Hi, first time posting here, and an old film lab pro at Technicolor and Eastman.
The best-kept secret of Gigapixel, and a feature that is still in its infancy industry wide, is the ability of AI to uplift 8 bits per channel to 16 just by “Saving As.”
Bit depth uplifting, or “filling in the tweeners,” has been a dream of internet alchemists and hobbyists for decades. The most common fantasy is being able to turn 16 million colors (8bpc) into 1 Billion colors (10 bpc) through a physical transformation that somehow doesn’t follow Newton’s Laws of Physics. Being able to do so would increase dynamic range, saturate the colors, and challenge our senses as if simulating a true 10 bit display.
The biggest rookie error, and it’s pretty common, is to assume that encoding an 8 bit image into a 10+ bit format will “fill in” those fugitive colors. That assumption is mathematically wrong, In truth, it is the same as pouring 8 gallons of water into a 10 gallon bucket. I call it “adding air.”
The beauty of Gigapixel is AI’s ability to actually double the number of output bits by saving to a 16 bit format, Increasing the number of f/stops and available colors, with the bonus effect of eliminating banding.
So, in a scenario that could only be imagined before, Gigapixel can generate this result, by opening the uplifted image in Photoshop 16 bit float space, grading, and downsampling to 8 bit integer for delivery.
Feature Suggestion: Add a lean batch processing mode that would upscale and transform bit depth, and very little else, and would handle PNG Sequences of maybe 100 or so to start. Speed, of course, is the goal.
Not being sure what is going on with the other two Topaz programs along these lines, I welcome any discussion. Note that this topic is not the same as scanning image at 16+ bit float depth.
Mark