Topaz AI Gigabyte - YAY. Topaz JPEG to RAW AI - NAY

[nemophoto]

I've used Topaz plugins for a number of years. Most I feel are very good and use several in my daily workflow. One of the Winners is AI Gigabyte. I have used a number of upressing plugins over the year -- I own Photozoom 6 and have used On1 Perfect Resize since the days it was Genuine Fractals by LizardTech. AI Gigabyte really IS a big improvement on those. While it is not perfect in every instance, and in fact can vary on the same basic image each time you run it, the fact is that it seems a big leap 85% of the time. As my own test, I enlarged an old E10 4MP JPEG image from it's native nominal size of 7.5" @ 300dpi on the long size to 26+". I did the same with Perfect Resize. Here are the results.

And now the Razzy. Topaz JPEG to RAW AI. I'll be honest, it sucks. It essentially encapsulates the original in a DNG. Big deal. Lightroom does that too, and better. On a recent job I discovered that I had not switch my camera back to RAW+JPEG after using the camera to scout. As a result, about the first 40 frames or so were shot JPEG only, until I caught the mistake. The lighting was tricky and unfortunately the client chose a JPEG for me to do for final print quality digital imaging. I had just received an email about JPEG to RAW, so downloaded it as a trial. Imagine my surprise when I imported into Lightroom and found it to be crappier than the JPEG (which wasn't horrible). Still, I pressed forward. But achieving better color balance/white balance was severely limited compared to a real RAW. (What did I expect? Garbage in/garbage out.)  Though I tried my best to work with the new "RAW", I was better off working with the original JPEG and exporting that as a TIFF.

[digitaldog]

Been discussed in the forums a lot. The product doesn't convert a JPEG to raw nor allow you to edit a JPEG as if it were a raw. It appears to produce 'better' results from a JPEG than before processing, you'd kind of expect that. But most of what the company promises is a big fat marketing lie. That doesn't mean the product is worthless, only the people who feel the need to lie to customers about what the product can and really does do.
Indeed, converting a JPEG (or a TIFF) into DNG doesn’t make it raw. Like TIFF, DNG is simply a container to hold data. So yeah, it's a JPEG in a DNG. Nothing new.

[nemophoto]

Yes, I find the product name "JPEG to RAW" very misleading and in fact there is no advantage over working with the JPEG in Lightroom, C1, DxO, Photoshop or any of the myriad of different products out there that can work non-destructively and allow you to export as a TIFF or PSD. It simply performs what LR can do natively. Why have a plugin/standalone do that. Of all the stellar products Topaz has produced, this is a serious dud.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

It simply performs what LR can do natively.

Hi,

This is not correct. Try saving a JPEG with quality 1.
JPEG to RAW AI will attempt to repair the resulting JPEG blocking artifacts before doing the conversion to 16-bit/channel RGBs.

I expect that they will improve the conversion quality further as the training of new models continues.

Cheers,
Bart

[digitaldog]

This is not correct. Try saving a JPEG with quality 1.
JPEG to RAW AI will attempt to repair the resulting JPEG blocking artifacts before doing the conversion to 16-bit/channel RGBs.

Yes, do that, save at Quality 1 now run it through the Topaz product; let's see what it does.

[nemophoto]

Hi,

This is not correct. Try saving a JPEG with quality 1.
JPEG to RAW AI will attempt to repair the resulting JPEG blocking artifacts before doing the conversion to 16-bit/channel RGBs.

I expect that they will improve the conversion quality further as the training of new models continues.

Bart, I have to say, I don't know a fool who WOULD save a JPEG as quality 1 except someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. So, in my mind, that's a moot point. My case in point was "real world" use. A 7 or 9 quality JPEG out of the camera was not improved one iota and it was a waste of time. In fact, I found the resulting DNG was worse than had I just worked with the JPEG in Lightroom. If I wanted to repackage the JPEG as a DNG I could have done it straight from Lightroom, including any adjustments I had made.