10X MEGAPIXELS with an app!! NOT CLICKBAIT

Tony Northrup compares the three top photo scaling apps to see which does the best job of adding resolution to your exisiting photos, and the results are AMAZING. He compares images for portraits, landscapes, and wildlife.

[topazlabs]

Thank you so much for the thorough comparison and praise you shared for Gigapixel AI, Tony! We're so proud of our Face Recovery AI model and can't wait to see how it helps restore everyone's upscaled, low-resolution portrait photos!

[SilverLarry]

I spent weeks testing all the major upscale and sharpening apps and came to the same conclusion you did - Gigapixel AI is the best of the bunch, particularly since you can choose 5 or 6 different algorithms and compare their results side-by-side in the app. This is particularly beneficial since an algorithm that worked great on one photo may not be the best choice for another photo. You're not stuck with one upscaling/sharpening method as with the other apps.

[Danawilyums]

Just bought Gigapixel AI and it is absolutely worth every dime! Best $85 or so (after your discount) I've ever spent on photography equipment or software. Sure, it isn't perfect yet, but 9 times out of 10 the results are really gratifying. So glad I saw your video. Thanks Guys!

[chrisbrown]

Thanks Tony, I read reviews of this and bought Topaz Gigaplxel AI a while ago. I am happy with it. No one had done such a great job of pointing out its limitations than you. That is a lot of work you did.

[mikeyb]

I’ve been using Topaz’s products for a couple of years now. I shoot mainly wildlife (birds in flight), often requiring high ISO/shutter speeds. I also tend to crop quite heavily. Accordingly, my images can be noisy and not as high resolution as I’d like. However, DeNoise and Gigapixel are simply outstanding at correcting both. I also have Sharpen AI which is similarly incredible. My main RAW processing software is ON1 but, I’d never use its denoising, sharpening nor upscaling features despite them being incorporated within the ON1 package. The Topaz versions are all so much better (I’ve compared the results of each and also tried DXO ‘s Deep Prime). I’ve renewed my Topaz license every year as the number of updates they provide (along with superb customer support) is significant - they’re always improving. The highly talented Mark Smith introduced me to Topaz in one of his videos - I’d encourage anyone to try the free trials of all 3 programs, I’d be lost without them.

[BirdYoumans]

Gigapixel hands down the best to my eye. I wouldn't even pay anything for the first two. One didn't do much and the other was harsh. AI will just get better and better the more it "learns". I just got a pluggin from Waves that removes background noise from video with voice tracks. I can't even believe how well it works and I've been working with music and sound all my life. So the more I see from this AI technology, the more I have come to expect. And yet, each time I just get blown away at what is possible now. Perfect? No, but way better than what went before when you need it for specialized uses.

[unknownKnownunknowns]

Topaz Gigapixel is great software. Amazing detail! Have several 40x60 prints on paper and metal hanging on the wall from A7RII, X-T4, and a stitched 5DIV pano

[mxilplict]

I actually used Topaz to make a canvas print of my father in law for his funeral . From 80k JPG heavily cropped from a wedding reception environmental scene to a perfect 16x20 150 dpi canvas that was the centerpiece for the memorial service and now hangs prominently in my mother in laws foyer. I highly recommend it as well.

[jbrtx]

I'm a hobbyist, and I thinkTopaz has some great software for restoring old, low-res or scanned photos. Gigapixel AI does wonders for faces, IF there's enough information in the original, and if it's not obstructed or damaged. Sometimes, if the picture is too low-res out-of-focus, it guesses wrong about what the eyes or teeth should look like, and though it may be a pleasing image, it does not look like the person it is an image of. Shadows on the face can throw it off as well.

[Photojouralist]

I bought all the Topaz AI software. I was blown away !!! I use Topaz for all my slides I scanned and brought new life the images. And I used Topaz Sharpening AI on my Nikon 50mm 1.2 AIS lens which is always been soft wide open and bam its mind blowing sharp when I put the images through Topaz AI Sharpening

[skyscraperfan]

I see software like that quite critical. The way an AI works that it uses patterns it has learned from millions of other photos it was trained with. So it basically adds content that has not been on the actual photo. Of course every photo gets photoshopped, but during photoshopping you work with what is there, but never add content from other photos. The idea of taking a photo is showing the subject that actually is in front of your camera. Of course with AI a lot is possible, as we saw with the FaceApp for example. That is quite a dangerous path.

