We’ve added two new filters of Adjust Lighting and Balance Color. We would like to hear your feedback about the output image quality and about what else controls you want in the two new filters.
Limitations:
Raw image can only save in non-raw (eg tiff) format at this moment. We are working on enabling the raw saving.
The Balance Color filter can be slow on large images. We will have a patch largely improving the performance in a very near future.
On iGPU, exposure filter can give wrong results (bad color cast instead of changing exposure). This will be fix in 09/21/2023 patch.
I’ve tested the Lighting and Color Balance adjustment on a dozen or so selected images so far, and I’m really impressed. These source images are TIFF, 4800dpi, typically ~160GB files. I’ve had a couple of app crashes, but not worried about those yet. Specific observations: (1) The lighting correction often seems to raise the black levels a bit too much. The white end of the curve is great, though. (2) Color balance seems to come out a bit too yellow. Perhaps you could consider adding a manual adjustment for Tint in addition to the Temperature slider. With that said, however, I gave it some particularly tough images (old Kodachrome slides with considerable color degradation), and it did a job comparable to most humans performing manual adjustment. I’m a fan! (I do a great deal of contract image restoration, and am delighted to have this enhanced toolse!)
That’s great to hear, but would you mind clarifying what you mean by ‘160GB files’? I imagine you might mean 160 MB or 1.6 GB, but it’s unclear. There’s almost no chance that your computer has 160 GB or RAM or VRAM, which would be necessary to process images that large - even high end desktop workstations are more likely to have 32-64 GB of RAM and perhaps 8-24 GB of VRAM.
(Apologies if this sounds pedantic, but I’m currently considering upgrading my license to the latest version of this software with particular interest in the Balance Color feature, so it’s important for me to get a better understanding of the performance impact of this feature).
[I’ve noted this elsewhere as a general comment re the new version, but will copy to this specific thread.]
With regard to Adjust Lighting (beta), it would be useful to the Apply to ‘Subject Only’ option added - this is available with Sharpening, but would be useful option with all edit options.
As an example, I’m editing an owl photographed in subdued/dull lighting conditions, (both owl and sky are dull/dark) and I’d like to brighten the owl a little but not the dark sky background. At the moment, any adjustment is brightening both the subject and the backdrop, and thereby in this case over-brightening the sky too much if I’m adjusting the owl brightness.
So far, I like the color adjustment . . . not always perfect but gets things closer. As for the lighting adjustment, all the examples tried so far have over exposed the image with lost of contrast requiring fine tuning from the auto setting. This needs more work to compete with the likes of Radiant Photo.
Adjust Lighting is interesting but the slider needs to work in real time. The way it is now it takes a few seconds for all of the other adjustments to be applied so you move the slider, wait, move the slider wait etc.
Good start. First image I tried it on was a hard image for it to work with - shot inside a church with a dark painting on one side and a stained glass window on the other. Both Lighting and Color do a very good/great job with the painting but both also begin to blow out the window with too much brightness - the change seems to be global? Would echo the request to be able to apply it to subject only or have the AI differentiate the light/dark sections of the image and act appropriately. Great to have the additional features and look forward to their refinement.
I tried the Balance Colour on an Olympus RAW image shot at a concert - the subject was a woman singer - it did well on the hair, but was way off the mark on skin colour.It ended up a shiny purple/pink colour. Maybe needs training against images shot under red and blue stage lights, which are (sadly) the norm in a lot of smaller venues.
The adjust lighting really brings out the healthy colour on peoples faces.
It does make white items a horrible brown colour however.
It would be good to be able to apply just to the subject
I’ve tried the lighting adjustment but it turned things green, so I won’t use that. I’ve done it on a number of photos and it’s the same on them all. I’ve not tried the color balance yet, as I haven’t needed to.
Have tried lighting adjustment on several underexposed jpeg and raw. Doesn’t appear to work at all - if anything it actually made the images darker and also added a green tint.
I use Topaz Photo AI mainly to adjust scans or portrait photography, i.e. torso or bust and above, so I am mainly interested in improving facial features and disinterested in background which I usually edit out in Photoshop. The new Lighting and Color Balance filters seem to weigh in the background too heavily and thus distorting the lighting and color of faces in weird ways. As others have suggested perhaps a Subject Only option for these filters. I think an eye dropper option to select what we want as the greyscale point. Or an option to emphasize Lighting and Color for Skin Tone. That said, I am so glad to see these filters added and can’t wait to see them evolve.
