Topaz Studio zoom percentages, cross hatching grain artifact, noise reduction without any edits

Topaz Products Product Technical Support
1

Hi everyone, I’ve reached out to Topaz technical support directly by email several times and they have not responded to me at all after asking me to provide more evidence of the issues I was facing. I hope sharing on this discussion board here might help me reach someone in Topaz.

I’ve noticed that the zoom percentage steps in Topaz Studio does not allow me to specify exact steps of 200%, 300%, 400% etc. There is a shortcut to 100% zoom, then the next interval is 125%, 156.2%, 195.3%, 244.1% etc. The zoom slider’s resolution allows for smaller varying steps, but the slider’s resolution is not fine enough to set something like 300%, rather I can get 299.8% and that’s it. It is vital that the zoom intervals are in whole steps so that the preview isn’t interpolated and thus would cause difficulty with judging sharpness. Steps of 200%, 300% etc should only use nearest neighbour enlargement to preserve the original pixels’ values for the optimal preview effect.

In addition, I’ve noticed that the previews in Studio have a weird cross-hatching artifact in the grain pattern of the image, which is not present once the image is saved out. Also, the preview image is very blurry at zoom percentages over 100. Turning on ‘HD Preview’ does not improve the preview quality in this case. No adjustments are applied at all, I’m just simply importing an image into Studio.

Lastly, I’ve noticed that Topaz Studio applies relatively strong noise reduction (that’s the only difference I can spot thus far), simply by importing a TIFF image with no adjustments applied at all in Studio, and then saving the file out again. Perhaps the program is doing some pre-processing to remove hot or stuck pixels, but it should not do anything to my image if I have not applied any adjustments yet.

These are pernicious issues which affect all Studio users regardless of what they intend to use the program for and need to be addressed ASAP. I am attaching an illustration to demonstrate the issues. The attached JPEG shows them side by side: original TIFF image zoomed in to 300%, same file just imported and saved out of Studio with zero adjustments, and also the preview window of Studio.

Here is a Google Drive link to a layered TIFF of the same images, which allows for a much easier visual comparison by turning the visibility of each layer on and off in a program like Photoshop: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a6x33Hp3TbM7v8sP0To0QiCci0Dj3k63/view?usp=sharing

I hope that one of the developers will take note of these issues and address them. Thank you very much for you time.

Studio-preview-problems.jpg3444×1164 1.7 MB

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Studio does not apply Noise Reduction, you need to use the Reduce Noise Adjustment

Studio doesn’t support layered TIFFs, simply flattens it as layered TIFFs are not part of the TIF standard. And, if you save a TIF from Studio it will be as per the ISO standard with a Alpha Channel.

As for the Zoom, you can raise a Request in the Product Feature Request category of Topaz Products.

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No, you are misinterpreting me. What I am saying is there is a bug in Studio which is that it applies noise reduction to imported images even when no adjustment is applied and the original image is saved out.

The procedure to investigate this bug is as such.

  1. Import a new image into Studio. Note that the “Save” button is greyed out since no adjustments are applied yet.
  2. Apply any adjustment by clicking on anything in the Adjusments dropdown menu.
  3. Delete that adjustment, so now nothing is being done to the image. However, the “Save” button is now no longer greyed out.
  4. Save the image.

Now when comparing the saved unedited image from Studio, you will notice that noise reduction was applied even though no adjustments were made.

No again, that’s not what I said. I am providing a layered TIFF of the crops shown in the JPEG for anyone who wishes to have a closer look at them, since it is easier to make a visual comparison by toggling the visibility of the layers than by having to look at them side by side. Differences between the cropped results become much more readily apparent. I never said that Studio was used to create this layered TIFF. It is simply a compilation of the screenshots which I assembled in Photoshop for easier comparison.

Okay, I will do so.