This is my first ever 360 photo taken back in 2015 with a 6 megapixel 360 camera.
This is that same photo after 10 seconds of editing inside topaz photo AI.
I promise it's not fake. Holy. As a 360 photographer everything
changed the day I discovered the previous Topaz products Denoise and Gigapixel.
360 photos aren't exactly known for being sharp and smooth but with a few clicks of a button and
the moving of the slider or two I discovered I could instantly double the image quality of my
virtual tour shots even with older photos taken several years ago OMG so now in 2022 topaz have
just released photo AI which seems to be an attempt of combining all of their previous
softwares and the various functions into one but did they do this successfully in this video I'm
going to dive into topaz photo AI just how good it is how it compares to the other topaz software and
if you should spend 200 on it or stick with what you've already got if you're Keen to double your
image quality then be sure to stay to the end to get all the answers now I'll start by saying that
photo AI can be used for both regular photos and 360 photos it's a no-brainer that it works
with smartphone DSLR whatever camera you own that shoots flat photos but also for the 360 Community
photo AI is 360 friendly just like before you can use Photo AI either as a standalone program or
as a plugin within Photoshop or Lightroom the interface is really similar to previous topaz
products where the sliders and settings are on the right hand side and the main preview window with
the before and after is occupying the majority of the window and my personal preference is the
side by side so you can see the before and after but they do also have the split screen or you can
just go full screen and click to see your before and after and what I've done here is intentionally
shot a very noisy and cropped in photos from a 4K video shot at ISO 6400 and I cropped into
less than a tenth of the frame and you can see automatically photo AI has gone to work to try
and improve this image based on what it thinks the photo needs this is called the autopilot feature
where it automatically detects a subject as you can see it's done a really good job isolating my
face and hands and internally it's saying let's denoise and sharpen the face as you would do to
a face and everything else should be denoised and sharpened in a different way that might be a bit
more aggressive because as you probably know over sharpening does not look good on faces and you are
able to refine your mask if you like by increasing or decreasing the sensitivity so how much of the
subject it chooses as well as the softness of the Mask I like my nice and soft so right there
without doing anything at all really photo AI has done a really good job at this low quality photo
now you can go further into this and adjust the settings to your taste so let's try with extreme
noise removal and I think that's better yet again you can choose the strong option for extremely
noisy shots but I find sometimes that blurs other areas so if you can get away with normal I'd do
that the detail slider preserves detail that was there before so like the crease in my jumper you
don't want that stuff disappearing completely I'm not going to go too aggressive here because
if you preserve too much detail it's also going to preserve some of the noise that it thinks is
detailing your shot so I'm going to keep it around 10 Because I'm Happy overall with the
level of detail across this image and we haven't even got to sharpening yet so let's do it shall
we underneath remove noise you'll find sharpen and I always like toggling everything on and off and
trying the different modes just so you know every single photo and situation will require a slightly
different approach and you won't know until you try everything so I'm going to zoom in nice and
close and there's three options standard lens blur and motion blur these are essentially sharpening
setting optimized for the reason that your shot might be blurry is it because of the lens is it
because it's motion blur or is it just low quality and I'm liking lens blur that's definitely sharper
than before and again you can play with the sliders manually bring them all the way up to
see what that looks like it does help to look around your shot to see if it has any negative
effects elsewhere so as you can see the lines on my hand it just looks sharpened so I've gone too
far with the strength of that what happens if I move it all the way back it's still there so that
tells me I need to choose a different sharpen mode Let's Go standard and for sure standard looks the
most natural now back to my face yep that's still sharper than before I'm gonna play around with
strength and Clarity and you've got to be careful not to overdo it here I know it might be tempting
to drag the sliders all the way to the right with every single photo but again that can give it that
over sharpened look so it's all about finding a sweet spot of what looks normal and natural and
in most cases that's at 50 intensity or less we've got to recover faces option as you can see when
I drag the slider to zero that's what it would look like if it didn't detect the face it looks
graphic artwork and that's obviously not a good thing for portraits so the recover face feature
is definitely a good one to have for more natural looking portraits finally we've got
enhanced resolution and in order to activate this we're going to need to upscale our image
and this shot is low quality because it's a crop of a 3840 by 2160 image so as you can see down
the bottom you can see the new widths and Heights if you choose 1X 2x 4X and Max if you do in fact
want to increase the dimensions of your shot and I do so I'm going to go with two times which for
me is 2140 by 1204 the final option is enhanced resolution and what this does is when photo AI
upscales your shots it's adding new pixels in there to try and intelligently add the missing
pixels that could have should have would have been there so let's zoom in really close into
my eye and take a look at that the eye on the left is definitely pixelated the eye on the right much
less so that is a really good feature it's added pixels very accurately as to what it predicted
would be there and like the other modes there are a few different options you can choose you've got
low resolution Graphics which is more for digital art and not portraits and there's natural so
choose whichever one looks best to you for me it's low resolution because this shot is definitely
low resolution so there we have our before and after and it is so much better after not only
do we have way less noise in the background and on my shirt and face but also we've got a lot
more clarity and less pixels overall when we zoom in close making this look like a much more high
quality image than what we started with not only that but it's literally four times the size as
our original I know it says 2x here but by 2x it means 2x this way and 2x this way which is
actually 4X okay so I think we can agree photo AI did a great job but how's it compared to previous
topaz products I've been using gigapixel and denoise for the past few years and they've been
unbeatable I haven't seen anything better than them including native upscaling sharpening and
denoising within Photoshop and live room well I did an interesting experiment now for some
strange reason all topaz products to this point have both a sharpening and a denoising feature
somewhere so in this experiment I tried using the sharpening and denoising Sliders within each
of the Native programs to see what it looks like when using one software only on the left I've got
