Sharpen AI by Topaz

[brandon]

After a dozen emails over two years I continue to be scrooged: Clarity and now InFocus, the two plugins of theirs I use the most, don't upgrade to the new version for me, says I don't own them when attempting to log in.  I sent them everything, including credit card statements of the purchases, I never heard back.  The mess created by their switch to Studio and different logins two years ago continues.

Not a happy camper. Not using their new plugins. I feel scrooged, so not buying new ones either. 
Jack

I too didn't get automatic free update of Sharpen AI and purchased it with their personal introductory price to me (thinking it must be a best deal). After contacting them they resolved the issue, refunded my money gave me a link to update etc. I think the plug ins, stand alones, studio etc is complex but I've always found them to honour their products and where compatibility issues have arisen (mainly studio) they have sorted out things in a time reasonable considering its been at product introduction time etc.. Additionally I think patience is a quid pro quo for having the advantage of perpetual products.
Cheers
Brandon

[hubell]

That's correct. Capture One often produces somewhat higher resolution output, with fewer artifacts. That is even the case when "Diffraction Correction" is not enabled.

Cheers,
Bart

That sounds to me like under the hood sharpening even when you think it is disabled in outputting to a TIFF.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

That sounds to me like under the hood sharpening even when you think it is disabled in outputting to a TIFF.

Hi,

Not quite. I've attached a comparison I made a long time ago, between the at that time current Lightroom 5.7 and Capture One 8.0.2. The green circle on the resolution test is the Nyquist limit (no reliable detail exists within the circle, it's mostly aliasing artifacts). CaptureOne resolves right up to the limit, whereas Lichtroom/ACR starts aliasing (and showing false color artifacts) before reaching the limit. Both conversions were made from the same Raw file.

That's real resolution, not sharpening.

Cheers,
Bart

[Garnick]

How long ago did you send in the request? I had a similar problem recently and also sent in a request to take care of it. It took about a week and half, but they did get back to me and resolved it; as well as apologized for the delay, which they said is due to being overwhelmed with customer requests related to the new AI products.

Hi Jack,

Yes, it took anywhere from one and a half to two weeks for the initial reply, but it was obvious that they were becoming overwhelmed with requests and issues with their AI products, so I was expecting a longer wait for feedback.  Not a problem, and they were very good about fixing all three issues I brought to their table.  Over all of the years I've been dealing with Topaz Labs they have never let me down with a request or perhaps an issue with one of their plugins.

Gary   

[hubell]

Hi,

Not quite. I've attached a comparison I made a long time ago, between the at that time current Lightroom 5.7 and Capture One 8.0.2. The green circle on the resolution test is the Nyquist limit (no reliable detail exists within the circle, it's mostly aliasing artifacts). CaptureOne resolves right up to the limit, whereas Lichtroom/ACR starts aliasing (and showing false color artifacts) before reaching the limit. Both conversions were made from the same Raw file.

That's real resolution, not sharpening.

Cheers,
Bart

It would be interesting see that test rerun after using the Enhanced Detail conversion of the file into a DNG in LR. Would it level the playing field?

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

It would be interesting see that test rerun after using the Enhanced Detail conversion of the file into a DNG in LR. Would it level the playing field?

It might (should?). I do not have the latest version of ACR converter, so I cannot test it myself.
I'll check with a friend and see if his wife has the latest Lightroom version.

It always helps to have an optimal baseline before further editing.

Cheers,
Bart

[vjbelle]

I had a very interesting bug show up when using Sharpen AI on my Mac.  I have a MacBook Pro 13" that I installed Sharpen AI on just to see how it would work with respect to speed.  Granted it was fairly slow but the image I was using it on ended up with a pixel wide vertical line on the right hand side that was definitely put there by Sharpen AI.  No matter what setting I used or whether or not I left layers in place the line always occurred. 

I tried this same image on my PC ( 35 seconds vs. 10 minutes ) and I ended up with a perfect image.  This is no big deal to me as I don't really expect to use Sharpen AI on my Mac but the fact that the artifact is there could be of interest to someone else. 

Victor

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I had a very interesting bug show up when using Sharpen AI on my Mac.  I have a MacBook Pro 13" that I installed Sharpen AI on just to see how it would work with respect to speed.  Granted it was fairly slow but the image I was using it on ended up with a pixel wide vertical line on the right hand side that was definitely put there by Sharpen AI.  No matter what setting I used or whether or not I left layers in place the line always occurred. 

