Topic: Sharpen AI by Topaz (Read 30963 times)

Rajan Parrikar · « **on:** February 27, 2019, 06:02:13 pm »

I just got an email about what looks like a new offering. It is a free download for me since I already have Topaz InFocus.

bjanes · « **Reply #1 on:** February 27, 2019, 06:57:01 pm »

Quote from: Rajan Parrikar on February 27, 2019, 06:02:13 pm

I just got an email about what looks like a new offering. It is a free download for me since I already have Topaz InFocus.

I got the same e-mail, but the web site appears to be down. Attempting to sign out produces repeated time outs. Any one else having this problem?

Bill

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #2 on:** February 27, 2019, 07:06:05 pm »

Quote from: bjanes on February 27, 2019, 06:57:01 pm

I got the same e-mail, but the web site appears to be down. Attempting to sign out produces repeated time outs. Any one else having this problem?

Bill

Yes, same with me.
EDIT: My coupon code just got accepted, I'm trying to check out ...
EDIT: Okay, today the free upgrade worked.

I suppose there are too many people at the same time trying to get the update (which is worth trying to get it!).
I've been beta testing it the past week or so, and it has come a long way.

And there is more to come, but I guess they thought; Why wait?
They are busy training new AI models but that takes a long time.

Don't know what is being released right now, so I can't comment on all the things that I've been testing, but the 'Sharpen AI' functionality works very well (think FocusMagic like; well).

Cheers,
Bart

plugsnpixels · « **Reply #3 on:** February 27, 2019, 08:11:39 pm »

Their website is struggling under the load of the new release but it finally loaded for me.

I did some tests of Sharpen AI.

bwana · « **Reply #4 on:** February 27, 2019, 09:30:51 pm »

It seems computational photography is reaching the desktop and not only for cell phone cameras. From what I've read, Sharpen AI is to be used very early in the post processing flow to correct blurring due to motion/focus. AI clear should be used afterwards. However if there has been any processing (for example in raw conversion ) they recommend using Denoise as it gives finer grained control.

lhodaniel · « **Reply #5 on:** February 28, 2019, 04:07:21 am »

This might be one of those expensive free upgrades for me. SAI is dog slow on my 2015 15" Macbook Pro. Preview updates are on the order of 5 min each (D800E 16-bit tifs), as is the final save. Pretty much unusable.

This reinforces my decision that I will return to Windows where I can afford both a desktop and laptop and just be looking at a video card upgrade (maybe) on the former. I have a R9 270x on the old desktop now, but it is just 2G. Topaz lists the 4G model as Recommended. The 370X in the MBP is barely above minimum and it shows.

I'm now regretting the Mac switch 3 years ago.

Lloyd

Rajan Parrikar · « **Reply #6 on:** February 28, 2019, 04:19:16 am »

Quote from: lhodaniel on February 28, 2019, 04:07:21 am

This might be one of those expensive free upgrades for me. SAI is dog slow on my 2015 15" Macbook Pro. Preview updates are on the order of 5 min each (D800E 16-bit tifs), as is the final save. Pretty much unusable.

This reinforces my decision that I will return to Windows where I can afford both a desktop and laptop and just be looking at a video card upgrade (maybe) on the former. I have a R9 270x on the old desktop now, but it is just 2G. Topaz lists the 4G model as Recommended. The 370X in the MBP is barely above minimum and it shows.

I'm now regretting the Mac switch 3 years ago.

Lloyd

Topaz has warned about hardware requirements.

https://help.topazlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024353312

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #7 on:** February 28, 2019, 05:10:52 am »

Quote from: Rajan Parrikar on February 28, 2019, 04:19:16 am

Topaz has warned about hardware requirements.

https://help.topazlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024353312

Indeed, and is unlikely that speed will improve all that much on older hardware. These are applications that do huge amounts of calculations, and beefy GPUs will help a lot. There are some speed improvements possible through code optimization, but nothing that compares to hardware upgrades.

But the rewards are sweet ...

Cheers,
Bart

Rajan Parrikar · « **Reply #8 on:** February 28, 2019, 06:04:09 am »

Bart,

The standalone works fine but the plugin crashes on launch. Are you seeing the same issue? I'm on the latest macOS on an iMac Pro.

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #9 on:** February 28, 2019, 06:14:08 am »

Quote from: Rajan Parrikar on February 28, 2019, 06:04:09 am

Bart,

The standalone works fine but the plugin crashes on launch. Are you seeing the same issue? I'm on the latest macOS on an iMac Pro.

Hi Rajan,

I'm on Win10, and both the standalone and the plugin work without crashing.

