Pages: 1 [2] 3 4   Go Down

Author Topic: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"  (Read 8237 times)

32BT

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3095
    • Pictures
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #20 on: February 14, 2019, 03:07:24 am »


Why not an improved (if any) version of a better Raw conversion?

Cheers,
Bart

This.

If anything, AI should be extremely capable at demosaicing. In fact, it could be trained easily with the ibis four-shot hr images like Olympus e.a. offer.

Probably a well designed AI structure will also include additional processing that might improve pattern detail or noise reduction etc., so it's useful to offer this as separate options, but in the current offering it seems the results don't quite justify the effort.
Logged
Regards,
~ O ~
If you can stomach it: pictures

Doug Peterson

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4210
    • http://www.doug-peterson.com
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #21 on: February 14, 2019, 04:48:11 am »

If anything, AI should be extremely capable at demosaicing. In fact, it could be trained easily with the ibis four-shot hr images like Olympus e.a. offer.

Phase One did this already, years ago, using data from the Phase One P45+ and Phase One Achromatic (same sensor, optical path etc, just with and without RGB filter on the pixel wells). It's one of the ways they made large improvements to the per-pixel quality of the Capture One raw processing algorithms; no additional step of processing required.

From some initial testing of LR's Enhance Details tool...

Detail Enhancement: Meh. Not much improvement, and where there is improvement it's only because LR's starting point is pretty mediocre. In this regard Adobe has added a convoluted step to their workflow that gets their image quality closer (but still, to my eye, not as good as) C1's native raw processing algorithms. This is true of absolute detail and fine lines, but it's even more true of the overall feel of the detail, which feels more organic and natural to me in C1 (again, without the need for a separate processing step).

Color Moire: Meh. The effect is that of locally blurring the color. If an area moire'd with a bias toward red then Enhance Details reduces the speckling, but not the underlying bias. So things are still randomly red or blue or green tinted that should be neutral. This can save time vs manually retouching for a quick-dirty use but for any sort of final use you'd still often need to manually retouch the color.

Luminance Moire: Impressive! In some cases subject matter that was rife with moire is cleaned up entirely. In other cases the moire is still there, but with a slightly tidier look. In some cases the moire is not improved at all. Overall that's very impressive.

Our experience is that, as you pass ~30-50mp into higher resolution sensors (e.g. 80mp, 100mp, 150mp), the chance of moire falls through the floor (still technically can happen, but far more rarely). But since most of the world is still shooting cameras in the 10-50mp range and likely will be for many years to come, this improvement in ACR is very welcome and will be broadly useful. 

Hopefully as computing power improves and the programming/frameworks behind this tool improve the effect can just be folded into the normal processing chain.

Bias Alert: I'm an admitted C1 fanboy and must be considered biased as my company sells P1 gear.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 02:14:54 pm by Doug Peterson »
Logged

Paul2660

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4066
    • Photos of Arkansas
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #22 on: February 14, 2019, 08:36:36 am »

Hi Doug,

Your post is confusing to me.  Does C1 offer the features you list as options for enhancing details?  As up to vr 11, I don't know of a enhance details settings.  So is it something built in to the software?  I know about the diffraction correction under the sharpness tab. 

Just curious, as I am always looking for more details.

Thanks
Paul


Logged
Paul Caldwell
Little Rock, Arkansas U.S.
www.photosofarkansas.com

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #23 on: February 14, 2019, 09:12:39 am »

Hi Frank,

I understand that part, but why not improve the Raw conversion itself, instead of storing a post-processed Rawish version of it (as if it where Raw, which it apparently isn't)? Wouldn't an output option make more sense?

Cheers,
Bart
It would make more sense if doable but today its not. Like its not doable to convert JPEG to raw.
Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".

Slobodan Blagojevic

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 18090
  • When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks
    • My website
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #24 on: February 14, 2019, 09:42:54 am »

Hi Doug,

Your post is confusing to me.  Does C1 offer the features you list as options for enhancing details?...

Doug was talking about LR.

