Topaz A.I. Gigapixel

You can guess what it does based on the name, but if you did not, it is to resize your photos into much bigger ones. Again, as with the JPEG to RAW AI, the interface is very simple. You just load the image, set the scale, noise reduction and output format. Then it takes few minutes to create your result (of course based on the size of the photo, size of the result and the power of your PC). Converting a 36Mpix JPG into a 1Gigapixel took around 5 minutes for me.

Result examples

Since there is not much to talk about workflow, let’s directly look at some result examples. In all cases, on the left is a version resized to the same size using the automatic resample in Photoshop. On the right is the Topaz A.I. Gigapixel result. All the examples are quite big, as the difference is better visible then.

So first, just to illustrate the difference in size, here is a 100% zoom on a 36Mpix photo, and a 100% zoom after it was resized to 1 Gigapixel. The scale was set to 6x for this one, and yes, the difference is huge.

Now let’s see the detail comparison. Here is a 22Mpix (19Mb JPG) photo from Dubai.

After the 6x resize, it became a 684Mpix photo (551Mb JPG). So let’s zoom into the area in the center. First, this is a 50% zoom.

And here is a 100% zoom to the same spot. You can see, the A.I. Gigapixel result has much more clarity. The machine learning algorithm really selects out the edges, and ads detail when it finds them. So the result is much more detailed, even if fully zoomed in you can see some edge artifacts.

Let’s look at another photo from Bratislava. This was a 36Mpix photo (27Mb JPG) resized with the 6x scale to 1Gigapixel (783Mb JPG). Again, first, here is a 50% zoom.

And here is a 100% zoom. As you can see, A.I. Gigapixel did really nice work here, with cleaning up the sky, and defining the church outline. It’s a bit worse on the trees, but there of course it has less to work with.

Night lamp over Budapest

To break away a bit from all the Winter photos, here is a panorama I took in Budapest last summer. It was a crazy hot day. I wanted a bit different view of the city center, so I decided to include the lamp and part of the wall. Still, it was not easy to edit. The lights on the Chain bridge are crazy bright compared to it’s surrounding and even with multiple shots you get the area overexposed. So I sped actually around 2 hours on this photo, just playing with it to get it to a point I like. There is a random work-space shot I took when I edited it to the side here.

I’m a bit unhappy about the composition though. The laps is on the wrong side. Since the parliament in the back and the lamp are both the brightest elements in the shot, the whole photo is a bit out of balance. I would prefer the lamp to be on the right so the light areas create a frame around the bridge. If I remember, I will try and check if I can get a shot like that when I’m there next time :)

I was a bit lucky that there were only few people passing by. I did this photo as a two shot panorama, with each one from three exposures. Only in the last shot a couple stopped right in the middle of the photo, but luckily I could remove them. You can check my article about that here.

This panorama was created in PTgui (see here how) and then blended in Photoshop.

And here are few details:

Topaz JPEG to RAW AI

Topaz JPEG to RAW AI has a very simple interface. You could call it a image converter, as that’s all it provides. It converts your JPEG into a RAW. You can only choose the input file, choose how strong the noise and blur reduction is and then the output path. You can then choose you output format, being either DNG or TIFF.

In the first version I got, I was not able to open the DNG results in Camera raw or Lightroom, but there was an update since then and now both results work fine.

So all you need to do here, is to load the file and save the result. It take up to a minute to create it, based on the photo used.

Result examples

I did not take a JPEG photo in a very long time. So to try this out, I vent back into my photo library, and I chosen few photos from my photography beginnings.

So fist, let’s look at this photo taken in Liverpool in 2009. There are a lot of shadow areas, so it would be a good candidate for conversion. In all screenshots you will see the original JPEG on the left, the converted DNG on the right. (all these screenshots are quite big, as you would need to see it bigger to see the details)

First impression is, that it cleans up the chromatic aberrations very well. It also added a lot of clarity and sharpness to the photo. In the zoomed image you can see it quite noticeably on the buildings decorations.

But lets open the shadows, and let’s see what effect it will have there. I put shadows to +100 and added one stop of exposure to both version in Lightroom.

I especially like how clear the sign looks in the DNG version. While the overall brightness in the DNG did not change, the photo is much cleaner, sharper, the clarity is much better. Overall is much crisper than the JPG.

I tried to match the result I got using Lightroom, but no luck. Each time I bumped the noise reduction, I would get a blury mess, not a nice crisp result as I got from the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI.

Let’s look at two more photos. The results are quite the same. The boost in clarity and sharpens is quite high (maybe even too much on the nature photo), but I have not noticed much of dynamic range expansion.

If you want to check it out for yourself, here are the original JPGs and the TIFF and DNG conversions for download.

Canon 17mm f4 TSE lens

The Canon 17mm f4 TSE lens is quite an unusual one. Tilt shift lenses, while quite popular with architecture photographers, are not that widely used by other ones. But they are just so great. Not only you can correct perspective distortion in your photos, but you can get views that are normally just not possible. I personally just love to do vertoramas with it, especially of tall buiding while standing really close to them (you seen many photos of the Eiffel tower like that on the blog :))

One of the points I think about, while taking photos, is to take a unique photo, that nobody did before. It’s not really easy if you do landscape and architecture. And using a less used lens, can help you with that, buy giving you a bit different view. That also a reason that I like to do so many panoramas and vertoramas.

Here is one of the many vertoramas I took with this lens.

Canon 24-70mm f2.8 lens

This is my basic go to lens. It could have been a different lens, like a 24-105 or any other with a similar range. It’s just something you grab when you don’t know what you need. The range is good for 90% situations and it just works well. Also making panoramas with this lens without a panoramic head works perfectly.

There is a so called lens trinity in photography. A wide angle (16-35mm or 14-24mm lens) a normal lens (24-70mm) and a zoom lens (70-200mm). With this combination, you will cover a very huge range. But do you need them all? Probably not. It all depends on what type of photos you do.

Let me give you an example. I have a 70-200mm lens. I carry it with me only about 10% of the time, only when I’m sure I will need it. If I need to zoom in, I have the 24-70mm lens, and since my camera is 30Mpix, I can easily crop quite a lot. So If I zoom into 70mm and crop down to 15Mpix, it’s the same as having a 140mm lens with me. This is of course not enough in all cases, but it works well most times.

Here is one of the many panoramas I took with this lens.

Laowa 12mm f2.8 lens

The last of these three is the Laowa 12mm f2.8 lens. It’s the latest lens I bought so the one I have been using for the shortest time. I love doing wide angle photos. And the wider you can go, the better. It’s quite common with architecture and city photos, that you just can’t move further back from something. There is just no place to go. And where sometime a tilt shift lens works better, it’s not all the time.

This ultra wide view of the world is just so different to what most of other lenses and cameras capture. And the more
different it is, the more I like it.

Here is one of the photos I took with this lens.

Down at the Hallstatter see

I have already been to Hallstatt in Austria few times, and each time I was there, I wonder where these spot was. I did see few photo from it, but I could not find the spot where one could go down to the Hallstatter see to get the view. The reason is, that most of the area is private property, so you can’t get down.

But this time, I found the spot, and I also found the reason why I did not notice it before. It’s because each time before I was there in the Summer, and since this is a boat dock, there was always a boat docked here. And it blocked the view. But not this time.

This was the last shot I did during my visit to Hallstat last week. I would maybe do more, but I had problems with my tripod. One of the legs got loose and just detached. So after spending a bit of time trying to fix it, I just took few photos and packed it for the day.

This is a blend of three shots, all edited in Lightroom and then blended in Photoshop.