NEW Topaz upsampling product: A.I. Gigapixel

[WayneLarmon]

@walter.sk:

PCI-e 3.0 cards are backwards compatible, so if your existing cards are PCI-e 2.0 you should be OK with any recent graphics card on Topaz Labs compatibility list. I'm running a Quadro P4000 (PCI-e 3.0) on a vintage 2010 PC with a 1st gen i7-980x CPU on an Asus P6X58D-E m/b (PCI-e 2.0) with 12G RAM, and it runs AI Gigapixel just fine, with fairly decent processing speeds. If you don't need the workstation and 10-bit features of the Quadro, a recent gaming card will probably be faster still, and certainly cheaper.

I upgraded my 2011 i7 2600K machine with a new Geforce 1070 Ti (and beefier power supply) to test AIG.  My MB is Asus P8Z68-V Pro and the video card slot is PCIEx16 v 2.0.

No crashes or hangs so far even on large input files and enlargements, just one glitch where Photoshop complained about an incorrectly terminated file error but then opened it without any further problems.

AIG runs fine but the image display in CC 2018 ACR gets corrupted.  I can restore it by resizing the image size in ACR.  A minor headache.  PS itself doesn't have any problems.

I'm not processing large files.  What I am interested in, thus far, is processing old 2002ish low megapixel images so I can print them larger than 5x7.  And to look decent on a 4K display.  For the latter, I decided that AIG wasn't really needed--Win 10's own resizing looks decent.  AIG processed images only look marginally better.  They do look better if I zoom into an image, but I'm not sure if reprocessing all my old images is worth the bother for viewing on a monitor/TV.

I haven't done any printing yet.  But I am enthused about AIG and I'm sure that my old four megapixel images can now be credibly printed larger than 5x7.  AI driven computational photography rocks.  AIG as it currently stands is only the beginning. 

[Edit:  I didn't upgrade my computer to process four megapixel images.  I'm using those to quickly get a feel for what AIG does.  I have found that the higher the quality the image the higher the quality of the AIG enlargements.  I do have a Canon 6D, several 24 megapixel APS-C bodies and several L lenses and am planning on doing some new shooting at the best of my cameras' ability.  With my existing equipment and old school image processing I kind of topped out at 16x20.  I'm confident that starting out with high quality images processed with AIG that I can print larger than I ever did before.]

Ah, I'm going to offer an opinion.  I can't understand why owners of expensive cameras are begrudging spending money on a decent computer to handle computational photography processing.  If you own a high end (digital medium format) camera maybe these are the the kinds of computers you should be considering.   Along with a 32 megapixel (8K) monitor.  We living in a computational photography world now.  The computer is now as important as cameras and lenses.  [Edit: I am planning on buying a $5,000ish computer sometime next year for AIG style post processing.  My current computer suffices for experimenting.  I spent $600 upgrading to just try out AIG.]

[plugsnpixels]

I posted some new iPhone 6 upscaling tests. Done on a 2013 MacBook Air ;-)

[plugsnpixels]

A couple more 600% A.I. Gigapixel upsizing examples, with the results at right viewed at 100% (compared to a 600% blowup of the original pixels in Photoshop).

The beach photo is from a 1-megapixel source (Kodak DC265, taken 1999).

This 4-megapixel example of the female reporter is from a Minolta DiMAGE S404, taken January 2006.

The San Diego waterfront photo is from a 6 megapixel Sony DSC-H2, taken 2007.

The original full-frame images (reduced) are included for reference.

[Josh-H]

Ive been testing this new A.I software over the last week. It just might be the most significant piece of software since Photoshop. It is a game changer in several ways. And not just because it opens up a world of large print opportunities, but because of what can now be done with an image downloaded from the web. Yesterday I wrote a brief piece about it on my site Blog

[plugsnpixels]

Thanks Josh, and great work on your site BTW!

[Ian99]

Some feedback on AIG v 1.1.2:
I am quite happy using an ancient quad core Q8300 running at 2.5GHz on Windows 7 with 8GB of Ram. This works well because I also use a Radeon RX 580 video card with 8GB of video RAM.

This video card might well be the cheapest way of upgrading an old system and still giving decent performance on graphic intensive work.

I use Capture One v11 with no apparent slowdown. DXO Prime is slow but it seems to be slow everywhere.

Moving on… I downloaded the trial version of AIG v 1.1.2 and used it to do a 400% upres on a 35 megapixel Tiff to a 567 megapixel jpeg. The original was a scan from MF film. I chose “reduce noise strong” and “processing with GPU”.

It took a total of 22 minutes to complete. CPU usage never exceeded 4GB and I noticed no reduction in response while doing normal web-surfing. I had no way of measuring GPU usage but I increased the GPU fan speed to 80% (whatever that means) from the normal 40% to keep GPU temperature below 70C.

