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Author Topic: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster  (Read 8193 times)

Wolfman

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #20 on: September 28, 2018, 09:22:13 pm »

I looked at it at 50% because that is the % that I look at a file for printing and checking sharpening.

Wolfman

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #21 on: September 28, 2018, 09:56:50 pm »

100% view.

Wolfman

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #22 on: September 28, 2018, 10:07:52 pm »

Bart,

I was told by a highly respected landscape photographer and processing guru who works closely with Art Printers Of Nevada that the owner of Nevada Printers is always researching & testing the latest cutting edge upscaling techniques for large print making and he says that the Lanczos algorithm in Raw Therapee is the best upscaling method at this time. Granted I used it in Iridient & not Raw Therapee.
I don't know if there is a difference between those 2.

plugsnpixels

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #23 on: September 29, 2018, 01:07:53 am »

Does anyone here use RawTherapee? I've heard of it and keep downloading it and tucking it away but never used it, until right now when I decided to see what Wolfman was talking about. And I can't figure out how it works (short of having to go read something...).

I finally found the Transform>Resize area but was unable to input my desired Resize parameters (is the pre-populated field pulling from the existing image size? Is it in pixels (probably) or cm or inches? The input fields maxed out at 3564 whatevers and I wanted something higher.

I went with the numbers it allowed. Now where do you go to invoke the process and output the results? I see there's a queue. I must have done something because now I've got .pp3 RawTherapee Profile Data files in my image folder for whatever reason but no enlarged images (unless the same pixel dimensions at twice the file size means anything).

Plus the interface is slow. Maybe it's still processing my request? There's no progress bar active so who knows.

Anyway, some software is just not fun to use... ;-)
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #24 on: September 29, 2018, 09:35:05 am »

Bart,

I was told by a highly respected landscape photographer and processing guru who works closely with Art Printers Of Nevada that the owner of Nevada Printers is always researching & testing the latest cutting edge upscaling techniques for large print making and he says that the Lanczos algorithm in Raw Therapee is the best upscaling method at this time. Granted I used it in Iridient & not Raw Therapee.
I don't know if there is a difference between those 2.

Hi,

Yes, in landscape resampling with a Lanczos windowing filter is quite useful, because the ringing artifacts are harder to spot than in e.g. architecture or product shots.

I've intensively studied the various interpolation algorithms and methods that are around, and I contributed an open source resampler based on ImageMagick here on LuLa. It uses a mix of upsampling settings at various gamma settings which are then blended together to avoid those resampling artifacts as best possible.

Presumably, some form of this technique found its way into the Capture One Raw converter, a few versions ago. That also benefitted the quality of lens distortion corrections, rotations, and keystone corrections.

But what all these traditional interpolation methods have in common, is that they mathematically create smooth transitions between existing pixels. The Lanczos family of filters performs very good, but with caveats that need to be addressed/corrected (which not all software does because it slows down the procedure).

Topaz A.I. Gigapixel works in a different way, in that it has learned from examples what that detail between existing pixels probably actually looked like at high resolution and uses that to fill in the blanks instead of using a weighted average. This allows it to sometimes create actual detail with higher resolution than the original capture.

Cheers,
Bart


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brianrybolt

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #25 on: September 29, 2018, 10:57:19 am »

I'm impressed with the AI results in extrapolating based on deep knowledge of real images. Quite impressive.

Your Link is not working.

plugsnpixels

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #26 on: September 29, 2018, 03:50:10 pm »

Is your computer too old to run Gigapixel?

I just tested on a 2008 MacBook Pro running Mojave (yes!), 4 gigs RAM, SSD. It works!
« Last Edit: September 29, 2018, 03:55:24 pm by plugsnpixels »
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Arlen

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #27 on: September 30, 2018, 04:00:32 pm »

I just tried version 2.0 for the first time, and the speed increase is impressive. An image that took 19-20 minutes to upscale by 545% 485% in the previous version only took 3 min in the new one.

Edit:  corrected mistyped upscale percentage above.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2018, 07:02:24 pm by Arlen »
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plugsnpixels

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #28 on: September 30, 2018, 04:02:45 pm »

Thanks for your report!
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Wolfman

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #29 on: September 30, 2018, 04:42:29 pm »

I just tried version 2.0 for the first time, and the speed increase is impressive. An image that took 19-20 minutes to upscale by 545% in the previous version only took 3 min in the new one.

Wow....that's not what I am experiencing. It is faster but no 3 min. processing on large files with high percentage upscale.

