V2.0.1 faces look like wax museum

[lhkjacky (Jacky)]

@jerome.marcin

The “others” image manages a realistic balance between sharpness in the guitar and a very pleasing and acceptable hand.

The “Others” images are upscaled using the latest AI upscaling algorithm called DiffBIR, developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai AI Laboratory. They recently released their research paper in arXiv.

DiffBIR utilizes stable diffusion and controlnet to upscale images and regenerate realistic details, including hair, skin texture, clothing texture, text, trees leaves, grasses and more.

Based on my testing, their face recovery surpasses that of GPEN, GFPGAN, CodeFormer, and VQFR, providing more detailed and natural-looking results.

Here is an example from their website.

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Few months ago, in the June Photo Roadmap,
Topaz’s CEO Eric has asked us opinion about using Generative AI to enhance image.

@eric

New tools with generative AI
Topaz Photo AI exists to give superpowers to professional image creators, so we’ve been exploring the potential of newer generative AI methods to give high resolution and realistic output for professional use cases. There’s several promising directions that we wanted to get your feedback on. Which new features would you find most useful in your work?

• 1. A targeted enhance function that generates highly detailed and realistic results of a single object within a small selection
• 2. Select and remove an object with a single click, and fill in the area with believable results.
• 3. Add natural bokeh to your image based on the detected depth of field of your image
• 4. Improve the visual quality of phone photos that often contain splotches caused by suboptimal on-device processing
• 5. Improve blurred or severely degraded text by selecting it and typing in what it should read

Within that topic, I have replied that

@lhkjacky

@eric

generates highly detailed and realistic results

This is the most important.
At the moment, the upscaled image is lack of realistic detail.
It will be great if the generative AI can regenerate skin texture, clothes texture, detail hair, realistic fingers, etc.

Now, It seem that DiffBIR has exactly done what I suggested.

However, Topaz seem to have decided to add option 2 “remove object” to TPAI V2.1 instead.
In my personal opinion, Topaz should focus on improve upscaling and image quality at first piority.
Remove Object can already be done extremely well by using open-source free software such as, Lama Cleaner.