I started using digital many years ago because of the cost of film for the many and long vacations we took then. Hence I have a lot of very small digital jpg files from very early digital cameras. I’m about to take alook at jpg to raw AI, but I have a question about workflow.
It seems to me that the magical AIClear (or denoise ai) would be relevant to these as would gigapixel AI, all of which I have. I am about to try out jpeg to raw, but there are a lot of variables and wonder if other people have faced this problem.
Is jpeg to raw AI the best thing to start with or would other tools work as well or better? Or would I first do gigapixel and then jpeg to raw? or forget jpeg to raw…
I’ve tried to find relevant reviews, but none of the reviewers I’ve found so far seem to have any OLD, VERY SMALL jpg files…
This is my opinion only and others may not agree but Jpg to Raw is the least used app in my arsenal, it converts a jpg to a tiff or png file. Gigapixel is more useful to me in increasing the size of the small images without pixelation as well as it doing some sharpening and denoise actions. This image started out as 640 x 480 and has been increased 4 times.
I played around with a trial version of JPGtoRAW a couple of months ago, but couldn’t see the incentive to purchase it. As a matter of curiosity, I took a low res digital JPG that I’d processed in J2R into Gigapixel AI and upscaled it for my 4k TV (on the left here, zoomed in). I then took the original and upscaled it (on the right). As you can see the direct GP AI version is far sharper and displays no colour fringing.
Good test. Unfortunately I had tested it at some point in the past and didn’t buy, so I couldn’t test it again. So I bought it (with a discount because I have most everything they make) and it doesn’t do well on my very small very old digital images. I saw no improvement, and think I also will go with gigapixel. I will probably use them only for web galleries, but they could still use some upsizing if I want to crop at all… So I don’t know what the optimum jpg for this might be. I will try later larger jpgs, but I had seen no reason to convert them to raw in the past – you can manipulate them pretty well as they are. I always used the highest quality jpg and I don’t do phone pics. My guess is it might be useful for low quality jpgs. I would call my very small old ones “low quality”, but…
Sorry, I wasn’t clearer. The image was only enlarged with only one step using a 4x scale increase. You have an option to do it up to 6x with one step. The original was 640x480 pixels…the gigapixel enlargement is 2560x1920 pixels. The enlargement is often better than the original.
The only advantage of the Jpeg to RAW I can see is that TIFF or PNG files do not break down as JPG files may do but their size becomes prohibitive. When using Gigapixel, I’ll crop and/or fix obvious things I don’t want to appear before running through the enlargement. Any fine tuning is done after running it.
