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Author Topic: Sharpen AI by Topaz  (Read 30880 times)

Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #120 on: March 11, 2019, 09:43:47 pm »

Here are 2 comparisons, based on the same image-crop. The image was taken on a sturdy tripod, but an aperture of f/16 was used. That narrow aperture caused diffraction blur (with resolution loss) and, additionally, a tiny bit of subject motion blur (despite my trying to shoot when the wind induced subject motion was at its minimum) was caused by the required exposure time of 1/8th of a second.

The first composite is from a straight Raw conversion with an excellent Raw converter without any additional sharpening, with first a Sharpen mode correction and then a Stabilize mode correction applied to that same crop. the first attachment shows these, side by side.

Click on the attachments to view them at 100% zoom, and make sure that your browser doesn't zoom in itself. Maybe it's better to download the images and view them in an image viewer or editor at 100% zoom setting.

Due to the softness and resolution loss caused by narrow aperture diffraction, Sharpen mode already produced a significant improvement in the first composite, but removing the tiny amount of subject motion blur with Stabilize mode helped it even a bit more.

The Raw converter I use (Capture One Pro) also offers a feature called "Diffraction Correction", which usually does a very good job of applying automatic Deconvolution sharpening (like the Topaz InFocus or FocusMagic plugins do), to compensate for the diffraction induced blur. I also used that setting for another Raw conversion of the same crop, again without adding any additional sharpening.

This time, see the second attachment, the Raw converter already took care of most of the Diffraction induced blur. Therefore the subsequent Sharpen mode adjustment only produced a tiny bit of additional sharpening, as it should. By using the Stabilize mode, again a slight improvement was achieved. One may need to pixel-peep to see the differences.

This demonstrates that if an image needs more help in regaining the original scene's sharpness, Topaz Sharpen AI will make more of a difference. If that same image is already reasonably sharp, then the gains will be relatively small.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: March 11, 2019, 09:50:13 pm by BartvanderWolf »
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Terry_Kennedy

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #121 on: March 13, 2019, 07:41:47 pm »

Also, what is up with the math test when posting to the thread? Supremely irritating.

It will go away after you've made a few more posts - it is apparently a countermeasure against signup, spam and run accounts.
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Steve Gordon

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #122 on: March 14, 2019, 10:22:37 am »

That is very interesting Bart and thank you for posting this.

Interesting that C1 can do in seconds (or less) what Sharpen ai does in minutes.

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Steve Gordon

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #123 on: March 14, 2019, 10:27:20 am »

Oh by the way, are these 100% crops?

When I use C1 deconvolution I see quite a difference with Sharpen AI at 100% but at normal viewing the change is hard to see.

Will be interesting to see if prints are different
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #124 on: March 14, 2019, 10:52:03 am »

That is very interesting Bart and thank you for posting this.

Interesting that C1 can do in seconds (or less) what Sharpen ai does in minutes.

Well, it does something different (and at the raw level based on the aperture metadata in the file), but the differences are very interesting in this particular image.

Since Capture One doesn't remove subject motion (caused by slight wind induced branch movement), if adjusts for diffraction only, which also kind of sharpens (removes diffraction from) the motion blur. This may result in what might look like somewhat overcorrecting for diffraction. But it indeed comes a lot closer (but not quite there) to what we'd hope to achieve in the end.

Sharpen AI, on the other hand, replaces both diffraction blur and subject motion, if set to Stabilize mode. That results in a significantly more subtle sharpening, which I kind of like better (in this case).

So, while I apply Diffraction Correction almost by default in Capture One conversions, I'm now paying more attention to potential subject motion in the source image and may decide to switch it off, because we now have a tool that can address that very well in post-processing.

Cheers,
Bart
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #125 on: March 14, 2019, 10:59:17 am »

Oh by the way, are these 100% crops?

Yes, unless mentioned to be otherwise, always 100% zoom.

Quote
When I use C1 deconvolution I see quite a difference with Sharpen AI at 100% but at normal viewing the change is hard to see.

Yes, but there is more than only Diffraction blur to remedy, although C1 does that bit quite well if that's all there is to do (and it is, on many stationary subjects like architecture or product photography shots).

Quote
Will be interesting to see if prints are different.

Yes, but that would require additional Output sharpening as well, or else the differences in improvements may be too subtle. A properly Capture Sharpened image, can tolerate more Creative 'sharpening' and Output sharpening before creating artifacts as well.

Cheers,
Bart
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bjanes

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #126 on: March 14, 2019, 12:57:23 pm »


Sharpen AI, on the other hand, replaces both diffraction blur and subject motion, if set to Stabilize mode. That results in a significantly more subtle sharpening, which I kind of like better (in this case).

