I have seen this topic / question mentioned earlier, but I have not seen a clear reply.
I am a wildlife photographer and many times there is noise due to high ISO, there is heavy crop as the bird is too far off and at times I need to sharpen the image too. I do use Lightroom for basic processing.
There are times where one photo need all the three modules. What would be the best workflow.
Should I do the processing in Lightroom before or after the Topaz modules are used?
In which order should I use the Sharpen, Denoise and Gigapixel modules?
I am not a LR user (On1PR), so can’t advise on that. What I can say is that cropping in TPAI is not great, so do that in LR. I also tend to do my basic editing (ie tone and colour) first, before sending to TPAI. In your case I assume you would send a cropped image to TPAI as a TIF. If you have autopilot on, it will decide what denoising and sharpening is required and you can set your own upscaling value.
Anthony Morgani is not a wildlife photographer but he often uses animal images in his YouTube demos, plus he always sends his mages from LR. Check out his tutorials, which you will find useful. There is a wildlife photographer called Scott Keys, who also posts to YT. He recall he has done videos on post-processing. Again, check them out.
To be honest I would suggest you give DXO products a try to demoseic and denoise the image and either finish it up in Lightroom once DXO produces linear DNG, or if you use PhotoLab from DXO instead you can do it all in one go. Anyway, after that I would use Topaz products for finishing. I would than use Gigapixel for upscale and crop if you need to. While you can use Topaz products for first part, I have had best results with DXO which also relies on AI. But it also has great lens correction and color rendering ability so you can get better final results.
Alternatively you can try Lightroom enhance AI module for de-noise and than use either Topaz Sharpen or Gigapixel. Most Topaz products now have a bit of both and latest Gigapixel offers some better algorithms.
I don’t shoot birds, but I took a random snapshot the other day with Sony a6300, kit lens, APS-C sensor. Not high ISO, but far away birds with soft lens.