I tried this same image on my PC ( 35 seconds vs. 10 minutes ) and I ended up with a perfect image.  This is no big deal to me as I don't really expect to use Sharpen AI on my Mac but the fact that the artifact is there could be of interest to someone else.

Hi Victor,

There have been a few other reports of vertical lines appearing on the righthand side of the image, so this will be looked at by the folks at Topaz. These typically point to memory related issues. But since there are so many possible hardware configurations, it might help them if you file a service request, describing your specific hardware and the setting you used.

Cheers,
Bart

[Steve Gordon]

1.1.1 is out.

Trying it now.

Not sure if I’m seeing anything new yet...

[julianv]

Here's another example and a few more thoughts about Topaz Sharpen AI.

It won't help much on images that are really botched, of course.  But if the blur is within the correctable range of the software, the improvements can be dramatic. For this example, exposure was 1/30 second and f/22.  The image is degraded by diffraction and camera shake (hand-held shot, buffeted by wind). From left to right: reduced size full image, unsharpened 100% crop, sharpened crop via Stabilize mode (0.5, 0.3, 0).



Most user complaints are about its sluggishness.  My computer (maxed-out "Late 2014" Retina 5K iMac, running Sierra) can take 20 minutes to process a full frame D850 shot. PC users are reporting much quicker results.  One of the Topaz support reps told me that I would not see significant performance improvements if I replaced my current computer with a newer Mac.

Looking inside the Sharpen AI application package, I found components from the Qt cross-platform framework.  I've never used it, but I've seen comments from developers who gripe that their Mac products built with Qt are running considerably slower than their PC products.

It's possible to get a speed-up for preview updates by reducing the preview image area, using the View > Zoom In menu command. Of course, this does not improve the time required to process the entire image. I noticed that when the program opens a small image file, the preview area can span most or all of the image. But if I process a preview, and then immediately choose to save, the program restarts the same process.  Seems like it should already have what it needs in a buffer.

More gripes: Once I start a preview update or a save, there is no way to pause or cancel, other than doing a force quit of the application.  I'm also finding, that while Sharpen AI is doing its thing, all other processes are virtually paralyzed.  I can't do anything useful in another app.  Surely, the Topaz geeks can fix this, and I'm hoping that they can eventually produce a build with faster processing on a Mac.

[kers]

Here's another example and a few more thoughts about Topaz Sharpen AI.
It won't help much on images that are really botched, of course.  But if the blur is within the correctable range of the software, the improvements can be dramatic. For this example, exposure was 1/30 second and f/22.  The image is degraded by diffraction and camera shake (hand-held shot, buffeted by wind). From left to right: reduced size full image, unsharpened 100% crop, sharpened crop via Stabilize mode (0.5, 0.3, 0).

Great improvement indeed! In my view Topaz Ai can be a big hit and a big miss  and everything in between. To see what it is requires 10 minutes on a mac...
This waterfall is beautiful ; where is it?

[Paul2660]

Yosemite, Vernal Falls, the wet trail.  Full summer from the look of the crowds.

The sample shows a few of the issues others have reported on this software.

Look at the tall tree by the trail, you will see a haloing type of artifact going along the tree, similar to what the Aircraft landing gear had in a previous example.
Look at the grass along the trail and you can see a mazing/grid pattern. 
You see this more with the Focus and stabilize options, than the sharpen.

Both of these have been shown in previous examples.  Hopefully with time Topaz can fix these issues.

As for the processing time on a Mac, for me 20 minutes is really unacceptable on a D850 single image.  Try working on a IQ3100 file or multi shot D850 pano, time taken is just too long.  And the Mac (even a less than one year old MacPro) will be almost frozen until the app has finished.  Which is strange since the software is only using the Video card supposedly.  Radeon 580.  Same card in a 3 year old PC takes 1/3 of the time and PC is not frozen to other apps.

Paul C

[hubell]

I have experimented with Sharpen AI on several X1D and IQ180 files and compared the results to my standby, Focus Magic. Regrettably, the results with Focus Magic are slightly, but discernibly,  better. When you factor in the time on a Mac to process the preview with different settings and the time to apply the chosen settings to a file, Sharpen AI is a no go for me. Perhaps things will change in the future as they work on Sharpen AI, but not now. Focus Magic is just so good and so easy to use.

