Free HDR video tutorial

Free HDR video tutorial

MASTER EXPOSURE BLENDING

Find the best ones

Find the best ones

TOP PHOTOGRAPHY SPOTS

Free wallpapers

Free wallpapers

HIGH-RESOLUTION WALLPAPERS

Topaz Gigapixel AI

I did an article about Topaz Gigapixel AI before, but with all of the recent updates, I thought I do one more. I am quite impressed by the results and have been using it right from when it was available. The ability to enlarge a photo by a lot, and still have a great result is just priceless.

Topaz Gigapixel AI

Today, I will go through some of the uses for it and will add a few more comparisons against photoshop at the end.

Different uses

There are few different uses for Topaz Gigapixel AI so let’s go through them.

  • Enlarging photos – Of course the most basic one is what it was made for, to enlarge photos. It works great for this and now, if I need to print one of my older, smaller, photos, I first enlarge it here. With the latest update, it also detects faces, to make the enlargement even better.
  • Enlarging drawings – While it works great on photos, the results with drawings are even better. Anything with sharp lines and bigger color areas is upscaled perfectly. Can’t really show an example, as I don’t draw and don’t want to use anyone else’s image, but if you try it out, you will be impressed.
  • Oversampling images – For this I did a guide here. By upscaling the image in Gigapixel AI and then downsizing it back to the original size in Photoshop, you will end up with much cleaner and sharper image.
  • Creating high-resolution photos form videos – I had few occasions recently, where I needed to make a printable photo from a video clip. I like to use Media Player Classic as my main video player, and in that one, I just hit Alt+I to save an image of the actual frame. Upscaling that in Gigapixel AI crates a very good quality image to further work with.
  • Upscaling videos – And while we are at upscaling one frame, you can upscale a whole video like that. Just search on youtube for Gigapixel AI upscaled videos. The process here is to first break up the video into frames, upscale those and then combine them back into video. I will not go through detail on this here, but here is one of the ways to do this.

As you can see, you can use it in quite a lot of cases.

Comparisons

Let’s look at few comparisons here. Just to show you how powerful it is. All are compared again a standard upscale in Photoshop, at 100% zoom. I upscaled smaller images here, so it’s easier to see the difference.

First one is a regular photo. Upscaled from 1580×1050 to 6320×4200. That’s from 1.6Mpix to 26.5Mpix. You can see the original file from which this was upscaled here.

The second one with a human face in the photo, as Gigapixel AI now recognizes faces. The difference here is really huge. Upscaled from 1350×900 to 5400×3600. That’s from 1.2Mpix to 19.4Mpix. You can see the original file from which this was enlarged here.

And for the last one, here is one enlarged from a video frame. So going from 1920×1080 to 7680×4320. That is from HD to 8K resolution.

As before, I would suggest you give this one a try, if you ever need to enlarge a photo. You can get a 30 day fully functional trial from the Topaz Labs website here.

Wallpapers

The number of wallpaper downloads is going up every day, so for those that like them, here are even more 4K ones.

All wallpapers are for free and can be distributed further, just link back to this site (of course only for personal use, no commercial use allowed without my permission).

Don’t forget to check out other available wallpapers:

4K wallpapers from Amsterdam

This time all the new ones are from Amsterdam, as usuall with 4K wallpapers, they are all in 3840x2160px resolution.

4K wallpapers from Amsterdam
4K wallpapers from Amsterdam
4K wallpapers from Amsterdam
4K wallpapers from Amsterdam

Red and green fireworks

Let’s do one more photo from the St. Stephens fireworks today. Originally I wanted to do an article today, but in the end, got a bit busy and those take more time. So instead, just a new photo. For this one, I have chosen one with bit more different colors, green and red. Actually, there were many of those there, as green, red and white are the colors of the Hungarian flag.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

Even more fireworks

Let’s do one more fireworks shot. This one was taken close to the finish of the fireworks show when they were many explosions at once. I quickly had to change the camera settings, as they were so bright, all my shots were coming out very overexposed. Actually, when I take fireworks photos, I change the settings often, based on how the photos I’m getting looks like.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

Even more fireworks

Fireworks over the Danube in Budapest

Fireworks over Danube in BudapestAs I mentioned yesterday, let’s do another photo of the St. Stephen’s Day fireworks today. I really had a great view, to see all of them at once. Maybe just form the castle to the left would be a nicer view. But it’s really hard to get a good spot there. The number of people in the city was huge, and a lot of spots are closed off during the fireworks.

Even the spot I got, under the Citadel, was only by luck. I got there 2 hours before the fireworks, and from my experience, that should have been enough. But to my surprise, the area was already full of people with cameras and tripods. Only by pure luck, a lady was leaving from this spot and I managed to put my tripod there. Next time I’m going even earlier.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

Fireworks over Danube in Budapest, Hungary
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