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #25 on: February 14, 2019, 10:12:52 am »

One area that I thought would immediately benefit from the claims being made about the AI detail enhancement would be the treatment of Canon DualISO images made with the Magic Lantern firmware hack.  The images were produced by merging the simultaneous recording of a single scene capture read off the sensor in pairs of lines alternating between two user-defined ISO values.  The resulting image essentially merges two captures spaced (ISO1-ISO2) stops apart, increasing the dynamic range of the capture, at the expense of linear pixel resolution.  The result is a file that often displays CA and moiré, as well as aliasing and color artifacts along color edge contrasts - the exact list of things that this new feature is supposed to address.

I do not shoot Canon anymore, but I have an archive of 5DIII DualISO images - I ran 4 or 5 DNGs through the Detail Enhance procedure and the result is essentially the same as the input.  I would have thought that the obvious artifacts would at least change a little and would be easy pickings for whatever AI algorithms are doing their thing during processing.

In terms of the x-trans images I have tested with it (from my X-H1) there is an observable difference, but it is really at the edges of details and you need to be zoomed into the image 200-400% to see any noticeable change.  This may be of benefit if one intends to enlarge the image significantly.  While the difference is observable, it does not appear to be significant.

Unless you make a business shooting Seimens stars, it appears that this feature is not particularly useful at the moment.

kirk
Logged

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #26 on: February 14, 2019, 10:44:48 am »


AFAIK, there are only two people here posting who had any experience, under NDA, speaking with Adobe engineers like Simon Chen and Eric Chan about the development of Enhanced Detail last year as it was being developed and tested. Here are some facts, as much as I can provide under NDA and the facts can be corroborated by other betas.


Adobe didn't wake up on day and thought, "let's produce a new rendering process that forces people to take the time to convert raw to linear DNG and extra space" because they felt those two attributes were good for customers workflows per se. They did it that way because that's the way, for now, the feature had to be implemented. The "why did Adobe do this" question was asked last year, by me for one! What happens in the future may change. Asking today why this was implemented as it was, especially by people who don't have a clue about the ACR processing code, marketing people who work for competing companies of Adobe who may or may not know how their own software code actually works, is as silly as me asking why my 2017 Mazda CX5 doesn't run on electricity or why my iPhone X doesn't receive G5 cellular.


Adobe didn't claim this feature is for everyone or works well on every image. They did testing with Enhanced Detail with Siemens Star resolution charts showing a 30% increase of resolution (NOT increase of pixels!). They didn't claim more, they didn't state this was true for all images and cameras that capture this data.


There is of course a before and after preview and the ideal zoom ratio to examine whether it's worthwhile converting the data to a linear DNG so users can see, on a case by case basis, if they wish to convert and use Enhanced Detail.


The same people asking why this is, are some of the same people who spent post after post, page after page defending Topaz Lab's claim they convert JPEG to raw and can edit a JPEG as if it were a raw without any evidence to defend those claims. Adobe can defend the claim that in some captures, Enhanced Detail will enhance the detail. As can users. They cannot "defend" why one must convert the data to a linear DNG to the degree they explained their processing to those under NDA. Nor can they defend that if you use LR or Photoshop to convert a wide gamut image to sRGB, you'll clip colors. That's how it works kids. Unlike Topaz, they will not use marketing shills to state they can produce stuff that doesn't exist and processing that can't be backed up.


Now this is a new feature and it will evolve. One issue is the amount of processing and OS support needed today (simply examine the OS requirements for Enhanced Detail to work, one OS being just released a few months ago). Few here have any experience producing software. I have a little. Yeah, it is possible that ED (Enhanced Detail for short) could be produced directly from the raw without a DNG intermediate but what if 8% of the user based had hardware support for it? Wouldn't fly well now would it. What happens in the future happens. TODAY, if you want to use ED, you convert to a linear DNG and if you're smart, you view the preview first instead of doing a batch convert. How you'll handle this in a year is your guess. Some of us will know before that.
Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #27 on: February 14, 2019, 01:31:12 pm »

It would be helpful if Adobe developed a metric, or set of metrics, that calculated some increase in detail or acutance, or decrease in moiré or aliasing, and provided that metric in the preview window.  A false color preview of the areas most affected by the algorithm would also be nice.  This way, the user could get a visual representation of a threshold level of improvement and evaluate the need to apply the algorithm in a more informed manner.