All in all, a good performance. The output file was obviously much bigger than the input and it looked identical in Photoshop CS6 after adjusting for file size. I did not see any of the miraculous improvements in resolution touted in Topaz’s adverts. I am also not sure that the result would have been any different when printed from the output that I get from Qimage.

Whatever, I consider it usable on a CPU constrained system but will experiment further on its overall usefulness.

[plugsnpixels]

Thanks Ian for your feedback!

As for results comparisons between PS and Gigapixel, my own tests with the initial release showed quite a difference, at least on screen where the pixels can't hide.

[WayneLarmon]

Moving on… I downloaded the trial version of AIG v 1.1.2 and used it to do a 400% upres on a 35 megapixel Tiff to a 567 megapixel jpeg. The original was a scan from MF film. I chose “reduce noise strong” and “processing with GPU”.

It took a total of 22 minutes to complete. CPU usage never exceeded 4GB and I noticed no reduction in response while doing normal web-surfing. I had no way of measuring GPU usage but I increased the GPU fan speed to 80% (whatever that means) from the normal 40% to keep GPU temperature below 70C.

All in all, a good performance. The output file was obviously much bigger than the input and it looked identical in Photoshop CS6 after adjusting for file size. I did not see any of the miraculous improvements in resolution touted in Topaz’s adverts. I am also not sure that the result would have been any different when printed from the output that I get from Qimage.

Whatever, I consider it usable on a CPU constrained system but will experiment further on its overall usefulness.

From what others have posted, I don't think AIG's models are trained for film.  Others have reported that AIG isn't an improvement compared to conventional upsampling (like QImage).  The AIG models are trained on digital images.

I hope they train future models for film because I have a lot of scanned film images I'd like to upsize.

[plugsnpixels]

Wayne, this may be so, but that doesn't stop one from getting great results. See here for my own tests with various format films.

[WayneLarmon]

Wayne, this may be so, but that doesn't stop one from getting great results. See here for my own tests with various format films.

But your images are exceptionally high quality with a lot more real image detail than film grain!  I should have limited my statement to say that AIG doesn't extract image detail from film grain.  (Does it?)   i.e., it is a lot less useful for grainy film images than it is for noisy digital images.  (Isn't it?)  It can extract image detail from digital noise better than it can extract image detail from film grain.  (Can't it?)  That Topaz hasn't trained their machine learning models on grainy film images (Have they?)

[plugsnpixels]

I see what you mean. At this point, film grain is enhanced along with the other details.

I haven't tried using Topaz AI Clear (or DeJPEG, etc.) first on my grainiest B&W images but that would be interesting to see.

[plugsnpixels]

Wayne, based on your questions I did some tests and posted the results here.

Turns out using AI Clear + AI Gigapixel works great for removing grain and preparing details before upsizing!

[Ian99]

Further to my post of September 21, 2018 I tested the AIG software on a digital file.

On the same computer system, I took a 12 megapixel 16 bit Tiff shot on a D300 with no extra processing and used AIG to do a 400% upres to a 195 megapixel jpeg. Again I used “reduce noise strong” and “processing with GPU”.

It took a total of 7 minutes. GPU temperatures did not increase much and I detected no adverse slowdowns with web use.

The results were simply spectacular. The output was very crisp and without the halos I have seen in other examples. It puts new life into those files.

I am now going to put my money where my mouth is and buy the product (no, I have no association with Topaz or Plugsnpixels). I do hope that Topaz will address enhancing film files as I see a huge potential for restoring old film photos.

[plugsnpixels]

Thanks Ian for your feedback!

As for film files, it appears Gigapixel already handles them well (see my blog post).

And don't miss your discount!

[MauriceRR]

Hi,
I purchased topaz AI cleared, but I'm really disapointed by the preview with high rez file (>20Megpixels) in topaz studio.
100% preview doesn't show the real image rendering (even without rendering...), which seems very inconvenient for fine tuning.
Here is a 60MP file : open in topaz and photoshop at 100%
Maybe I'm doing something wrong ? (I don't see where, I just open a file in topaz and click on 100%). Switching to low and high rez parameters in preferences has no effect.
It affects only the preview, if I save back the file, the file is as sharp as the original.

[Arlen]

Maurice, are you talking about AI Clear or AI Gigapixel? This thread is about the latter. AI Clear is part of Topaz Studio, but AI Gigapixel is not. It's a stand-alone program.

[MauriceRR]

I'm talking about AI clear, inside topaz studio, yes.
There is no preview with AI gigapixel.

[plugsnpixels]

Maurice, please break your question out to a new thread so we can help you there.

[MauriceRR]

Maurice, please break your question out to a new thread so we can help you there.

I didn't want to make a whole thread (and give bad publicity) for maybe just a bug on my computer.

[plugsnpixels]

No problem, that's fair. And we did mention AI Clear along the way so I guess it's relevant ;-)

So is this basically a preview problem (ie, where you're seeing something different in the preview than you do with output)?