I have processed several thousand scanned images with Photo AI with excellent results it’s what i bought the product primarily for.
I reported a bug (which others have reported in the past) whereby on several images the hair and neck of subjects which has been correctly identified by Photo AI has not been processed correctly.
Only to be told by Topaz that Topaz Products were not indented to be used to process film scans.
This is news to me .
I have several friends that bought the software for exactly that reason.
The topic was subsequently closed and the problem marked as resolved.
I realize that Topaz was never intended to repair tears and dust marks in scanned images i have other ways to deal with that, but upscalling ,face recovery, denoising,sharpening surely this is possible.
I have always been a great fan of Topaz products so I’m disappointed to be treated like this.
I was a software developer myself until i retired so i know the pressure the guys are under and i sympathize with them but to dismiss the problem in this way is disappointing.
If Topaz software is not intended for scanned images then i will need to consider the alternative software on the market.
Original response from Topaz
you’re using our apps with film scans, I’m afraid the results for these photos are going to be very hit or miss.
Our apps have been all trained on photography purely from modern-day digital cameras. In essence, this means that when our AI models come across a photo from a film camera, oftentimes it doesn’t know what it’s looking at. This is due to film photography (especially scans of older prints) behaving much, much differently than modern digital cameras. Things like film grain, scratches or tears on prints, and artifacts from scanning, all are factors that our algorithms have not encountered before when they were trained on digital images.
It’s possible for our software to have occasional success when processing film images, but the photographs would need to be extremely low-noise and would need to be free of all other blemishes. I’m afraid that if you are not getting notable results with Sharpen AI, and you’ve tested out all of the parameters within the app, the film photo you are working with is likely unable to be improved further due to the aforementioned limitations of our software when it comes to film photography. Unfortunately, film photography was never a use-case that we intended our software to work with.
I think this is a clear indication that, because of the way the models are trained, that film scans may or may not be corrected. This isn’t what the program was designed for and I have had some success with film scans but not all in a consistent sense,
If you have a scanner, i believe all can do this, such as a Epson you can use professional mode to restore color and remove dust as a start:
Thanks Don
