I'm Robin Whalley welcome to Lenscraft today we're
looking at resizing photos to create enlargements what caught my attention is
the recent release of topaz gigapixel this software claims to use machine
learning to improve your results when enlarging photos the website makes a lot
of comparisons with photoshop so I thought I'll run some of my own and
let's test these comparisons to see what we get the image will be using for the
test is one that features a sunrise in Highlands of Scotland that I shot
recently I captured it using a Fuji XT3 and a samyang 12mm
prime lens when we view this at a hundred percent you can see that it's
packed with detail and the foreground is actually very sharp let's check the
current size of the image if we move this to inches we can see we have a 23
by 13 inch print at 240 pixels which is quite large now this dialog also allows
me to make the enlargements to the image I'm going to do this by entering
percentage increases now because I have this blink here
clicked any enhancement I make to the width of the image is reflected in the
height so if I enter a 200% width increase the height also increases by
200% and you'll notice that the resolution of the image remains at 240
if we look further down we have this resample option now when that's not take
what happens is that rather than create new pixels in the image Photoshop Miree
readjust this resolution so if I just really enter here 200% you can see that
the resolution drops to 128 from 240 the pixels of the image have remained the
same all that's happened is we've halved the resolution let's just reach
that and will reset this now to be 240
now if you want to enlarge an image but keep the resolution the same you need to
have the resampled option ticked when the resampled options selected we have
access to different methods that Photoshop uses for the resampling now
some of these methods are very old and probably well in excess of 20 years old
but they can be effective with different types of image so if you were working
with graphics for example the nearest neighbor method may be very effective
but it may not be well suited to photography let's select a very basic
one which is bilinear now if we scale our image by 400% we can get an idea of
the results in this preview window so i'm repositioning the preview window to
look at a small area of the image here and you can see it's making a reasonable
job of resizing it keeping the detail in the grass and the rock but it's a little
soft if we know go to preserve details -
which is a recent method of enlargement you can see that this is a little bit
sharper an alternative new method of resizing was this preserved details and
when we select that the image detail seems to be a little bit crisper now
there's also an automatic option here now if I select that what will happen is
Photoshop tries to create the best enlargement based on what you're doing
at the time in this example there wasn't any
difference between the automatic and the preserve details enlargement in my
preview and that's because Photoshop decided that's the best routine to use
making a 400% increase in the size of this image now something to watch out
for is that depending on what you're intending to do with the resized image
picking the option that gives a sharpest enlargement may not give you the best
finished result so don't be scared to try out some of the other options let's
resize this image to 400% now the computer I'm using is a two year old
27-inch Mac desktop it's got an i7 processor and at the time it was the
best spec you could purchase as you can see Photoshop
completed the resizing pretty quickly in this example let's come down a look at
our detail you can see it's quite sharp viewed as 100%
let's check the image size and we'll put this into inches and you can see we've
got a 93 inch by 53 inch print at 240 pixels per inch looking at what I'm
seeing in the 100% magnification on screen this will give a reasonably good
print and it would certainly be a huge print that you couldn't get to near to
if you wanted to appreciate it at this point I wanted to show you the
gigapixel processing of this image but I can't for two reasons firstly
gigapixel takes a long time to process the image and I do mean a long time
secondly gigapixel hogs all the resources on the computer so I can't
seem to do anything while it's running now that includes doing a screen
recording so as soon as it starts to process the screen recording just seems
to lock up so what I've done is I've created a second test image and it's
cropped from this first image which are then saved as a tiff file here's the
image you can see it's a section of the original if I now fit that one to the
screen so we've taken the section from here and that's it saved
let's check the image size and we've got eight and a half inches by five and a
half inches at 240 pixels let's resize that now to 400% and I'm going to use
the automatic option the image looks reasonable when viewed at a hundred
percent magnification looking at the same area
let's check the image size and we can see we've actually created a 35 by 23
inch image at 240 pixels which is pretty good if you're making a print from this
it should look okay from what we're seeing now let's compare topaz gigapixel
with the image opening topaz gigapixel what you get is this preview and you can
move the preview point around
now at the moment I've got the scaling set to four times or 400% and looking at
this preview the original looks quite blurry as you would expect magnify it to
400 percent but the preview doesn't look particularly great now I've got a
suppressed noise medium and also remove blur at medium now I'm wondering if this
is part of the problem and if I set this to none and this to none do we improve
the results it looks a little less sharp but it's also looking a little bit
blurry it definitely seems to look better with the medium removed blur I'm
suspecting that this suppressing noise and removed blur is causing some sorts
of problem in the preview so I'm going to run it but with these both off the
reason I've jumped back to photoshop is because gigapixel took a minute and 40
seconds to actually process the image and I didn't think it made for a very
good viewing but what I have got open is a couple of images that I did process
the first one which you can see on screen now was processing gigapixel
without any noise reduction or any blur reduction let's have a look at that at
100% at first impressions it looks very good if I compare it to the test image
that I had from Photoshop
you can see that actually it looks a little bit sharper and it certainly
appears to have more detail in there so the claims they're making are actually
pretty accurate there is though something that I don't
like too much what gigapixel appears to have done is
in some of the areas such as here on the rock you can see the details just a
little bit of soft what we're seeing are slight artifacts here where it seems to
have overcompensated on the edges and all four sharpen them
it's then reached the sort of limit of what it can do to tighten up the blurry
pixels so where the pixels are soft it started to try to overemphasize those
but then it's got to the point where it thinks I can't do any more and it stops
processing them and just leaves it like the original if we look back at the
image here you can see those areas are just that little bit softer on the
Photoshop enlargement on gigapixel they look a little bit better but then you've
got these artifacts around here I did run the enlargement again but I set the
sharpness or the reduce blur too high and this is what we get now again it's
not managed to fix these soft areas and it has overemphasized around them where
there is good detail though in the grasses it's made a superb job of really
pulling that out and it's definitely better than the Photoshop best which
actually no looks a little bit soft and blurry in comparison
now I did try sharpening the Photoshop image and it doesn't improve it to the
level that we've got in gigapixel the definitely seems to be detailed being
pulled out in this the question is would you see these sharp edges in a print
well if I look at this at a hundred percent I would say yeah it would show
up but when you're printing you don't tend to see 100% of the detail because
the printer tends to soften edges to some extent let's look at it if it was
at 50% what we've got there is a really sharp image and I can't see the
artifacts anymore now viewing the image at about 50% gives you a good impression
of what the print would look like so although I'm concerned about these
artifacts the print should look pretty good now I haven't tried printing this
yet and I will do in the future but looking at what I'm seeing on screen
actually should make a pretty good print and when you can say that this he's
going to give me a 35 inch print that's pretty good for a piece of software so
my conclusion yes I think gigapixel can produce sharper enlargement with more
detail than Photoshop can at the moment but I am a little bit concerned about
some of the artifacts I was seeing and until I've printed this image I'll
remain concerned I also think the processing time for gigapixel is just
unacceptable and I think it does need to be sorted out it needs to be faster and
less resource hungry will this work for you is it better than Photoshop I
honestly don't know I think it will depend on your images with your camera
and what I would say is if you are interested in something like this I
would go and get the evaluation copy and try it out I have been impressed by what
it can do with my camera phone images and it seems to perform well if you've
not got any softer areas in your image as well I hope you found that
interesting I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft i'll see you
next time for another video