Sharpen AI v3.3

same 4 me

To get control over the models click on the switch above.

Also check if there is a new driver for your iGPU.

Sharpen
Here is a play button at the bottom right, in case the animation should not run.

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I agree. In Motion Blur Normal, sharpening is obvious, but noise increases heavily. Then, both Motion Blur Very Blurry and Motion Blur Very Noisy smooth over the noise pretty severely and with no change seeming to happen with the slider.

In general with the other modes (Too Blurry, Too Soft) the smoothing of the noise and texture seems pretty strong in the “Very” modes, just like with motion blur. Its almost like the models are just tweaked to smooth the noise heavily in any “Very” mode.

Now, that’s not saying it doesn’t look stunning at times! At many times, actually, but it’s not logical for the user and not adjustable.

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I mostly use SAI for animal photos which may be special as to the ratio of sharpness to noise in many cases. Many of those pictures suffer from slight motion blur (which any shutter time longer than 1/2000 will inevitably produce when the animal is moving) and some have slight defocussing blur because autofocus, at least with my Canon lenses, seems to be susceptible to (slight) malfocusing on animal fur.

That said, my workflow in SAI is quite simple: I start with the “sharpen” mode at setting “100” which will do a good job on anything that is just slightly blurred, inrespective of the blur being due to motion or focus. When that fails, I use “focus” with settings between about 5 (which is roughly where the sharpening capabilities of “sharpen” end) and 55 (everything higher will produce strong artefacts). When using “sharpen” noise reduction is set to zero as it doesn’t improve anything for my type of pictures. When using “focus” I set NR to zero as well but “Extra NR” is always on - because leaving it off will produce very bad periodical artefacts on smooth backgrounds near to the animal outlines, especially with “focus” set to 25 and above.

I almost never use “stabilize” because it seems to have no use fĂŒr animal photography where the main issue is sharpening the fur texture of the animal.

@TPX: I have found the switch for controlling the settings but when I decided to revert to 2.2.4 I had yet to find a set of settings that give results comparable to my aforementioned workflow in 2.2.4. The game stopper were not so much the settings (I should have found a way to deal with them) but the intolerable slowness to the previews (I use comparison mode so the problem multiplies). My graphics adapter driver is up to date but I have no fancy gaming graphics card, just the on-board Intel 630. Which is quite fast rendering the preview on SAI 2.2.4 but took at least ten times longer with any of the 3.3.x versions I tested.

Same here. I’ve tried 3.3.5 and gone back to 2.2.4. 3.3.5 is good but the models seem to have been trained on fuzzy noisy mobile phone images and the GUI had been dumbed down accordingly. Obviously this is now the main market for the program. Best of luck to Topaz. Sooner or later these new users will realise that cleaning grease, fingerprints and scratches off their phone lenses is just as effective.

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Nope, it just looks different.

The options are the same as they were 3/4 of a year ago.

Doesn’t look that bad.

Please keep in mind that the website compresses the images.
In the upper right corner are compression blocks that do not exist in the original sharpen image.


Sharpen 3.3.5 - Too Soft Very Noisy



Original crop



Full image - 1DX MKI - EF 50mm 1.2L @ f/2

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Yep, I noticed similar

Unfortunately, 3.3.5 is absolutely horrible; there are so many bugs, I cant even get my head around them and some, that render the software not fit for purpose. Some of the sharpening modes, instead of sharpening the image, actually make it look like I applied 100% of Gaussian blur in PS; other modes just simply dont do anything; then when using the masking brush at 0% softness, as I paint through the subject, I only get a narrow line, like strokes, instead of a proper masking, then I have to go over and over to have it masked properly; the progress bar keeps switching from the right bottom to the left bottom; I have auto-update preview turned off, so I use the update preview button, which keeps disappearing/going inactive-in this case I have to either move one of the adjustment sliders or move the image, to which the button becomes active; next one: if I process a photo and export it, then say I go into PS and remove a branch, for example, and export it, then when I pull this edited photo back into Sharpen, it will still show the branch that I removed?! so I have to quit the app, re-launch, reload the image and then it shows the edited version; next: view mode I use split view as standard, but it keeps switching to some other views-mostly to single view.

You need to contact Topaz support. I use v3.3.5 on my Windows 10 machine and it works great. No blurry processing, all the models work, I can set the mask brush to 0% softness and it works with the whole brush. I can’t speak to the Photoshop issue since I don’t use it. I suspect something is wrong with your install so maybe Topaz can help.

As an experiment, have you tried uninstalling SAI (with Ps closed), re-downloading the installer (from the Product Releases page on this forum vs from the Topaz Labs Downloads page) and re-installing (with Ps closed)?

If so, Artisan West’s suggestion that you contact Spt is a good one. Pls be sure to provide them your current system info and which release of Ps you’re using (if using SAI primarily as a plugin).

Thanks. I have. And also have contacted them, but no reply.
I use it as standalone, not as a plug in, so the PS has nothing to do with it.

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Theoretically (!) it should behave the same as standalone or plugin. But sometimes not. So good to know.

Good luck. Yes, it’s the holiday weekend, so I wouldn’t expect any reply until at least Monday or Tuesday. Sometimes there are just flukes with specific systems. They’re usually good at troubleshooting & fixing.

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Can’t Install v3.3.5 when changing the default model directory

sharpenAIInstallERR

I don’t want to install the models in the C: drive because it takes too much disk space.

Sorry to hear that! As a temporary workaround, if you delete that models folder and then re-run the installer it should work. We’re trying to improve this behavior for the next Sharpen release.

I have 3.3.5. Something strange happens pretty often. If I open a TIFF in the standalone app with all settings set on Auto it will suggest a model and the values for the model parameters. If I open the same TIFF in Photoshop and then without any changes to the image I send it to the plug-in I see that Sharpen AI will often choose a different model. Why? Here are screenshots of the same TIFF file opened each way.

Opened in standalone:

st

Opened in Photoshop and then sent to plug-in:

sh-plug

What is going on?

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Henry - Just out of curiosity, which Auto choice looks better to you (standalone or Ps plugin)?

Yes, it does that for me also.

The model and parameter autoselection had always seemed to be far too quick to be doing any deep analysis of the image. Is it just random or is there actual logic to it ?

Perhaps one of the lurking software people could enlighten us ?

On 3.3.5 plug in (PS) it always picks "Out of focus-very blurry. Have not tried with stand alone.
Also as plug in on opening “applying profile” runs until dismissing it. Easy to work around however, so not complaining.

Topaz broke auto model selection in v3.3.x as I’m concerned. It was working fine in v3.1.x and v3.2.x. I already posted about this problem and submitted a support ticket for it but haven’t heard back from Topaz yet.

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The software really feels like it’s broken.

I was quite much happy with the old version, which also did some artifacts but never that much this version is doing. The old problems I could fix with photoshop high pass filtering, but this new version makes images that are much worse than the old ones. The images it creates don’t anymore look the original images at all. It creates completely new, bad looking “shading” to the surfaces. Very dark shadows and stuff like that.

Often, especially with the “auto” settings it actually blurs the images, removing so much details. I’m not sure is it actually sharpening the images at all. It feels like the image quality after processing is worse than the original image.

With Topaz I’ve started becoming very scared to update the programs, because it always is so random if the program actually is getting better or worse. The Sharpen Ai feels like that it’s now worse compared to the old version. I would like to downgrade this, if I would know how to do it.

Thank you for understanding.