I don’t see a “bloom” topic here so just wanted to add some thoughts. I use GigaPixel and Topaz AI (in my mind GP does overall a better "upscale’ job with less hassle + the AI stuff, and I have not renewed my Photo AI subscription).
I tried Bloom for a few days and while cool. I prefer to stick with GigaPixel as they basically do the same thing and Giga has some advantages over Bloom, namely it’s offline.
Problems with both
At high create levels they both suffer badly from the same “contrast delete” in their output making both, at high creative levels…, barely usable.
Everything gets washed out. Bloom also does not do a great job of actually up-scaling it seems to me. One reason I kinda decided not to continue the subscription is because The upscale can leave a ton of noise, end up blurry (despite more detail) and some other issues like under-detail in weird areas or over-sharpening.
Here then is my feeling: Bloom
#1 Online only. And no delete option. I’m sure is just oversight and will be built.., but Your gallery becomes filled with stuff you can’t get rid off here online. Not a big deal but a bit… why no delete?
#2 Upscaling feels messy with alot of newly generated noise left over (noticeable in skies). This is not random noise but looks like left over from the upscale/grid process. There is a pattern of both dots and darkness that is obviously left over artifacts.
#3 Not super sharp as I would expect. Yes more detail but zoomed to 100% things were.. soft? Hard to explain.
#4 Higher creative modes trigger less and less contrast and almost a fake HDR look that is washed out. Giga P does this as well. Gotta be fixed in both before these modes are useful
#5 Slow. Expect 5+ minutes to go from 1280 px image to 4x or 6x resolution. Yes, you get 4 images but …hmm.. I’d expect faster times considering it’s cloud based and alot of servers back there. My puny GPU cam give me a 4x render in a few minutes. Why is bloom almost the same?
I think the kicker for me in the end was seeing the last few images I tried… I had to run a noise clean up, fix the contrast and was “Soft”. Yes it built a pretty cool looking 10,000 pixel image but I struggled to make it useable because of the side effects. In the end it looked no better when I scaled this image down to 2500 pixels and resized with Gigpixel high fidelity back to 8000px. Disappointing.
(btw, on Giga P for a moment… one REALLY annoying side effect of Giga P is that in addition to the contrast issue, the color gets more and more red—> green Meaning faces go from a nice tan, into sickly orange and greenish orange skin tones. EVERY image I have to recolor back to original colors. I didn’t notice this side effect in Bloom as much.
