Perhaps the CPU gives a slightly sharper image, but this is not what they promise in the preview.
From correspondence with developers, I understand a little what the problem is. And it is not solved by their methods, over the next five years at least. I proposed that they add a switch for a new processing mode - render the image, with multi-threaded feeding it in small pieces into the jaws of AI.
This will work, I have already tried and showed it for all. But developers without enthusiasm want to add this simple function where everything is ready for it. No one contacted me for clarifying the idea. You can look at how I imagine it, but I have not finished modifying the idea of the interface, I just decided to show you.
In fact, there is not one problem, but several problems made that result. But I need free time to finish up examples of errors for submitting a request for their correction.
I don’t know, but I wonder if Topaz has outsourced it’s coding to China (or similar)?
Some of the mistakes that show up in various Topaz products show a lack of fully understanding English.
Example being where Studio 2 had two ‘Looks’ that were both the same and were labelled as ‘Stain Glass’.
“Stained Glass” would obviously be much better (and the name of the ‘Look’ was eventually changed, and reduced to just one copy too), but the lack of English ability to allow thinking that “Stain Glass” was OK shows that English is not a major part of the Topaz vocabulary.
Maybe that’s why some of these long going faults are not getting fixed?
I noticed that the quality of the preview also sometimes changes when I move the view point only a little bit. This can change from quite blurry to really nice sharp with nearly the same preview.
interface
I had a little time to finish my vision of the interface. I tried to transfer from other programs from Topaz Labs portions of the interface that are needed by this program but are missing for some reason.
At the same time, I added functions that fix the biggest bugs and weaknesses of all AI programs from Topaz Labs. It remains only to reach out to the developers for this to be done.
I will now little by little add requests to fix that painful set of bugs that should have been fixed before the release of programs to the world.
Having just tested this software again after giving up back on version 4.1.2, it’s looking worse than ever and the output still doesn’t match the preview, no matter what your settings. CPU is better than GPU, but both are nothing like the preview. From a quick review, v4.4.5 appears to be even less accurate than 4.1.2. This software is a joke and the folks at Topaz should feel ashamed for not being honest. Do they not see that the output and preview don’t match? Why can’t they? What exactly is the problem here?
And for reference, i’ve been a retoucher for 25 years, with clients which include many of the world’s largest brands. I understand very well how to use software and to judge the quality of an image.
Since I am a fan of neural networks and have received a few words in correspondence from developers, I approximately understand the essence of the problem. Although I don’t understand why they didn’t immediately do what I propose to do for all their AI products. The main problem is that they do not train neural networks with pictures larger than 512 pixels. This means that their AI algorithm works only for small pictures in 256x256 or 512x512 pixels. So now they just stretch the picture, with the quality level of any free application, and show on small advertisements how well their algorithm works.
I suggested cutting the incoming large picture into small ones, and even showed how to arrange it in the interface, and showed that you can get the final picture of the preview window level connected from a set of cut ones. But the managers who process incoming requests for bugs do not seem to understand that this can be done without changing the AI algorithm by the hands of one programmer for one week.
Actually more scary, the numbers on the buttons for enlarging and reducing the picture in their interface. Of course, I understand that I’m too old because I know the theory of image resizing algorithms. But an increase in x6 or a decrease in x0.2 is equivalent to a call to kill the remains of good useful data in my picture in the current implementation of image processing.
That explains why the preview window is so small and why making the image smaller before processing often helps getting better results. It also comes close to my assumption that the pixel density and the detail density should match to enable the alorithm to work properly. maybe an image splitter helps: Cut photo into equal parts online - IMG online
That as you described, I consider a bug. The designer should not think about whether the picture matches the algorithm sufficiently for processing. To do this, I added the Auto Focus function in my vision of the interface. It automatically resizes the incoming image to the optimal density of details in the image. The humor is that, only developers know their algorithm and where is its optimal detail density for effective work. And this had to be done before the release of all their AI programs.
I made some experiments with cutting an image into a lot of pieces before processing, but after that I can not merge them to a photo again. Photoshop needs some sort of an overlapping to get the pieces together but the pieces don’t have.
Photoshop and other applications can do cut with overlapping. Use the Slice tool with different parameters twice to get a set of pictures with overlapping. And if you have not noticed, above in the text I recommended another application for stitching images:
And I glue a series of shots as a panoramic shot using the “microsoft image composite editor”.
Well, that does not work. A regular image with so many megapixels is so big and the slices are so small that Photoshop can not get them together anymore no matter if they overlap.
Stitching images in “Microsoft image composite editor”
Although I do not really like Photoshop in terms of PNG or JPG Export for Web. It uses lossy compression as I recall. Photoshop does not know how to make a JPG without losses.
Thanks for the assistance profiwork. My latest issue was not to cut the image into pieces. It was to merge the processed images via Photoshop. That Microsoft tool crashes too often and also was unable to merge the images to a photo again!
It is sad to see such a result in the fifth version. The opinions and wishes of the community are completely ignored.
But I am happy because the scroll-zoom appeared.
Three more years you need to wait and the remaining wishes are realized. And even the interface design of all programs can become the same.
I’ve grown to accept that the final image will not look like the preview, but it is galling to see what is possible when using the underlying AI code on only a small part of the image area as the preview does.
The addition of the Man-Made image type process used with the Max Quality model does produce a slightly better result on your test image that we’ve ever achieved before so at least we have that much progress.
The idea that they could process the image as a series of patches, and then integrate them back together for the final output, is a reasonable one. The seamless stitching of the boundaries may be what makes this a less than straight forward solution.
We will finally be able to describe the pain of working with the program directly to the developers.
The battle for a normal working gigapixel is temporarily moved to this topic:
I hope users and developers can find the problem and solve it. While I didn’t experience it myself, I trust others have and based on the description it does seem like the program is not delivering for some on what is promised.
Considering the nature of your complain I am very confused by this sentence. How can you be so vocally unhappy with preview, but then be happy with AI based zoom in non integer steps (multiples of 100%)? Zoomed preview is far more removed (aka different) from the actual output file than 100% preview.
