Staggering quality improvement using AI Gigapixel on MP2 Files

[Bussty]

Hi SAR
I'm picking you are on a Mac? Still can't see the module for MP2 in available downloads in the WIndows version?. Can't wait to see what DXO PRIME does on noise in MP2 images.
View attachment 55558

Sorted.. looks like you don't update through your DXO Photolab Software but login into DXO and the update is available for free taking version to DXO Photolab Elite 2 version apparently.

 

[sar104]

SAR: Yes, AIG is very slow on my system. Prior to today, I had only fed AIG RAW files, never a TIFF, so I saved a 20mp DNG image from the M2P to 16-bit TIFF in PS and then fed it to AIG. It took about the same amount of time as the DNG file did. (14+ minutes.) Now how you got it to accomplish the same thing in THREE minutess is beyond me.

My system: 8-core I7 (4ghz), 32g memory (70% available), nVidia GTX-970, 1tb SSD drives for boot disk and data disk, Windoze 10 optimized for Performance.

For now, I'm tired of dealing with these huge TIFF files and mucking around with AIG. However, during all this, I learned about a Topaz Studio "pro" adjustment called "AI Clear" which SOUNDS like it's doing the same things as AIG without the upsampling. I gave it a whirl but, it has the same performance problem as AIG and while it did "clean" up the original DNG, again it took forever and the result was no better than when applying Topaz Denoise 6 and then color correcting, which took almost no time at all. I have learned that version 2.0 of AI Clear is available but TL hasn't ginned up the trial version yet.

Anyway, I will undoubtedly purchase AIG for the upsampling capabilities but I don't see me using it in my normal DNG workflow. However, I did drop Topaz Labs a note asking about this as well as about AI Clear. We'll see what they have to say.

Intel Core i9, 2.9 GHz, 6 cores, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Radeon Pro 560X. It's doing all the processing in the GPU.

 

[sar104]

Hi SAR
I'm picking you are on a Mac? Still can't see the module for MP2 in available downloads in the WIndows version?. Can't wait to see what DXO PRIME does on noise in MP2 images.
View attachment 55558

 

[CanadaDrone]

I finally got around to playing with this software. I will say overall it's pretty good, but not perfect. It's underlying problem seems to be that it tries to create detail from unrelated images in it's image library, and thus is not always very good at it. I find for larger details it is very good, and smaller details it is not as good. I used the same image used elsewhere in this thread with the same settings and it essentially ruined this part of the image with artifacts - this is high magnification though.




I also used it on some old smartphone images and it did improve them. Can you make a wall sized print out of a smartphone image? No, probably not, but it will still look better than if you had not used the program if your goal is to print large. The higher resolution the source image, the better your up-res'd image will turn out, which shouldn't be too surprising.

I then tried it on some 1200 X 800 scans my father made of old photos of my family when we were much younger. Again I will say they are better than if you did not use the program, but it gave a very artificial / pastel look to them (even with enhancement at "none"). I think the program does better if you can throw a little more resolution at it.

Then I tried it on some 1200 dpi scans, and that is where I actually found it improved the least. Looking at the original at 430% and the Gigapixel copy at about 130%, the only difference appeared to be the smoothing/NR effect Gigapixel had. This was the least impressive of my tests.

Then I tried it on a Facebook photo (2048 X1360 after download), and I chose a landscape instead of people. I was much more impressed here - it added back a ton of detail that would be clearly visible in a print. This is not good news for people who use low-resolution photos as their first line of defense against image 'pirates'. You could definitely get a decent print from a Facebook photo, especially if it was a landscape or something similar.

Two other observations - 1) It is extremely GPU heavy. If you have a slow GPU and have to use the CPU for processing, it will take forever. In my case (I have a very fast CPU and GPU), the GPU is probably 20X faster. 2) If you process the image first, it produces a better final result than if you just feed the unprocessed RAW into the program.

I did everything at 400% enlargement.

Anyways all in all I think this is good "tool for the toolbox" for lack of a better term. I certainly would not use it in every scenario but it very clearly makes certain images better in other scenarios.

 

[Mindsphere]

Curious if anyone has tried letsenhance.io as an alternative? I've been using it a bit with good results. Haven't had any weird artifacts like in the above post.