Halos with sharpening in 1.5.0?

Topaz Photo AI General
1

Windows 11 Pro, Photo AI 1.5.0 (I’ll try this with 1.5.1 when I get back home)…

Ordinary image, fairly noisy, high ISO.

I’m getting thin halos…
In Photo AI, Noise reduction RAW Normal Strength 4, Minor Deblur 1, Sharpening Subject Only Standard Strength 20 (same thing happens at least as low as 10) and Denoise 5. This leaves a thin black halo that’s visible mostly above the head/beak and down the left side of the neck.

If instead of using Standard noise reduction I use Lens Blur, even at very low settings such as Strength 4 and Denoise 1, I get a thin white halo between the subject and the black halo.

I don’t know if this is oversharpening - which seems unlikely at such extremely low strength levels - or that with a noisy image, this is the best that Photo AI can do, OR its something else happening that I haven’t thought of, but even with all the settings in Lightroom except exposure set to zero, the halos are visible.

This image uses Standard sharpening.

_A114741_TPR std
_A114741_TPR std800×1200 207 KB

This image uses Lens Blur sharpening.

_A114741_TPR lens
_A114741_TPR lens800×1200 218 KB

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Thanks for uploading those images. This is a known issue with RAW Remove Noise that we’re trying to get fixed for a future release hopefully coming within the next few weeks.

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Do you want the original ARW file?

1 Like
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If it’s too large to upload here, you can submit it to my Dropbox. Let me know when you send something because Dropbox doesn’t always notify me.

5

To make this whole halo thing more interesting…

I recently discovered that when I export a RAW Sony image to Photo AI, and get back a .dng file, the returned file is a DIFFERENT size than what was sent. The original 5616x3744px file comes back 5664x3768 px. It’s being resized by Photo AI during processing. It may not have ANYTHING to do with what’s going on with the halos, but now that I’m sensitized to it, I just put an image I’d worked on in Photoshop, which returned a TIF to Lightroom, through Photo AI (the TIF version).

While watching the image at 100% IN Photo AI, I did SUBJECT ONLY sharpening, which I do at least 95% of the time. There was NO halo, did standard sharpening, and when completed I had a black halo. Repeated. On about the third time I realized I’m NOT getting a “HALO”, the IMAGE is resizing on the screen, with the subject becoming SMALLER, LEAVING a dark edge.

I did a snip 'cause I don’t know how else to show exactly what I’m seeing… If you watch at 100% in Photo AI, maybe depending on subject, you may see the same thing…

The top image is with sharpening on, and being applied. When the sharpening FINISHES, the bird (subject that’s sharpened) gets SMALLER on screen - very visible on the beak, and the space vacated by the smaller subject becomes a dark edge.

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