[bluloo]

I have experimented with Sharpen AI on several X1D and IQ180 files and compared the results to my standby, Focus Magic. Regrettably, the results with Focus Magic are slightly, but discernibly,  better. When you factor in the time on a Mac to process the preview with different settings and the time to apply the chosen settings to a file, Sharpen AI is a no go for me. Perhaps things will change in the future as they work on Sharpen AI, but not now. Focus Magic is just so good and so easy to use.

Agreed. Processing a single image is INCREDIBLY slow.
Focus Magic works well, and Piccure+ (RIP) was excellent - both using a fraction of the resources/time Sharpen AI uses.
It's a good effort but seems  more like a solution in search of a problem at this point.

[mdijb]

I agree.  It took 10 -5 minutes to process one image,

In addition, I did some simple High Pass sharpening on a couple of images  and compared it to Sharpen Ai results and found the simpler High pass method to give similar results with fraction of the effort.

On the other hand, iused Sharpen AI on some Iphone images taken in relativley low light using the "Stabilize" option.  these images took several minutes to run but the result were pretty nice

MDIJB

[julianv]

Focus Magic is just so good and so easy to use.

Unfortunately for me, the makers of Focus Magic say that it does not work on Retina Macs running Photoshop CS6.

[stockjock]

This topic is starting to become so long as to be unwieldy and I'm a little hesitant about throwing in my two cents but I'm going to do it anyway.  I got a free upgrade to Sharpen AI because I bought Topaz InFocus 8 years ago so kudos to Topaz for offering that.  I never liked or used InFocus but I think Sharpen AI deserves a place in my toolkit.   All of the criticisms about the product being incredibly slow and often introducing artifacts etc. etc. seem to me to be valid and I have only gotten good results with the Stabilize mode.  But on a few of the images that I have tried Sharpen AI appears to create realistic detail where none seemed to exist to be recovered.  Most of the time, and on most parts of an image, it seems to me you can get equally good results using Lightroom or whatever other tool is your favorite and with a much faster and easier workflow.  But on some images Sharpen AI really works wonders.

Here are 100% crops of a soft edge of a picture taken with the new Fuji X-T30.   The two images are crops from Sharpen AI and Focus Magic.  All my other sharpening efforts were worse than these two.  I tried sharpening with LR alone, LR's Enhanced Details and then further sharpening in Lightroom, Sharpen AI, and Focus Magic which I am just learning.  Enhanced Details makes a big difference in permitting further sharpening in Lightroom with the Fuji Trans-X files but had no impact when I tried it with Sharpen AI.  I am just learning Focus Magic but it seemed to give cleaner results than LR Enhanced Detail with additional sharpening.  Sharpen AI achieved slightly better results versus Focus Magic and Lightroom Enhanced with added sharpening in the center but Sharpen AI made a significant improvement in the soft edge. 

Bottom line for me is that Sharpen AI is a very imperfect and time consuming tool that is still worth trying on problem images.

[julianv]

If you look at Stockjock's Topaz shot, and examine closely the boundaries between the buildings and the sky, you will see the halo artifacts (what I call "spatial ringing") mentioned elsewhere in this thread.  So far, I have seen this effect only when using the Stabilize mode.

[stockjock]

I have to say I've been looking at all these images at 200% and never noticed that "spatial ringing" until you pointed it out, but I do see what you are talking about.  It doesn't show up in the other sharpening methods I tried.  Since it closely matches the color of the surrounding sky I'm not sure you would ever see it in a print but it is there.  For me, I'm pretty sure that the improvement in the sharpness of the buildings would outweigh this very minor haloing but I can see why you might find it objectionable.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I have to say I've been looking at all these images at 200% and never noticed that "spatial ringing" until you pointed it out, but I do see what you are talking about.  It doesn't show up in the other sharpening methods I tried.  Since it closely matches the color of the surrounding sky I'm not sure you would ever see it in a print but it is there.  For me, I'm pretty sure that the improvement in the sharpness of the buildings would outweigh this very minor haloing but I can see why you might find it objectionable.

Hi,

I wonder if Sharpen AI creates the ringing (which is unlikely), or whether it just amplifies what is already there ...

Cheers,
Bart