the original then the photo AI version then the topaz gigapixel version then the denoise version
and the last one you probably think is topaz sharpened but actually I haven't really found
much use for topaz sharpen I really feel like denoising gigapixel are the leaders by far and
I haven't seen anything within sharpen AI that those two softwares can't do so our last photo
on the right hand side is actually the noise and then gigapixel which is my workflow of choice in
many situations especially virtual tours where you're not actually shooting faces but I thought
I tried anyway with this shot but taking a look at these and there are some really good results in a
couple of them I think we can agree that denoise isn't that strong on its own when it comes to
working with faces I think gigapixel is doing a fantastic job at both sharpening and denoising as
is the denoise and gigapixel combination but for me photo AI does the best job at faces for me this
looks the most natural it's done a great job at denoising even though it isn't perfect but it's
really sharpened my eyes nose and general face so if you do mostly shoot people then photo AI
is looking really really strong so let's give this one to photo Ai and I do think you could totally
use gigapixel on its own if you're shooting portraits next I put them side by side in a
virtual tour situation so I shot this photo with my insta 360 X3 which I'll link below and this is
only a 400 camera so you really shouldn't expect miracles with it that said I think these softwares
will be able to work miracles with it so I started with the exact same photo and here are the results
I got so let's start at the clock if you start by looking at the original that's pretty blurry
I think for sure photo AI did a good job as did gigapixel and denoise then with the denoise
and gigapixel combination not only do we not have a single piece of noise but we also have
the sharpest numbers of all five shots I just want to zoom in a bit closer so you can really
see so looking at the 12 and the clock hands it's definitely sharper with the denoise and
gigapixel combination I probably did over sharpen it to be honest but from a wider perspective it
won't be that noticeable still though look at the difference when you go back to the original and
then denoising gigapixel it's miles better going to another part of the shot and it's looking a
bit more even in fact I'd say that photo AI is probably the best and keep in mind that we are
at an extreme level of Zoom here looking at this pillar again all four workflows do do a good job
but I'd probably say the D noise or the denoise and gigapixel combination are the best I've
really found denies to be so good with any kind of wall or flat color where it's just a magnet
for noise and artifacts and denoise wipes it away like it's a windscreen wiper also so the pillar
does seem to be the sharpest with the D noise and gigapixel combination I found gigapixel also to
be fantastic for having a really good sharpening algorithm for inanimate objects overall though I
found photo AI does perform extremely well and is very close to denoising gigapixel let's take one
last look here's the painting in my stairway and to me this one's pretty obvious that the
noise and gigapixel combination is the winner the brush Strokes of the painting are the sharpest
and the gradient also seems really smooth in the whites behind the elephant whereas the others have
these little pixelated bits and blurry lines in general so for Real Estate virtual tours any kind
of architectural work where there isn't faces the combination of denoise and gigapixel is a
winner I've been using this workflow for years and I still feel like it's the best one final
comparison note it seems that photo AI produces the lowest file sizes overall which is definitely
handy because if your shots are massive they're not going to turn into half a gigabyte per photo
and make it hard to upload and download instead it seems to compress it nicely maximizing quality and
minimizing space now I feel like I need to State the obvious here and say that my edits aren't
perfect no doubt you could get slightly better results with all programs however for the sake
of speediness I gave each software about the same amount of time trying to get the best results for
noise and sharpening which was about five minutes per software now let's talk about the big question
and that is pricing the regular price in late 2022 for photo AI is 199 US dollars for gigapixel
denoise sharpen and the whole image quality bundle the normal price is 259 however I do also see them
on sale frequently for 199 or less if you want me to notify you when any of the topaz softwares
go on sale then sign up to my email list below and I'll shoot you an email when I see them on sale so
with prices around the 200 Mark for all software is it worth it yes it absolutely is because when
you're doing professional work for paid clients and you have a tool that can help you double your
image quality especially for us 360 photographers where point and shoot 360 cameras don't always
deliver the sharpest images for virtual tours then topaz software is a blessing and will mean
you could produce higher quality work and in turn charge more for that high quality work if you want
to learn how to land your own paid photo video and virtual tour clients you can do so inside my
two major online courses which reveal all of my best business strategies for earning good money
with your camera so you can finally go full time with it you can learn more about both
courses by following the links in the description so while I truly do think all contenders are worth
the money you pay should you I think there are different circumstances for when you would buy
each specific product so if you haven't bought any topaz products at all and you want to start
increasing your image quality and removing noise from your shots then I'd probably just start with
photo AI everything is there in one you don't need multiple software running at once and it delivers
results that that are good enough and while it's not always better than denoising gigapixel the
workflow will be simpler the file sizes will be lower and the overall end result is still going
to be significantly better than your before photos if you're okay with a slightly longer workflow and
you're shooting a lot of content that isn't so much people based so real estate architectural
Landscapes virtual tours where you really do need high quality on those inanimate objects then I'd
probably still get gigapixel ND noise they really do look fantastic and these two softwares have
been my go-to for the past several years shooting virtual tours what about if you already own
gigapixel denoise or sharpen well I think you can probably guess I'd just keep them they do a great
job and your results aren't really going to be any better with photo AI except in very specific
circumstances like if you're shooting a lot of portraits and you want to try multiple softwares
to see which one delivers the best result for sharpening and denoising then I guess I'd get
photo AI but it really is not essential overall I do like where Topaz are going with photo AI but I
still think it's very early days and it's not an obvious upgrade at this point in time I'll
finish by saying that there are obviously other apps outside of topaz products that can achieve
similar results so it's definitely not a one-horse race that said if you have any suggestions for
other software that achieves the same or better result be sure to let me know down below that's
it for this video let me know if you have any questions again subscribe to my email list if
you want me to send you discounts when they come along for all topaz software peace out