Gigapixel v5.1.6

Downloaded 5.1.6 and installed with some trepidation but seems stable, so far so good.

An off topic question. I’m looking at the upgrade plan page which is a bit confusing. I’m assuming if you buy the Photo Upgrade Plan you don’t need to buy it for each individual item you own? Even though it allows you to add each of those individual plans to the cart as well as the Photo Upgrade Plan.

I get a lot of jpgs for upscaling and restoration. I’ve found NATURAL with FACE REFINEMENT works best with REMOVE BLUR turned right down and suppress noise either left to the AI or turned right up.

Any suggestions on better options appreciated.

As I mentioned above it seems unusual but i am waiting for a follow up from Taylor to see if there is an explanation.

I am also interested to learn more about how these options process the image?
Using Gigapixel Natural 55, 50 for video, the result has some cc and higher contrast.
This may not be the case from a technical standpoint, but it shows in Gigapixel’s amplification of remnant Macroblock left after NeatVideo de-noise.

The Gigapixel result includes very bright white flash points that change position from frame to frame.
This is a big problem for poor quality copies in low resolution video.

VEAI CG was a little less polished and remnant Macroblocking was not noticeable.
VEAI HQ tends to clean “off white” and create more depth then reality in some cases.

Welcome any insights into Gigapixel settings.

I test every new release to see how it compares, in terms of image detail, to version 4.4.6. Still not as good when it comes to fine details. It doesn’t matter if it’s GPU, CPU, or OpenVINO. This all started with version 4.5.

5.1.6 has resolved ALL the issues I had. Many thanks for update.

Cheers
Ken

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Almost all. Red stripes on GPU acceleration is still exist on 4x, 6x, and custom upscaling.

I like the performance and image quality of 5.1.5 on Dual Xeon CPUs verses 2080TI GPU image artifacts which appear now an then(CPU is better, for batches and stable image output). Is there any chance for this kind of performance in the future versions on CPU like 5.1.5 (Threadripper/Eypc/Ryzen high cpu core counts)?

Issues are fixed thank you !!

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  • Switching to Man-Made while using CPU mode instantly crashes GP to the desktop. Tried various images at various settings. GPU and OV do not crash.

  • Is there any chance that those first 2% of preview processing can be made multi-threaded?

  • GP still is not able to properly magnify to larger than x6, resulting in a blurry mess compared to anything up to x6 and compared to GP version 4.2.2 (and earlier). This is sort of becoming the long ignored elephant in the room. 32k px limits do not help when more than x6 magnification is needed, like sending an enlarged image to a printer at native 360 dpi.

We’ll be swapping out the back-end in Gigapixel in the next few months, once it’s been completely tested and stable in VEAI. This won’t be an AI model change or anything, but strictly performance. This should be a massive speed improvement to the current processing times - conservatively speaking, at least 2-3 times as fast.

It’s a huge change so will take quite a bit of time to implement and work out the kinks. I’ll keep everyone posted on progress though as we get closer to seeing it in GP.

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VEAI (generally speaking) uses a technique similar to something called temporal anti-aliasing to achieve some of its frame-stability and crispness. It basically uses frames before and after the current frame to infer what certain things in the current frame should look like.

We’ve played around with similar ideas in Gigapixel, but ultimately scrapped them because it’s not the focus of GP and the architecture of the product doesn’t support it easily. We are looking at ways to reduce some of the artifacting you see from old photos, however.

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I’m not sure I understand - are you noticing differences in the entire image with face refinement on or off, or is this just a difference between the Image Type modes? It’s hard to say what exactly’s going on, but the two different modes are two different AI models trained on different sets of images, so there’s definitely going to be differences (major and more subtle) between the two.

I guess it must be because they are different AI models but I see differences in the overall result and with the faces where there is a general overall “softness” using face refinement compared to not.

It seems that man-made gives a far better result without face refinement especially because there is less softness in both the faces and the image overall.

v5.1.0

v.5.16

Great to see this red issue has still not been fixed! If anything it’s gotten WORSE as there’s now even more red areas in the processed image.

Starting to think the developers just don’t care about this problem despite being made aware of it.

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Please refrain from posting like this as it is totally unnecessary, you should read this thread for guidelines how to use and act on this forum …

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Wow, really Don? So it’s totally unnecessary to voice my concern that a longstanding issue has not been resolved and any time I (or other users) have brought it up, we’ve gone ignored by @taylor.bishop?

Don, I LOVE Gigapixel and the work the Topaz team does. But I don’t think it’s right for update after update being pushed forward without the developers taking a serious look at what could be causing this red problem with releases beyond v4.4.5 .

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Update v5.1.6 has broken Photoshop integration for me. When I run Gigapixel from Photoshop, Gigapixel creates a new layer but opens and close immediately with any interaction. I tried reinstalling Gigapixel a couple of times but have been unable to resolve the issue.

Please run as a standalone and go to Help-> Graphics info., press Copy and post the info here please.

You can voice your concern but keep it reasonable and to the point, sarcasm and cynicism are really not useful in this situation. I assume you have also raised a support request with a copy of the image and details of your setup.

If you would like me to have a look at this for you, please either post a link to the original … or you can send me a link to the original on a file sharing site in a PM, then tell me what parameters you are applying to the GigaPixel processing … a screenshot of the setting and the Save panel on the output would suffice if you are running as a standalone or just the settings panel if you are using as a plugin. If you are using as a plugin please quote the host.

Also open the preferences and post a screenshot of those here along with the technical details which you can find by going to Help-> Graphics info. and press copy.

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