So, while I apply Diffraction Correction almost by default in Capture One conversions, I'm now paying more attention to potential subject motion in the source image and may decide to switch it off, because we now have a tool that can address that very well in post-processing.

Bart,

Sharpen AI is promising, but I have been unable to find any documentation on how to adjust the parameters or in what order to apply the corrections if one is using more than one of the three algorithms. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Best,

Bill
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #127 on: March 14, 2019, 03:53:34 pm »

Here is another example (attached) that I wouldn't have been able to do without the spatially variant capabilities (it treats different regions of interest differently in the same image) of Sharpen AI in Stabilize mode.

The first attachment is of the full image at reduced size, then sharpened.
The second attachment is a crop (100% zoom) of an image where the leaves are slightly wiggling in the wind with different directions and speed.
The third attachment is the same crop with Sharpen AI v 1.1.0 Stabilize added. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the previous version 1.0.9 .

There is some color fringingvisible that can be solved by using the sharpened file as a layer with Liminosity blending, but I'll try if the folks at Topaz can fix it and prevent it from happening in the first place.

The ability to stabilize allowed to get a bit additional sharpness out of those regions that were in focus. The image was taken on a tripod with a full 35mm frame sensor and a 200mm lens at an aperture of f/5, so DOF was limited and there are branches with leaves that are simply out-of-focus (OOF). Shutterspeed was fairly short, but there was still some subject-movement.

Cheers,
Bart
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #128 on: March 14, 2019, 04:36:47 pm »

Bart,

Sharpen AI is promising, but I have been unable to find any documentation on how to adjust the parameters or in what order to apply the corrections if one is using more than one of the three algorithms. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Hi Bill,

There is a very minimalistic "Product Tour" when opening the Stand-alone version (it can also be called from the Help Menu). Opening the application, with Photoshop closed, should add the app as a plugin to Photoshop.

There is not that much to tell.

One uses one of three modes wich chooses between three different AI models.
  • Sharpen sharpens the most sharp pixels in the image.
  • Stabilize does the same. but at the same time attempts to remove motion (subject motion or camera shake) blur up to 10 pixels long in any direction.
  • Focus attempts to refocus images that missed critical focus when the shot was taken (defocus creates a different type of blur/PSF).

So in principle, it only takes one of the three. Of course one can try to save a shot and reload it for another pass, but that's not how it's intended to be used.

There is currently a risk that Focus will pick up details that do not belong to the plane around best focus, like parts of the background. That's why it has been requested to add some sort of masking control. When a lens design e.g. creates spurious background resolution, it will be mistaken for OOF blur. The folks at Topaz are looking into that. For the time being, just use a masked layer to hide any overzealous attempts at refocusing.

Because it takes a relatively long time to process the entire image, the preview area only is processed to save time, when you hit the "Update Preview" button. So zooming in  will require fewer pixels to be processed and that speeds things a bit up. When the preview is moved, or the zoom percentage changed, one has to hit update again. The space bar, or the icons in the top menu bar toggles between processed and original image view. There is also a Split-view preview possible. Only when Saving the image will the entire image be processed, which can take some time.

With the controls, one tries to match the amount of blur, or noise, in the source image. More is not better, but a match gives the best results. That takes a bit of guessing, but one gets the hang of that after a bit of trying on one's own images. The Add Grain control can add a bit of uniform grain back to the image to avoid too smooth gradients. To learn, one can start at 0 and update (which only does a little) then 10 and update, and so on to try and find a sweet spot which is just enough to not produce nasties, like halos or stair-stepping. I usually see something useful happening at 20 or 30, or at 70, but that depends on image content. Undo/Redo steps through the changes.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: March 14, 2019, 04:42:50 pm by BartvanderWolf »
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bluloo

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #129 on: March 14, 2019, 06:23:29 pm »

Ran a test with the newly updated version today. It's literally unusably slow. Prior version would render a save in a few minutes. This version is taking close to 10 minutes.

Anyone else notice a huge slowdown in processing speed for v1.10?

It also doesn't save back to LR. I have to navigate to the Library -> Target Folder -> Synchronize -> Develop, and then check it out.

Seems like a better idea on paper, than in practice so far. No offense to anyone.
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Redcrown

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #130 on: March 15, 2019, 02:09:39 am »


Anyone else notice a huge slowdown in processing speed for v1.10?

I've already written off Topaz AI Sharpen, but still have a few days left on my trial. And I kept several samples from the original version with good notes. I can confirm that the "new" version released yesterday (1.1.0) is considerably slower than the original.

