With Nikon and Panasonic RAW and jpg files I’m still getting very poor skies with Recover and Redefine.
Everything from blobs - scratches - tiling patterns - wildly different patches of sky not even slightly blended with adjacent different sky patches and styles etc etc.
This sequence of skies with different Creativity settings and both Local and Cloud rendering illustrates what I’m seeing.
Will there ever be an end to it ?
Lots of Panorama and HDR Panorama photo editing apps manage to blend clouds very nicely and very quickly - why does Topaz make such a mess of things ???
Photo AI Super Focus is the same - see last example below.
Topaz in the Cloud Render
Cloud results are a bit better than Local but faint tiles still visible
Generative models in Gigapixel are not designed with RAW photography as a use case. Recover and Redefine are intended for images with pixel dimensions of 1024 or less.
When rendering locally with small images:
Recover is designed for photos to restore accurately and
Redefine is tuned for art to add creative distinction
Remember that they demand significant processing power and have special requirements.
Resampling the image first to fit within 1024×1024 will provide the best experience.
Providing a detailed Image description when using Redefine will produce the best results.
Thank you for your reply.
I am aware of your quotes from the standard instructions and guidelines.
My fairly decent Windows 10 PC has an oldish but good i7 7700K 64GB and an RTX4070 Super 12GB and plenty of SSD drive free space - so my hardware should be adequate.
Many of the sky artifacts I have experienced have occurred with small <1024px size online images. I have also achieved excellent 1x upscale results with 4000px plus size images but the skies nearly always have 5-10% areas with exceedingly bad defects. Landscape areas from large originals are nearly always perfect which is why sky defects are so frustrating.
I also draw attention to my comment that so many photo editing software programs make an excellent job of blending multiple sky photos with their Panorama and HDR Panorama blending tools. So it’s doubly frustrating that Topaz doesn’t manage sky areas as well as landscape areas.
Regarding your comment about what Generative models are designed to do - many things in the real world get used for things they were never designed for. Often the “wrong” tool in the right skilled hands can do a much better job than a much more complicated and expensive tool specifically designed for the exact job in hand.
For example as a frustrating fact here in Thailand, some of my neighbours borrow my wood chisels and then normally use them as screwdrivers. They nearly always succeed in fully tightening their screws but not surprisingly they sometimes damage the sharp edge of my chisel blades.
So I regard it as a most welcome if somewhat unexpected bonus that Gigapixel Redefine regularly - and not so often Recover - manage to produce some really excellent results with some of my large photos - jpg, tif & RAW. In the Community Forums I see many examples of other people getting marvelous results from large image inputs. So I think that needs to be openly acknowledged. Excellent results may not be 100% guaranteed for every large input but it certainly happens often enough to be well worth trying, rather than always limiting oneself to only sub 1024px size inputs.
As another example of a happy outcome when breaking the rules, recently I have upscaled x8 and x10 ignoring the Gigapixel 6x “limit”. The results have been excellent even with the rather extended Local render times.
Anyway back to the subject of sky artifacts. There was a brief period with one or two beta and full releases when bad sky tiling was resolved when it seemed as if sky defects were getting tamed. Not sure which exact version(s) were best but sadly from my experience the latest release have reintroduced sky defects albeit not as much as maybe the worst we have ever seen.
So I live in hope that skies can and will be improved …
