New User of Topaz Photo AI, using v. 1.5.1; Long time user of Gigapixel, DeNoise, and Sharpen.
I see and appreciate the effort you guys have poured into this ambitious integration of your photo technologies. I’m writing to express two issues with Photo AI that could prevent me from maintaining my license after the 30 day trial period vs keeping my money in and thus supporting its evolution over the next year.
My concerns:
First, your Upscale mode is critically hamstrung vs. Gigapixel. No way to save a tiff in 16 bit format? For me this is a severe limitation. Not as critical, but annoying: no way to select a Color Profile.
Second, Photo AI’s processing time compared to, for example, DxO’s PureRaw, which handles a well balanced and useful combination of noise reduction and lens profile based sharpening in a quarter to an eighth of the time, is a real barrier to using Photo AI as a regular component of my workflow. Indeed Photo AI provides much more nuanced results, but when both noise reduction and sharpening are needed, the multiple passes required when saving the image produce a really steep time/performance curve.
Thank you for considering my comments,
Brad Beukema
What is the input file when you tried to save it out as 16-bit TIF. We do allow for saving in 16-bit TIF, but if there is a specific file type that is not allowing it then I can check the behavior.
You can securely submit your image(s) to my Dropbox using the link below. Please be sure to send me a note to let me know you sent something. Dropbox File Request
Topaz Photo AI processing is expected to take longer than DxO. There are more processes in Topaz Photo AI to improve the image. It will also allow control over the processing, which other applications do not have.
The graphics card on this computer is fairly low performance. It has decent VRAM but the processing is not very good. Do you have another computer you could try using Topaz Photo AI on?
I looked into the saving of 16-bit TIFFs in Photo AI and found that when selecting to save the TIFF with LZW compression, only 8-bit depth is allowed. With no compression or with ZIPed compression, 16-bit depth TIFF is allowed. Curious, why not with LZW compression, a curious limitation.
I just spoke to my team about this. Seems that LZW 16-bit compression is worse than using no compression. Here’s a comparison from this article discussing compression results on TIF:
