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Topaz Gigapixel uses artificial intelligence to enlarge images. I did a YouTube video comparing the software with Photoshop in May last year (https://youtu.be/GHnBMuPE48k). The results weren’t always good and not much better than Photoshop with many of the images. But the killer for me was the time it took Gigapixel to produce the enlargement.
Recently Topaz launched a new version of the software, so I decided to download the 30-day trial. So far, I’ve only tried it on around 20 images but WOW!
Most noticeable is the speed of the software which is at least 10 times faster on my Mac that the original. It’s still slow in comparison to the likes of Photoshop but it’s an acceptable speed. I can also use my computer for other things whilst Gigapixel’s running, which I couldn’t before.
As well as the speed, my results have improved considerably. The software has made a great job of every image I’ve tried it with so far. Most of these are images I’ve shot in the past with low resolution cameras of 6-12Mpixels.
For one of my tests I used the above image above, which I shot on a 6Mpixel camera in 2008. The original file is around A4 size when printed at 300dpi, so I decided to resize it to A3. The resized image and print looked great. But this wasn’t really a good test, so I resized it to A2. Again, the print and image looked good, so I decided to resize it to 34” wide.
At this size, I could only print small sections of the image on A4 paper. It’s also the size at which I could see the image starting to break down when I looked very closely. But viewing the print at around 12 inches it looks great.
Having been impressed by Gigapixel’s resizing of a 6Mpixel digital image I wondered how it would cope with a film scan. I decided to try it on one of Exploring Ed’s New York subway scans I mentioned above. The original scan was slightly more than 16.5” wide at 300dpi. It was shot on 35mm Kodak TMAX3200 and I used Gigapixel to double it to just over 33” wide.
I can’t show you the result here but it’s amazing. It’s exceedingly difficult to resize a scanned image and the consensus is you can’t do it. This result would suggest otherwise and it’s something that I’m going to investigate further. I’ll try to get a detailed review together for the next newsletter.
Organising Photos
The final thing I’ve been doing is tidying up my image library. I’ve let it grow significantly over the past few years and it’s in need of attention. I’ve also changed my approach to managing images in the past and I need to migrate those into my new system.
Whilst I’ve been doing this, I also realised that a lot of people have a similar problem. They have either drifted into disorganisation or they just don’t have a system for organising their images. That’s when I had the idea for a couple of videos explaining the basics of a simple approach. You’ll find these on my YouTube channel.
You’ll also find the tutorials on my website mentioned below. |
