+ 1. The change in color and tone, albeit not enormous, is still noticeable, and would add even more editing time to my image prep to bring the image colors and tones back to where they started. What's up with that?
Hi Mark,
I suggest just sending a support request, and have it fixed.
Given the myriad of possible computer configurations, a version 1.0.x is bound to have some issues on specific hardware that were not caught during the beta testing cycles. Also, as was the case with some of their recent A.I. plugins, progressive insight may add functionality or change some of the controls that they implemented before massive feedback by actual users. One of the great things with Topaz Labs is their Support for Life promise. Pay once and 'forever' reap the benefits of new versions and even upgrades to new versions (Version 2 ...).
Also, due to its long processing time for a single uprez as everyone has noted (several minutes on my 2013 MacPro) it's going to be time-consuming to really run this new resize method through its paces, and likely to be somewhat of a statistical game. I'm personally OK with a long process time if I can routinely get a better result.
They are still tweaking the performance and accuracy, so some improvements may happen. However, as they mention in their background information about the new technology, until now one had to rely on sending images to a central powerful server system that does the processing and sends back the result (which can take a while with such image sizes). A.I. Gigapixel on the other hand allows to keep the image files on location, and process them on the local machine. That does mean that a lot of processing power is required for somewhat acceptable processing times, although batch processing happens in the background. No need to wait for it, it doesn't block working with one's system, other than using a lot of resources that could lead to slower responsiveness.
It also means that those who have the latest/fastest graphics cards will benefit from the fast GPU(s) which do get exercised to a large percentage of their capabilities.
On one image I tried, I did think it did a little better than PS, but on a second image PS (preserve details 2) produced a decidedly more realistic result, Topaz AIG turning certain areas of a flower petal image into slightly mushy tonal transitions that lost photo realistic quality in favor of a more obvious "digitally painted look".
Be careful with judging print quality on a zoomed-in display. What works nicely when pixel-peeping, may be suboptimal in the final print (especially when printed at native printer resolution, 600/720 PPI). From what I've seen, Topaz A.I. Gigapixel does
not produce halos, but it does render very sharp lines and edges, sharper than the source image despite scaling. That means that one can get very close to the image without losing visual sharpness.
Also, I set the resize to custom and defined inches on the long side at 300dpi, but the resized image came out a different size. Probably a bug that Topaz will fix soon. The long side of the image should have turned out 12,000 pixels, but ended up under 10,000 according to PS, so I couldn't compare the PS converted image to the Topaz converted image precisely since the screen viewing magnifications had to differ in order to look at the two images arranged side by side at similar size in photoshop.
Sounds like a bug, but one can specify exact pixel dimensions instead of a physical size with tagged PPI. Doesn't that work? And that also allows to later tag with an arbitrary PPI until the application supports those directly
Cheers,
Bart