all right now let's look at the before and after so this was the before and then with my with all of my edits that's the after before let me zoom in a little more and after and that's it so i thought that was a really really powerful example of how you can use both pieces of software and then mask in select so pretty impressive now what do we learn from this what's the takeaway well i'll tell you for me the takeaway is this if you if you edit wildlife and you have concerns with noise reduction so if you're shooting higher iso low light denoises to me i mean almost mandatory like it just feels like it works yes you can use other noise reduction software if you've got a workflow that works for you and you're on a budget don't worry about it stick with your workflow but i've been editing bird photographs for eight years i can tell you that this software has saved me time and energy and the nice thing about that ai clear mode is that it does a little bit of both it eliminates most of the need to mask in sharpening and masking noise reduction it just kind of handles it so if i only had one product to endorse i would endorse the denoise software because you get a little bit of that sharpening you saw a fairly sharp image and it just popped a little bit you don't get the slider adjustments with that so if you need more fine control over your sharpening then topaz sharpen ai is a is an excellent option i always tell people they're like scott what do i need what what software do i need to buy i get this question a lot on social media right like should i buy this or should i buy that here's what i tell people if you're on a budget get topaz denoise ai just get it scrape up the 60 or 70 use my coupon code get another 15 off if you have expendable income if there's a little extra in your bank account or you've got uh you know you worked hard all your life and you've got a retirement and money uh the next food or the next meal isn't your concern get the topaz sharpen it's just a nice addition to the suite if you've got a problem where you need to recover motion blur denoise is not going to recover the motion blur it'll help you with some out of focus issues and it will do a really nice job on in focus in focus subjects it just need a little pop it does a really nice job with that but it's not really a recovery tool the sharpen ai does have the ability to correct things like motion blur which we didn't really explore in this video but we did explore kind of those softer images versus a relatively in-focus image so that's my recommendation my recommendation is if you don't have the money go get ai go get d noise ai and just make that your first purchase if you've got that little extra and you want something extra and more control those sliders are going to help you go over and get sharpened ai it really i've had it for a couple years i don't use it in all my workflow but i definitely use it and i can definitely say it works so my next video is going to be to compare all different forms of sharpening so i'm going to show you i think six or seven ways to sharpen an image and i think you'll find that one really helpful so thanks for tuning in to this one i hope you enjoyed it uh i always appreciate your support i love the comments please if you watch the video thumbs up i don't care if you give me a thumbs down but like honestly put some time and energy into this stuff it's free content for you so i hope you enjoy it comments i really really do like so thank you for your continued support and i hope we can continue to find inspiration and wildlife together [Music] you

Channel: Wildlife Inspired w/ Scott Keys

Views: 7,753

Keywords: photography, wildlife, wildlife photography, scott keys, skeysimages, beginner photography, beginner, bird, birds, bird photography, topaz, sharpen, sharpen AI, denoise ai, denoise, value, money, new, savings

Id: 6bGF5G5Xvlc

Length: 40min 59sec (2459 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021