Kirk
Logged

Ken Bennett

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1797
    • http://www.kenbennettphoto.com
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #28 on: February 14, 2019, 01:41:39 pm »

FWIW, I'm seeing effects on my Fuji Xtrans files ranging from "not much difference" to "wow, that's amazing." Better fine detail, better color detail, no "worms" in foliage and natural areas.

It didn't occur to me until photodan suggested it in another thread, but I tried it on a file from my GFX50S and it handles moire quite well. Posted a sample in that thread (link.)

Haven't tried it on Canon or Sony files yet.

Even given all the downsides (separate DNG, long time to create), I'm still pretty happy with this new feature.
Logged
Equipment: a camera and some lenses. https://www.instagram.com/wakeforestphoto/

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #29 on: February 14, 2019, 01:45:59 pm »

It would be helpful if Adobe developed a metric, or set of metrics, that calculated some increase in detail or acutance, or decrease in moiré or aliasing, and provided that metric in the preview window.  A false color preview of the areas most affected by the algorithm would also be nice.  This way, the user could get a visual representation of a threshold level of improvement and evaluate the need to apply the algorithm in a more informed manner.

Kirk
It's image and capture (device) specific. So they can't, YMMV. What they did test and can report is what they produced on a capture with one system of Siemens Star resolution chart. No more, certainly less depending on lots of possible factories.
Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #30 on: February 14, 2019, 02:02:58 pm »

Interesting - so Adobe cannot compare the differences between the original raw and the processed Enhanced Detail linear DNG and report those differences in a meaningful way?  Weird.

kirk

Logged

Peter_DL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 544
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #31 on: February 14, 2019, 02:15:10 pm »

 
With the X-Trans/ Raw files from my X100F I see a 2nd effect (aside from a somewhat cleaner rendition at pixel level): The sharpening controls in the Detail tab work more in a traditional way now with the Enhanced.DNG, i.e. allowing a higher Amount setting compared to the original RAF.
So altogether it can make a quite significant difference.

Note that this can not be previewed
(with the Preview function of Enhance Details, before the Enhanced.DNG is created).
 
--
Logged

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #32 on: February 14, 2019, 02:34:31 pm »

Interesting - so Adobe cannot compare the differences between the original raw and the processed Enhanced Detail linear DNG and report those differences in a meaningful way?  Weird.

kirk
You can easily use Compare mode in LR and examine the Enhanced Detail version to the original. What else would one need?
Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #33 on: February 14, 2019, 04:11:45 pm »

I was thinking more along the lines of something meaningful when evaluating the preview - like a false color map of the "improvement" or at least the difference between the original and the enhanced version.  If there were some quantitative way of evaluating the effect, that value, or range of values, could be correlated with some real observable difference in the final output (print, etc.) and then it could be used as a go/no-go threshold for evaluating whether to spend the extra time and expense of enhancing the base conversion.  It would be helpful if I knew for my images on my printer, if the effect did not generate a score of 10 or greater, then it is not worth running the enhance algorithm for my print output.  Or, maybe an "effective MTF" could be computed to demonstrate the gain from the enhance routine.  Etc.

This would be different than, for example, knowing that my specific image contained moiré that I would need to treat with the enhancement, regardless of the overall metrics.

What would be nice as well would be a side app that would run through a batch of raw files and compute the various metrics along with a small false color preview of the spatial distribution of the metrics and output the results to an HTML document that would be sortable based on highest to lowest effect, on a per-metric basis.  This way you could run that in the background on a batch of images, making evaluation of the effect more quantitative and efficient.  You could even make the app sort the images, based on their scores, into folders, or marked with ratings stars, flags, etc. that would get imported into Lightroom.