Can you tell me what size file you started with and was a jpg or tiff?

plugsnpixels

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #30 on: September 30, 2018, 04:52:36 pm »

I can't speak for Arlen but I was getting about 2X speed (see my tests here).
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Arlen

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #31 on: September 30, 2018, 06:19:39 pm »

I was very surprised too, but it's not too far off from their claim of 5x faster. The 3 min was measured today with a timer; the 19-20 min was arrived at a week or two ago by glancing at the clock every so often, so it might be off by a minute or two.

The starting image was a 16 bit tiff, 5348 x 3395 px; upscaled to 25,920 x 16,454 px. The latter translates to 36" x 22.85" at 720 ppi, for test printing on an Epson printer.
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sportmaster

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #32 on: October 02, 2018, 10:58:15 am »

I upgraded to a Nvidia 1070 gpu.  Gigapixel processing that previously took minutes now takes seconds.
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #33 on: October 02, 2018, 12:17:44 pm »

I upgraded to a Nvidia 1070 gpu.  Gigapixel processing that previously took minutes now takes seconds.

Good to know, thanks.

Cheers,
Bart
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John Hollenberg

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #34 on: October 02, 2018, 01:56:58 pm »

Tested a 20 megapixel file from Sony RX100-4 with enlargement by 400%.  Have Windows 10 on a 2-3 year old computer with fast SSD and 64 GB memory.  Video card is 4 GB Nvidia.  Time to process and write file was 4 minutes using version 2.0.  I didn't test the earlier version.  Invented detail on landscape shot was very convincing, particularly in showing fine detail of pine trees that were probably 400 yards away.  I put a TIFF file crop (89 MB) on dropbox you can open in Photoshop to see the differences:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2xqgl45q31zd00/Gigapixel.tif?dl=0

There are 3 layers:

Photoshop Preserve Details (enlargement)
Gigapixel Reduce Noise/Blur None
Gigapixel Reduce Noise/Blur Moderate

My personal preference is half way between None and Moderate (set None layer to 50%) as it looks a little too smooth and plastic in the lake otherwise.  Would be nice to have a Reduce Noise/Blur Mild.  It is easier to see the differences that would probably appear in print by viewing at 50% in Photoshop.  Original image attached with box showing crop in file on dropbox.
« Last Edit: October 03, 2018, 10:11:08 am by John Hollenberg »
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Arlen

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #35 on: October 02, 2018, 02:22:53 pm »

Thanks for sharing that file, John. Having the various options on layers is a good way to present it.
And I agree with your assessment that half way between None and Moderate works best in this case.
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MichaelEzra

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #36 on: October 02, 2018, 05:49:47 pm »

Tested a 20 megapixel file from Sony RX1004 with enlargement by 400%.  Have Windows 10 on a 2-3 year old computer with fast SSD and 64 GB memory.  Video card is 4 GB Nvidia.  Time to process and write file was 4 minutes using version 2.0.  I didn't test the earlier version.  Invented detail on landscape shot was very convincing, particularly in showing fine detail of pine trees that were probably 400 yards away.  I put a TIFF file crop (89 MB) on dropbox you can open in Photoshop to see the differences:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2xqgl45q31zd00/Gigapixel.tif?dl=0

There are 3 layers:

Photoshop Preserve Details (enlargement)
Gigapixel Reduce Noise/Blur None
Gigapixel Reduce Noise/Blur Moderate

My personal preference is half way between None and Moderate (set None layer to 50%) as it looks a little too smooth and plastic in the lake otherwise.  Would be nice to have a Reduce Noise/Blur Mild.  It is easier to see the differences that would probably appear in print by viewing at 50% in Photoshop.  Original image attached with box showing crop in file on dropbox.

John, Thank you for sharing the comparison. The Preserve Details 2 gives significantly more detailed result. Since you have the original file, would be interesting to see how that compares to Topaz:)
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John Hollenberg

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #37 on: October 02, 2018, 06:26:57 pm »

John, Thank you for sharing the comparison. The Preserve Details 2 gives significantly more detailed result. Since you have the original file, would be interesting to see how that compares to Topaz:)

I modified the file on Dropbox to include a layer for Preserve Details 2.  The Gigapixel result half way between Moderate and None still wins.  Be sure to check at 100% and especially look at the top portion of the crop.
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plugsnpixels

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #38 on: October 03, 2018, 01:20:12 am »

Thanks sportmaster and John for the feedback.

Maybe a Reduce Noise and Blur slider would be better than the three set options, I will suggest that.
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MichaelEzra

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Re: Topaz Gigapixel 2.0: 5X faster
« Reply #39 on: October 05, 2018, 08:40:22 am »

Thank you John, I see a clear difference now. The texture of details generated by Gigapixel has much more natural and suiting appearance.
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