On three images where I ran Stabilize with settings 7-0-0, the time averaged 150 seconds on the original version and 260 seconds on the new version. An increase of 73%, This is on a Win10 system with 16gb memory and an Nvidia GTX 960 GPU, processing 8 bit images of about 6,000 X 4,000 pixels.

The new version also produces significantly different results. Hard for me to tell if it's better or worse as both versions produce poor results over about 70% of the image, with only 30% being OK. Unfortunately the OK areas are often so partial to be unusable. For example, on a soft focused portrait, it would do OK on half an eyebrow, but leave the other half either still soft or full of artifacts.

I also noticed that the new version produces darker tones overall, most noticeable in solid, flat backgrounds. Darker than the input image.
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dchew

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #131 on: March 15, 2019, 10:06:04 am »

I ran a test today to see how long it would take to do my typical pano, which turned out to be about 21 minutes.

Two-image stitch from an IQ3100. ~19400x8700 pixels. I usually flatten the stitched layers but don't flatten the sharpening layer, so the file size is 3.4gb w/ those two layers.

2018 MBP
Mojave 10.14.3
32gb
Radeon Pro 560x 4gb

Topaz Sharpen AI 1.1.0

I didn't think that was too bad. As someone else pointed out, not that big of a deal compared to the overall processing and printing time.

Dave


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bobfriedman

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #132 on: March 15, 2019, 12:01:00 pm »

plug-in still locks up PS CC 2019 for me.. iMacPro Mojave
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Bob Friedman
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bobfriedman

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #133 on: March 15, 2019, 12:10:45 pm »

started standalone with a Tiff... took a jog around the block... was finished by the time I got back. :)

the real problem is that it grabs 100% of the GPU rendering my machine completely I/O bound, except for Sharpen AI of course.
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Bob Friedman
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kers

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #134 on: March 15, 2019, 01:23:56 pm »

AI, as we know; it is not real intelligence...  ;)

I tried some more and have mixed results:
On high iso images the Focus option does a good thing making almost grainless 3200 asa images (skin works well) with more delicate detail,
However on parts were there is no structure it introduces some kind of texture...and false detail, especially when used too strong.
Because of its AI it decides what needs sharpening and what not, resulting in a oneven/ unbalanced sharpening over the whole image.
i have a d850 camera ; On an A4 print i cannot see any difference compared to my normal technique and on a 140 cm wide print i see a bit less grain, but also this uneven sharpening that i do not like.
On screen i cannot see difference on websized images but there is a lot of difference on 100% full size.
Grain is much more of a problem on screen than it is in print and i do not really mind some grain.
I can see some improvement when I use it together with other sharpening techniques resulting in a mixed better result.
All in all i think i stay with my old sharpening techniques, and just make sharp images to begin with.

timing:    sharpen 3min      stabilize 8min     focus 12min
« Last Edit: March 15, 2019, 01:27:00 pm by kers »
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Pieter Kers
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bobfriedman

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #135 on: March 15, 2019, 04:28:47 pm »

so I just tried a 36Mpx TIF that used to take 3min with 1.0.9 now takes 9min with 1.10.0

iMac Pro (2017), 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W 8-core, Radeon Pro Vega 56 8176 MB
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Bob Friedman
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Paul2660

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #136 on: March 15, 2019, 04:55:16 pm »

It's not Mac friendly at all.  Try a 150MP file.  or 100MP file. can't handle it.

You are correct it grabs 100% of both GPU's on a MacPro, but still is very slow and IMO inefficient.   Works fine on any windows machine I have so just move to them when I need to sharpen.

This is just like Gigapixel AI when it first came out.  Topaz did speed it up a bit, but still much slower on Macs.

Paul C
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Paul Caldwell
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Christopher

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #137 on: March 15, 2019, 05:06:51 pm »

One reason certainly is that most mac graphic cards aren’t that new or fast.


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Paul2660

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #138 on: March 15, 2019, 05:13:45 pm »

Neither are most of my windows cards they run circles around my MacPro.  macs do fine with Video editing, and to be honest that takes quite a bit of processing also.  It's more an issue of code that is just not written well for a mac.  Happens all the time. 

Paul C
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Paul Caldwell
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Paul2660

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Re: Sharpen AI by Topaz
« Reply #139 on: March 15, 2019, 05:16:11 pm »

Hi Dave,

Your 21 minutes is about the same I see for a similar file.  I guess I am an exception to the rest.  To me that just way too long and it totally locks my mac down.  Focus Magic can process the same file in 4 minutes, no AI, and all, but it still does a pretty good job. 

Nice shot BTW,

Paul C
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Paul Caldwell
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