Do you ever wish your photos
were just a little bit sharper?
We have so many cameras available in today's day and age,
including many of the 360 cameras I talk
about on my channel.
And while they all have a lot of perks
and good things about them, one thing
that has always been lacking is sharpness and resolution.
It's always been one of the biggest barriers
with 360 photos.
Due to buying cheaper consumer cameras,
under a thousand dollars, that don't have the resolution
and sharpness that you might like.
Well, what if I told you,
you could instantly double the image quality and sharpness
of any 360 photo in a matter of seconds?
I've got some good news.
You can, and it's using a new software I just discovered.
It's called Topaz Gigapixel AI and it's a paid software.
It costs a hundred dollars.
It's not cheap, but if you were able
to get twice as good photos using this software,
would that not be worth it?
For some people, the answer's yes.
When you're working professionally,
you want as much image quality,
resolution sharpness, as you can possibly get.
And it's easy to justify paying a hundred dollars
to get vastly improved image quality.
And for others that are just shooting for social media,
it's not as easy to justify a price like that.
So regardless of which camp you might fall into,
I'm going to show you this awesome software today,
and you can be the judge.
Spoiler alert, it's seriously amazing.
Okay, so they do have a trial of the software
if you wanna play around with it
before you buy a proper license.
So here, I've imported a shot that was taken
at the Park Hyatt, here in Sydney.
And this was a 360 photo taken with my Theta Z1,
using the Dual Fisheye plugin.
And I've already gone ahead and edited this image,
combined all the bracketed shots together
into my final result, but while it does look good already,
I know we can take it to the next level,
yet again, using the software.
Okay, now here's the basic interface.
It's ridiculously simple.
On the left, you have before.
On the right, you have after.
And then we have a few settings here on the right hand side.
What we're doing in this software is firstly sharpening,
and then, we're removing noise.
So it's gonna be really important to zoom in
into the small details of this shot,
so we can see exactly what we're doing
and what the effect is of these filters.
All right, I'm going to zoom in a hundred percent.
And in real time, it gives you a preview of the before
and after, and without even touching anything,
it predicts what it thinks are the right settings
for fixing this image.
And straight away, you're seeing a big difference
between the before and after there on this wardrobe.
Firstly, there's less noise and artifacts
that we were seeing before, but also,
that straight line is looking a lot sharper.
Let's have a quick look around at other areas of this shot.
Now, what I'm going to do is move the sliders
down the bottom right hand side.
We have Suppress Noise and Remove Blur.
Removing blur, is obviously sharpening.
So you want to play around with this,
to see what level of sharpening looks right.
Most of the time, if you go all the way up
to a hundred percent, it sharpens
to the best of its ability.
However, it is important that you inspect every detail
of your image because sometimes,
over sharpening can create results
that look worse than before, in certain areas.
Let's say the detail wasn't there before.
And you're trying to sharpen a really blurry image.
It's going to try and predict the pixels
and it can get it wrong.
So I'm going to move around this shot, as I edit,
and see if this has had any negative effect anywhere
by turning that sharpening all the way up.
So far, it's looking great.
And look at the texture on that tile.
That really is incredible that it was able
to pull back so much detail that simply wasn't there before.
I've used sharpening in other popular softwares,
like Photoshop and Lightroom, but I've never seen it
as good as I've seen it here inside of Topaz Gigapixel.
Next, I'm going to play with a Suppress Noise slider.
And this does exactly what it says it does.
And as you can see, it just smoothed out that light there.
I think I did a pretty good job at exposing this image
to begin with. But inevitably,
you're going to have some issues that come up
with your shots, no matter how good the camera is,
or no matter how good your techniques are.
Things like noise,
things like artifacts in the image, chromatic aberration.
There are so many things that you simply can't control,
while you're shooting, which is why using software
like this later on is going to help you navigate some
of the bigger issues that still remain,
even after technically, perfectly exposing your image.
I really can't believe the difference
between the before and after here.
That is incredible and when you think of the $99 price
for this software, when that's the before
and that's the after, this is such an easy investment
because it literally looks like I shot this
with a much more expensive and high resolution camera.
So it also means I could charge more for these shots
and make my money back straight away on my very first shoot.
Now, I'm going to zoom out a bit,
so I can see it from a wider perspective,
and have a quick look at the rest of the shot.
Overall, I think it looks great.
Now, there is a face refinement mode you can toggle on
in case you have any faces in your images.
It just adjusts the algorithm a bit,
so your face doesn't look funny, and it doesn't remove bits
of your face that shouldn't be removed.
And that's it.
We've edited this photo and now, it's time to export.
And what we're going to do now,
is choose our final export size.
What this software also does,
once it has intelligently sharpened and reduced the noise
of your shots, is it then takes your images
and stretches them out to a much bigger size
that those sharper details can exist inside of.
You've got twice the resolution, four times, six times,
and then there's a custom option if,
say you wanted five times or three times.
But you really can get up to ridiculously big resolutions,
like 32,000 by 16,000, which is way too big.
And that would produce all kinds of problems later,
trying to upload these massive files to various platforms.
And platforms like Facebook have restrictions,
as to how big the files can be that you're uploading.
So for most 360 photos, I'd recommend choosing two times
because this is going to mean it actually quadruples
the original size of the photo by two times.
That means two times this way and two times this way.
So it's four times, overall, as big.
And that's it.
I did that edit in like 60 seconds.
That was really fast, really easy.
So I'm going to finish it off by hitting the save button
and save to the same source directory
that the image was originally located.
Now, it exports and check out this before and after.
I've gotta say I was blown away
when I first discovered this software and as someone
that mostly uses point and shoot 360 cameras,
this has always been a problem for me.
From now on, it's so good to know I've got this software
at my disposal.
When I need that extra sharpness and an extra level
of noise removal for professional shoots,
I can now feel more confident using consumer 360 cameras
for paid jobs.
Especially when you combine it
with one of the better ones like the Theta Z1,
the image quality gets seriously impressive.
And of course, you can use this software with DSLR 360s
or just any photos, in general.
So yeah, I would strongly recommend considering
Topaz Gigapixel.
I've found it to be worth every cent so far.
I put a link in the description of this video
to Topaz Gigapixel AI, as well
as some of the other really good Topaz softwares
that I also use and recommend.
I consider this software not to be an essential software.
Photoshop and Lightroom are more of the essential ones
because they allow you to do the bigger things
like focusing on your exposure, your colours,
and get the photos looking nice, overall,
in terms of dynamic range and everything else.
However, I have found the more mainstream softwares
to fall a bit short when it comes
to sharpening and de-noising.
So I consider Topaz Gigapixel to be a good,
nice to have software, that is the icing on the cake
on top of what you can do already,
inside of Photoshop, Lightroom, or Affinity Photo.
And that's it for this video.
If you want to see my entire shooting and editing workflows
for great 360 photos that you can use professionally,
then I've got a course called "Virtual Tour Pro,"
that covers all of that.
Peace out.
It's been real.
I'll catch you next time.