This week we have major changes surrounding the AI Engine. This is the portion of the app that runs the various filters and models. Specifically, there should now be various improvements to loading speed and stability in various circumstances as well as caching of preview tiles now which should make the preview experience better on slower machines. A list of various changes related to the engine can be found below. In order to support adding the engine we did have to temporarily pull back some of the straightening additions we made last week due to conflicts. We are looking into adding these back in better form later down the road.
Alongside those changes we also have tons of fixes which should improve stability in various sections of the app. This includes some crashes, freezing in the CLI, preview issues, metadata issues, and more.
As always, the full change log can be found below.
Please give us any feedback or report issues with this release. We’ll be updating TPAI regularly to address those pieces of feedback and issue reports. If there’s a specific image you’d like us to see, you can send it us at this dropbox link.
We’ve recently added the ability to post RAW files under 65MB in the forum. If you are okay with your image being posted in this thread publicly you are free to do so. You are also free to go through our dropbox if you do not want to post publicly.
Updated AI Engine
– Implemented caching of preview tiles to make preview more responsive on slower machines
– Improved model loading speed when stacking models
– Improved Autopilot accuracy
– Fixed lens correction and crop sizes on some RAW images
– Fixed CoreML GPU selection on some Intel Macs
– Fixed some ONNX related crashing issues
Updated to OpenImageIO 2.4.11.0
– Fixes PNG metadata and color issues
Added ability to select low confidence faces manually
Removed various straightening features temporarily
App will now clean thumbnails instead of leaving them in temp directory
Capture One plugin will now send canceled event when no images are saved
Added camera profile translation for Hasselblad X1D II 50C
Mac installer should now respect system theme
Added tpai to PATH on Mac
Fixed applying crop not working via Plug-in Extras in Lightroom
Fixed image processing errors causing the CLI to freeze
Fixed incorrect tooltips being displayed when closing an image while hovering thumbnails
Fixed switching images sometimes causing previous thumbnail to be copied onto new image
Fixed potential crashes surrounding writing images with the wrong size
Fixed order of drag and drop images being backwards
Fixed non-RAW images using MakerNotes EXIF data to determine crop
Fixed XMP files being shown as non-supported (avoids annoying error message when importing RAWs by selecting all in folder)
Fixed very large non-RAW images not generating thumbnails
Fixed some files with “.DNG” extension causing a crash on exit
Fixed potential crash in thumbnail writer
Fixed image previews being shown while exporting
Fixed preview image showing dark/desaturated after finishing or canceling an export
Fixed background of image view sometimes showing as grey when using light system theme
Fixed issue with camera profiles that would prevent select ones from loading correctly
Known issues:
Downscaling with the Enhance filter currently does not work
HDR or Monochrome DNGs which previously did not open may have issues when saving as a DNG
– To get around this you can save as JPEG, PNG, or TIFF which shouldn’t have the same color issues
The only thing I can say about this version is that the Standard Enlargement model is noticeably slower in generating its preview images than the other three models.
Thanks for the new version - too bad you have moved my “idea” of adding the grain button here again to other “ideas”. The new engine does a terrible job in terms of artifacts caused by the denoise tool. And, unfortunately the tool still does not really react to the strength slider I am back to 1.3.2
I have just tested the option, using Photo AI on the RAW file starting from Capture One. Then I can use the same settings and camera profiles as I do normally. The artifacts (halos) are almost gone. This is good news. The bad news is that you have to generate a new DNG, what is at least 3 times the size of the ARW…
With 1.3.2 and again with 1.3.3 I noticed the same problem after updating using the full installer. Using the standalone program. The first time I ran both of them after updating, the program hung in Recovering Faces. Both times I finally had to use Force Quit. In both cases the second time I ran the program everything worked properly.
It seems that even if PAI is set to use the GPU, it appears to rely on the CPU more than Sharpen AI or DeNoise AI with the same setting. Does anyone else notice this?
win10 22H2
13700K
32 GB
RTX 3070 TI with the latest driver
RAW Remove Noise heavily kills details but at the same time may sharpen parts of the same image even more so the first thing I do when opening a RAW file normally is turning off this option!
“App will now clean thumbnails instead of leaving them in temp directory”
Where are these thumbnails located? On the Mac I could not find them anywhere, even with invisible folders revealed.
Speaking of buried folders, on the Mac I have in User>Library>Application Support>Topaz Labs LLC>Topaz Photo AI>coreMLCache files dated almost a year ago. Are these current? 369 megs.
Tested again – and compared to the new Denoise option in Camera RAW. Unfortunately I can only tell you that Adobe currently does a much better job mainly in denoising even surfaces like skies and water. Moreover there are no artifacts with Adobe tool. If you are working with C1, the workflow is not very attractive when having to generate a DNG in Camera RAW first, but if the result is better, the choice is quite simple.
Really look forward to big improvements…
If you open a terminal and run echo $TMPDIR you can see the temp folder on Mac. That’s where the uncleared thumbnails would have gone to. If you have restarted since they were generated the OS should have cleared them for you. The names all end with -thumbnail. During app run these are required to show the thumbnails in the file list view at the bottom.
The coreMLCache folder is a cache for the CoreML model files. These are cached because loading them takes a very long time the first time around. I believe the installer between versions will clear this and it should be populated whenever you run a CoreML model from the app which will then cache that model for later use. I believe it’s not detrimental to delete manually but it will make re-running the models slow the first time around again.
We have temporarily pulled back the GPU models for denoise in particular because they were causing stability issues. So at the moment denoise will be slower than it was previously on Windows machines. We are working on adding them back as well as updating the denoise models in general, but those models are still in beta.
You can get to the temp folder on Windows by typing %temp% into the explorer address bar and then press enter. You can also navigate manually, should be something like C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp
Hello for some time, I noticed that my Topaz Photo AI v1.3.3, does not work at all, when you launch it, it just does nothing, just a black screen and nothing happens after… Basically, I no longer have access.
Thanks in advance for your support.