Unwanted bokeh sharpening

Topaz Photo AI General
1

The attached sample is from a piece of clip art 640 pixels wide. In general, with a little tweaking, TPAI does a good job of enlarging and sharpening the images. However it’s often “over-enthusiastic” with sharpening bokeh, or anything deliberately out of focus.
Sharpened bokeh

In this screen grab, with the untreated image on the left, the issue is particularly apparent in the over-sharpened ridgeline in the background, although there are artifacts around the clouds, too. In the original image there are two cowboys on horses, and they’re masked as the subjects. The background terrain isn’t masked.

I expect TPAI to clean up obvious pixilation, not give sharp edges to the out of focus ridges.

My current work-around is use GIMP to smear the too-sharp lines. Is there a way to get TPAI to be generally kinder to bokeh?

2

I also got a similar result on clouds with just enhancing size with its sharpen/blur parameters off and no sharpen/blur ai

It is coming from enhance, it does not use the subject mask. enhance does its own segmentation which decides to leave a segment blurry or detail a segment and it seems very poor at decision making (in my case it was only clouds!)

indeed better result using conventional interpolators.

3

The challenge for the AI is to know the difference between intentional blur and noise-induced and/or pixilation-induced errors that should be processed. Perhaps, as a design question, should TP{AI be able to vary the strength of its action based on location within the imag? Or have a way to, in effect, say “tidy up the ridgeline slightly, but the crud around the clouds really needs to be cleaned up”.