Just thinking out loud.

kirk
Logged

faberryman

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4851
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #34 on: February 14, 2019, 04:16:14 pm »

I don't mind making qualitative rather than quantitative judgments about image quality. I do it every time a make an image and every time I process an image.
Logged

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #35 on: February 14, 2019, 05:24:24 pm »

I suppose eyeballing it can work.  But that begs questions like "why do we calibrate and profile our displays and scanners and printer-paper combinations?"  Why do we proof under controlled lighting?  If eyeballing it works, it works!  But maybe it doesn't.

Here is a mock up of what I am describing.  I took a shot of a tight patterned weave of nylon that I know will produce moiré when photographed at a right distance with a particular lens+sensor - in this case a Fujifilm X-H1 and the 16mm f/1.4.  The attached images compare the original conversion in ACR and the sync'ed enhanced version.  The moiré is visually reduced, for sure.  But there are other areas of the image that do not appear to have received any enhancement that actually have received changes similar to the moiré areas.

Attached are the two images in split window view at fit to view and then at 100% zoom - the moiré artifact is apparent and tints the neutral gray material with a purplish hue.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 05:44:24 pm by kirkt »
Logged

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #36 on: February 14, 2019, 05:25:19 pm »

Here are the L, a and b channel comparisons for the enhanced versus original images. 
Logged

kirkt

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 604
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #37 on: February 14, 2019, 05:29:46 pm »

In each of the three channel comparisons, I copied the respective channels into an RGB image, performed an "Apply Image..." and chose the base image in Subtract mode, Scale 2, Offset 128.  Then I applied a steep curve to the result to amplify the differences from neutral gray (no difference) and then applied a false color gradient map to give a sense of positive or negative deviation.

What these images tell me is that both the L and the color channels are receiving modification, but the b channel is receiving stronger modification than the a channel.  In this case, that is already obvious because of the particular issue that I can see even without rendering a preview of anything, but in cases where it is not so obvious, these kind of aids might be helpful in evaluating an image prior to enhancement.

Also, in the below image, where I zoomed out to include the whole image, there are other areas of enhancement (shown here is the L channel) that are being shown by the false color rendering that do not become apparent until you really zoom in and toggle back and forth.  Are these worthwhile?  I don't know, but at least I have some data to evaluate and compare with whatever output I generate and can evaluate the effect uniformly over large batches of images or image types.

kirk
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 05:37:46 pm by kirkt »
Logged

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #38 on: February 14, 2019, 05:59:09 pm »

I suppose eyeballing it can work.  But that begs questions like "why do we calibrate and profile our displays and scanners and printer-paper combinations?"
Why? Calibration is a process to take a device and place it into a desire condition. Like making a display better match a print. Displays are not stable devices so we recalibrate to put that desired calibration back into effect. We proof under controlled conditions for the same reasons. We calibrate an E6 film line to a desired condition and replenish (recalibrate) to maintain that condition. We profile devices to fingerprint device behavior. So calibration and profiling have nothing to do with this discussion.
IF you charge by the hour, or if you use OPM (Other People's Media), you don't need and may not desire a lick of color management (calibration or profiling).

Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".

digitaldog

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 20630
  • Andrew Rodney
    • http://www.digitaldog.net/
Re: Adobe new "AI Enhanced Details"
« Reply #39 on: February 14, 2019, 06:01:22 pm »

In each of the three channel comparisons, I copied the respective channels into an RGB image, performed an "Apply Image..." and chose the base image in Subtract mode, Scale 2, Offset 128.  Then I applied a steep curve to the result to amplify the differences from neutral gray (no difference) and then applied a false color gradient map to give a sense of positive or negative deviation.
What this tells you is there IS a difference and where in the image, and as the article provided states, when using the process described: Pixels that aren’t level 128 gray are different by the amount they depart from 128 gray.
Logged
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Author "Color Management for Photographers".
Pages: 1 [2] 3 4   Go Up