Hi everyone,
Topaz Natural is using the focal point to optimize the image improvements, thus avoiding generating details in the grey areas that must remain so.
Topaz Natural is a great technical improvement.
Topaz Standard works in an optimized way but without distinction of the brightness of the areas in the image.
Thus, Topaz Standard can seek to reveal details in the shadows and darkest areas.
This can generate visual artifacts because dark areas have more analog, digital, and compression noise due to the very nature of codecs and their encoding entropy.
Proteus Adaptive (name suggestion), a new model based on Proteus Standard, will solve this recurring problem.
How do I work around Proteus Standard issues in the shadows? To do this:
- The model copies the current image being processed and transforms it from the RGB color space to LAB.
- It keeps only the luminance to focus on the areas of highlights and shadows and to distinguish between the areas to be treated and those to be spared.
- It blurs this luminance by using a 2-8 pixel Gaussian filter to avoid being disturbed by very small light peaks.
- It applies a threshold and a non-linear curve for example of the type: from 100 to 15% brightness = 100%; from 15 to 5% brightness it goes down from 100 to 0% brightness; from 5 to 0% it has fallen to 0%. This cleans the luminance map by clearly distinguishing between well-lit and dark-light areas.
- Proteus Standard uses this optimized brightness map to apply or not to search for details. Details are revealed by light. It is therefore normal to seek to reveal the details in these areas. In darker areas from 99 to 1%, it proportionally reduces the search for detail. At 0%, he doesn’t look for any details. This implementation avoids revealing analog, digital, or compression noise in low-light areas that are very prone to these types of problems.
- The model also uses this card to adapt the level of analog, digital, and compression noise reduction based on the optimized brightness map. In areas with 100% brightness, it applies the Proteus Standard dimming pattern as usual. In areas from 99 to 1% brightness, it gradually increases the noise cancelling power because these areas are noisier. In the 0% brightness zone, it applies the most powerful setting to eliminate this noise as much as possible.
Based on this optimized map of the intrinsic brightness of the image, Proteus Adaptive increases its efficiency while avoiding over-accentuating noise and similarly reduces this noise in the areas that are most conducive to having it!
Kind regards, Vincent.
