Edited for brevity.
This is a simple, itemized list of my PAI problems.
The list: (Photo examples below for most issues.)
#1 Blurry patches and squares all over the place no matter what mix of settings program wide are used. This is the main deal breaker! Please fix it soon!
#2 Stringy root/spider web like textures on rocks, boulders, cliffs and other objects that should not look biological. This is imo, the 2nd biggest problem/deal breaker.
#3. Plants that do not generate correctly. For instance, an obvious to me pine tree, will suddenly have maple tree like leaves on certain settings. A whole group of obvious pine trees will have little green leaves.
#4. Strange dot like patterns when using the standard model with a higher blur removal setting. Often the standard model can be the best imo, but the dot patterns ruin it in certain image areas.
#5. Considerable over sharpening with certain settings and an inability to dial down that sharpening below a certain point without just shutting the sharpen section off. Can there be a fine tuning, radius setting like PS has?
#6. Painterly, smear like effects on noise reduction settings with higher values, sometimes an extreme painterly effect. Other times, oil paint dab appearance on trees, rocks, with certain models and other settings.
#7. Wavy lines on certain settings, or plants that trail off into long lines.
#8. Rendering the viewport and image is much slower than with Gigapixel, even with my RTX 3090! (But, I’ll take that over other enlarging programs that take five minutes to render.) And, so far, I can’t say the improvements on the results from Giga vs PAI are that substantial to warrant the extra rendering time.
As a request, imo, I would like more manual like control and less “auto” everything. I would like a button to shut that off entirely for my purposes and be able to custom work on my images and save my custom settings for similar photos in a batch. I don’t want to wait for photos to be analyzed every time, of which I rarely use the analysis, as it’s often wrong for my needs.
Please see example issues below.
Biological rocks with a giant helping of blur on the left.
Leaves on conifer trees. In this example the conifer is a bit blurry, but it can do the leaf thing on sharper ones as well, or other issues with other plants and trees.
Swirls of dot like patterns that don’t belong, typically shows up on Standard model. Sometimes the dots can be much larger and much worse.
Why does the slider even allow this sort of thing?
In this example, everything, including the sagebrush, has been flattened, looks more like stones.
In this example, the conifers have tiny leaves and there’s huge jungle like leaves in the middle of the pine grove.
Speed test
For this test I loaded the exact same image in both Giga and PAI. I used the exact same settings as much as could be, and the same view. I had the program set on low rez, switched to standard and started counting seconds. Giga took a fraction of a second. PAI took nearly three seconds, and of course that goes way up if you add on any other settings.
And to boot, the images are not that different, perhaps with Giga being a hair better, but still has the blur issue also.
When you are trying to pan an image around to see results, blink of an eye is wonderful. Three seconds, not so much, or much longer depending on settings.
Here I was using raw remove noise and instead of that, I get paint dab art, even when I lower the strength way down.
Here’s an example of wavy lines. I turned the remove blur slider all the way up to really show the effect, but it still does it even at 50% and less, just not as extreme.
With the exact same setting, Giga did not do this hardly at all on the bush, but nearby rock, it did the lines pretty bad, but only took one second to render the scene when panning.
