Question about Topaz Gigapixel?
FirstBastion
Posts: 7,822
in The Commons
If you have it, are you happy with it and does it deliver? It says up to 6x upscale are the result meeting expectations and worth it?
And if you have the full suite, if you simply rezied an image in PS then ran it through the Topaz Denoiser would you get simlar results? Or is the process and function completely different?
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Hi, I only own Topaz Gigapixel and an older version at that but yes, it's impressive in what it does and most definitely is worth the purchase price. In the beginning a few years back, I did run tests with Photoshop's resizing versus Gigapixel and there was no comparison. I never upgraded because it still does a fine job to this day. Also on a different note for another useful product, I use JPEGMini Pro to downsize my file size after I use Gigapixel, cause increasing with Gigapixel can make a huge file size. So if you need to cut the final resized image size down, without degrading the quality, JPEGMini Pro is excellent as well. Just my 2 cents
I have the lot, and if you do buy it I would be a beta tester, as the new features they're working on are great, particularly noted, is their video editing program is one of my biggest assets, and I'm glad I bought it!
It's best to resize in topaz itself as that's what it's specifically made for, though I haven't tried your method, but who knows? Maybe it will work!
I have Topaz Photo AI, which bundles several of Topaz's products together. I think the maximum upsizing allowed by Photo AI is 4x, not the 6x supported by Gigapixel, but it also includes denoising, sharpening and face enhancement tools.
I've only used it for photographs so far, to fix up blurred or undersized images. I haven't really compared it systematically with other upscaling tools (such as Pixelmator Pro, or Lightroom's Enhance feature), but overall I'd say that the results are comparable, perhaps even slightly better. On the other hand, I don't typically upsize by more than 2x. Once you get to larger magnifications, things can get trickier.
The sharpening, particularly of faces, is definitely better than a conventional Sharpen filter. A standard Sharpen or Unsharp Mask filter is just a mathematical operation on pixels; Photo AI is model-driven, deriving its idea of what a sharper image ought to look like from a huge sample set of images. It's faking everything, of course, but its fake sharpened images are often quite convincing.
It can sometimes go wrong. Here's an example where I used the sharpen and face recovery features to fix a blurred photograph. It was able to salvage the faces of three of the children pretty well, but the fourth -- the boy at the back -- is still blurred. I don't know whether that's because his face is partially hidden, so the face recovery models couldn't work effectively, or because his face is blurred by motion rather than camera shake; Photo AI actually lets you choose between Lens Blur and Motion Blur when you apply it, and if it was correcting for one kind of blur, it may not have coped well with the other kind.
The suite of products are fantastic when they work, frustrating when it doesn't. It's impossible for applications like this to work each and every time. I don't use Gigapixel very often but I've never had good results with 6x. 4x can be distorted, 2x usually works well.
Have you tried the RealESRGAN options out there?
Some have their own GUI or can be installed in Automatic1111
I use one called Waifu2x-Caffe
https://github.com/lltcggie/waifu2x-caffe/releases
use Google translate
its self contained and you just click the exe file in it
For me, it has taken pictures that were too small to be usable, and turned them into barely usable. And it's taken barely usable pictures and turned them into good pictures. It's surprisingly good at times. And there are times it just fails spectacularly. But I think it works fairly well and I don't regret getting it.
I use gigapixel AI to upscale My AI generated Art.
Thank you all for the useful feedback and info. and the examples, I do appreciate it.
And I do like the fact you own the software once you buy it.
Looks like there are a few trials to test out.
Yeah, that is the main reason why I bought it as it's not rentware!
You will get updates for 1 year, and they do update quite frequently. There have been a number of times when updates broke something, but they usually fix it. I use Gigapixel on the poorly compressed textures I find in various Daz products, among other things. This is not really its intended purpose, but it can do a pretty good job upscaling rock textures and stuff like that. There are certainly times when a texture is just too crappy to upscale. It also likes to add new colors into textures when it shouldn't, like bits of green or something in a b&w bump map. At least that is easy to fix, but it gets annoying when it adds seemingly random colorization to a color texture, even when you check the button to retain colors. You will want to play with the various dials and try different models, because one can work better than another on different images.
I will say that if anyone hasn't updated in a while, the software has improved over a couple years ago. Perhaps not drastically, but there are real improvements in the updated models.
If you have a good Nvidia GPU, the upscaling can be very fast. I can take a 2k pic to 8k in just a matter of seconds with my 3090. Ampere cards in general work well, my 3060 is surprisingly quick as well, and is faster than my 1080ti was.
One more note, the Topaz Denoiser is designed for noise in photos, not renders. It is pretty much useless for denoising renders. So no need to get the denoiser unless you wish to denoise photographs. A good denoiser for Iray is the Intel one that mcasual made a script for and it is all free. On the flip side, the Intel denoiser does not handle photos well.
The Topaz AI that does everything is a master of none. It might be handy to be able to sharpen and upscale at the same time, but to me, that seems redundant when the act of upscaling is sharpening the image already. The stand alone upscaler has 6 different models, plus multiple options and dials. The do everything version only has a few upscale models, and doesn't have all the fine tuning dials. So just my opinion, the big Topaz AI pack is pointless. Gigapixel is all I need.
Every one of them has a free trial, and I think it is 30 days (I may be wrong.) So you can try them all out, and the trial length is generous enough to find out if it is what you are looking for.
Yes, they do frequent updates, usually, their betas are extremely busy and constantly updated, so if you do have the program, you'd do well to request being a beta tester!
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but they also have Topas Photo Ai. It enlarges images and does a beautiful job generally. I have several apps that enlarge, but this is my go to usually.