You could try, if you get that far, whether (temporarily) switching the Processing Mode to 'CPU' instead of 'GPU' makes any difference. You find that option in the (File>)Preferences.

Cheers,
Bart

lhodaniel · « **Reply #10 on:** February 28, 2019, 06:58:05 am »

The plugin crashes for me as well, in GPU and CPU modes. Must be a Mac thing.

Lloyd

bobfriedman · « **Reply #11 on:** February 28, 2019, 07:12:33 am »

works for me - iMacPro AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 8GB

although it slams the GPU

bjanes · « **Reply #12 on:** February 28, 2019, 07:15:50 am »

Quote from: lhodaniel on February 28, 2019, 04:07:21 am

This might be one of those expensive free upgrades for me. SAI is dog slow on my 2015 15" Macbook Pro. Preview updates are on the order of 5 min each (D800E 16-bit tifs), as is the final save. Pretty much unusable.

This reinforces my decision that I will return to Windows where I can afford both a desktop and laptop and just be looking at a video card upgrade (maybe) on the former. I have a R9 270x on the old desktop now, but it is just 2G. Topaz lists the 4G model as Recommended. The 370X in the MBP is barely above minimum and it shows.

I'm now regretting the Mac switch 3 years ago.

Lloyd

I was able to install Sharpen AI on my Windows10 machine with an i9-9900K processor running at 3.6 GHz with 64GB memory and a GForce GTX 1060 video card with 6 MB of memory. I loaded a 5504*8256 16 bit D850 TIFF image into Photoshop from Lightroom and used the AI-sharpen plugin. Updating previews at 100% took about 5 seconds and processing the entire image took 1m 10s. Improvement of the image was modest. This performance is acceptable to me.

Bill

bobfriedman · « **Reply #13 on:** February 28, 2019, 07:48:11 am »

I tried a 7906x5271 16bit D850 image - Sharpen - Save As. roughly 3 minutes

iMacPro AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 8GB

Note: processing for a save was twice the time of a split image preview

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #14 on:** February 28, 2019, 10:00:34 am »

Quote from: bobfriedman on February 28, 2019, 07:48:11 am

Note: processing for a save was twice the time of a split image preview

Yes, saving an image will process the entire image, while sharpening a preview will only process the preview region of interest. That also means that zooming in will speed up the preview, because a smaller region has to be processed.

Cheers,
Bart

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #15 on:** February 28, 2019, 10:05:42 am »

An important thing to know is that the "Remove Blur" slider control relates to the amount of blur in the source image. It is not suggesting that more is going to produce better quality output, just that it will assume a more blurry input that needs to be fixed. So one really needs to look for a sweet spot.

So, when an image is already very sharp, one might need to use a low setting of around 10 to 30, and even 0 does some sharpening (assuming an already very very sharp source image).

Cheers,
Bart

bobfriedman · « **Reply #16 on:** February 28, 2019, 10:09:43 am »

I interpret "blur" as motion blur and that the "AI" part would determine the direction of motion I assume.

Bart_van_der_Wolf · « **Reply #17 on:** February 28, 2019, 10:54:44 am »

Quote from: bobfriedman on February 28, 2019, 10:09:43 am

I interpret "blur" as motion blur and that the "AI" part would determine the direction of motion I assume.

Hi Bob,

Sharpen AI can (try to) tackle 3 types of blur.

Blur due to Demosaicing or resampling, or less than perfect lenses
Blur due to camera shake or subject motion
Blur due to defocus

Assuming one has one's technique under control (camera on tripod, well focused, stationary subject, quality lens), then number 1 does best. If there is camera motion or subject motion (e.g. from low shutterspeed) involved, then number 2 will do best. If there is some front or rear focus going on, one just missed critical focus distance, then number 3 will do best.

Number 2 and 3 may have difficulty figuring out which part of the image to deal with (it may be AI but it's not clairvoyant), so it might be necessary to work in image layers, addressing the relevant parts of the image, and masking out the other regions, or layering different regions with different sharpening settings.

The layering/masking functionality, or something like that, has been requested during the Beta cycles, but will probably be added in future (free) upgrades.

Cheers,
Bart

bobfriedman · « **Reply #18 on:** February 28, 2019, 11:09:00 am »

ok... what is the explanation for "stabalize"

Rajan Parrikar · « **Reply #19 on:** February 28, 2019, 11:12:10 am »

I tried the Stabilize option on an image. See attached gif. It does well on salvaging the image, at least for some applications. The original image was very noisy and I should have run a noise reduction before feeding it to Sharpen AI.

Author Topic: Sharpen AI by Topaz (Read 30963 times)