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Sharpen Photos with Artificial Intelligence – Topaz Sharpen AI

There are many ways to sharpen photos, like in Photoshop, Lightroom or many other apps available. But Topaz Labs, who is on an AI kick lately, created Sharpen AI, software that uses artificial intelligence to sharpen photos.

Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Today, I want to show you one more piece of software that Topaz labs is releasing. That is a I base. This software is called sharpen Ai. Now if you haven’t seen my other videos from Topaz is AI software, both a jpeg to Roy AI and Ai Gigapixel. Please check out those videos. You can just click on the playlist up here and you’ll be able to see those videos as well. Now today’s software is called sharpen AI and the point of the software is literally to sharpen a photo that is soft, blurred or something like that. Now where with the other two pieces of software, you can do things in batches. I don’t believe you can do batches in sharpen AI, at least not in it’s current state. This is a Beta I am testing right now. This is not a final production. A piece of software from them is just a Beta.

Now what I’m gonna do is I’m going to drag in a photo. Now this is a raw file that was converted to a jpeg. It’s still very high resolution. It’s still a very large jpeg. What I’ve done is I’ve actually uploaded to Google photos which is now going to compress it. And then I’ve read, downloaded the photo and the photo is one where my daughter is actually a sliding down a slide. So she’s actually a little blurry. So I wanted to see what sharpen AI would do to that photo. So you can see here it, it already started in the center of the image. I’m going to just go up to her face cause that’s where I want to see the difference of what it does as far as the focus point. And you can see that as I adjusted it is reprocessing the image that you see.

And it does take a little bit of time. That is AI base. It is uh, looking at a very large image file. If I went with the smaller image or probably go much faster and while it’s waiting, as you can see there are three different processing modes. There are sharpen, their is stabilized and there is focus. And then at the top here you can also search by, you can see a preview of the navigation of the actual image. The RGB levels and the HSL levels as well. Now, um, what is already done is it is sharpen, it has sharpened the image based on what it believes is the best. And if I click on original, you can see this is the original, this is the sharpened version. You can see there’s not much difference between the two. If I go to split, you can also see little bit of a difference of look over here, you can see a little difference of how that looks.

Uh, it’s uh, it definitely is a little bit sharper and of course you can also, you know, adjusted, you could add more green, you can adjust the noise and the blurb amount. But this is what the software thinks is the best for this photo. Now I’m going to go to stabilize it as a different processing mode for sharpening. This is more for something where there’s a, if there’s a little bit of shake now I, the camera was using, which is the Nikon z six actually has a embody VR. So it is stabilizing. So the shake shouldn’t have been an issue at all. Plus, I had a very high ISO and um, I had a pretty fast shutter speed but she was coming down the slide pretty fast. So that’s why she is a little blurry. So there are times where sharpening won’t do any good and I’ve tested a lot of sharpening software from a lot of companies.

I’ve yet to find one that is really, really perfect because typically there is, there is a, uh, a con, there is a uh, a downside to using a sharpening and you can see it right here using the stabilizer. You can see all of these artifacts are starting to come out and that is not good. That is not going to make the photo look very appealing. Um, so let’s switch it to stick to a firm stabilized to focus. You can see the difference in the focus, what it does for, for sharpening of the three. I actually think that the focus one for this photo in particular is actually worse now for focus. This would be if you were literally out of focus. Now the camera that I was using, the Nikon is e six actually does have pretty advanced motion tracking. So it was actually doing a very good job even when she’s coming down the slide.

So the photo is in focus, the mood, the the, the blur is only because she was going faster than what the shutter speed capture at the time. Really the best mode for this photo would be just sharpen. But as you can see with this one, look at the difference, look what it did to her forehead and the edges and everything. You can see that it did sharpen it, but it also kind of made it look a little cartoony and, and too many artifacts I want to go back to sharpen and again, look at the difference is very subtle and I want to show you what happens if you just increase and decrease the blur amount.

Okay,

I’m going to bring it up all the way. Now keep in mind that this is AI is calling home to Topaz is um, neural network of for their Ai. It is figuring out what is best, but when you adjust settings and now needs to take that into consideration. So things take time. Now if you’re using a raw file, you can imagine how much time that would take. This is just a jpeg, may from a raw and the file is only 549 kilobytes. It’s not that big. So some things with AI take some good amount of time. All right, so here we go. Original and the new one, you can see it sharpened a little bit, but it kept the blur. That’s pretty good. It’s still not great. It’s still not as sharp as I would want it to be, but it definitely did a good job.

Look at the teeth. Um, you look at the detail of the flowers and her dress. It definitely sharpened it. So what I would do here is I would just literally go save as choose are wanting to go and what, you know, color space and just save. And it’s going to save that jpeg as a new jpeg and itch sharpen. You know what, again, this photo may not have been the best example for this software in particular, but it really does show you how sharpen it can bring out artifacts, but how the software does actually sharpen, you know, it is what it is. But again, I’m, it’s cool to see Topaz using AI for things like this. Uh, I think of the three software from Topaz that I’ve tested, we using AI so far. My favorite by far is gigapixel because of how well it works. But if you would like to see more videos that use AI, I’ve got an entire playlist that you can get to right now, and it’s all on photo software that uses Ai. And if you liked this video, click that subscribe button below. Now I publish new videos every Monday and Thursday whenever possible. You don’t want to miss it.

By Scott

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