You could give an AI a photo of a dressed person and it could create a nude photo of you. The AI did not really see their private parts, but if it was trained with millions of nude photos of other people, the AI would just "guess" how that person might look nude. I am sure sooner or later we will see such an AI and it will make people feel really uncomfortable. That is an extreme example, but those upscaling AIs already go into that direction. The AI can't see much detail of an eye, but it sees that it is blue. So it will just create a fake blue eye, because it knows how blue eyes look like. Especially with portraits that should be avoided.

I wonder if paparazzi will use software like that. They often take photos from a mile away. Although they already have an 800mm lens plus a teleconverter, the subject still is tiny in the frame. So I imagine they will be very tempted to use an upscaling AI.

[Rswell]

Not sure about doing this on sentimental or potentially historically important prints. This may be a bit knit picky, but the fact that the program actually adds or looses textures and details, means that this is no longer a faithful reproduction or restoration of the original.
To my mind, and in these particular circumstances, if the original was a bit blurred or indistinct then that's how it should remain,
For everything else it seems great.

[timothylatour]

I use Gigapixel AI all the time to do just what you discussed -- restoration of old photos. It even significantly improves tiny images, such as three pictures I had that were basically thumbnails. All three were less than 10KB, but when Gigapixel AI corrected and upscaled them, they were perfectly usable as real photographs. I do agree, however, that the app does sometimes produce odd artifacts, some of which can be creepy. This is what I noticed about the Face Recovery feature. If you start with a very poor image, the face can end up looking like a lifeless "doll" face. Luckily, the percent face recovery slider can be lowered so as to keep from overdoing the adjustment. Or it can be turned off altogether (which is what I do sometimes).
I will continue to use Gigapixel AI to restore my thousands of old, scanned photos. It's an amazing app that can turn even an old Instamatic picture from the 1960s into a nice looking image.

[Wolfen]

I played around with Topaz Gigapixel AI a year or so ago but just took the plunge recently. Most of my work is landscape and wildlife and I had some older photos I wanted help in resizing to get some decent wall prints. I was surprised after fiddling with the program for a while. The results were really pretty good. I haven't done much editing with portraits, but if you know what your doing, you'll find Gigapixel to be a program worth buying.

[rreichar]

I shoot birds with a Canon R6 and the RF 100-500mm lens. Awesome lens but a bit short for a 20mp camera. I have used a combination of Topaz Gigapixel and Topaz Sharpen. I generally have more luck with the low resolution setting but I do have to play with the settings on each photo. Results are almost always amazing. I have stuck with the R6 for over a year even though I had originally planned to get an R5 but they were hard to come by when I was shopping so I bought the R6 for the AF. I have used the same workflow for old family pics with great results.

[stephenpartridge]

I bought Gigapixel after trying it, I found it to be awesome for landscape and travel photos especially those taken with the old 350d but I found it better when processed in this order Denoise AI, Sharpen AI, and lastly Gigapixel AI, the difference can be massive!!!

[rhayvenj]

I absolutely LOVE Gigapixel. Seriously. I create 3D artwork (often times for posters and sometimes as book covers). Though I have a really nice computer to render my images fast on, it makes the process even twice as fast as I don't have to render at the size in which the artwork will be placed on. I can render a 300 DPI 16x20 image in 20-30 minutes and turn it into a giant mural with Gigapixel (which would have taken a couple hours of render time if I had rendered at a mural size).😊 I too recommend this software.

[geopapa]

That's great! You should also test what DxO software does with noise. It's mindblowing

[trout]

I just had a very good experience with Gigapixel restoring a 50 year old, heavily faded print. It was pretty amazing at restoring the face.

[michaelkhalsa]

I have the full suite of Topaz products. The one i use all the time is DeNoise, both for removing noise and sharpening. The latest version does a really good job at both. Best to first remove any sharpening and clairty in C1 or lightroom before moving over to Denoise. The latest version is much faster, and thus i am more likely to use it within a workflow for pictures with minor benefits. It usually keeps it clean enough, where i can do further local clarity/sharpening if needed on an image. It also makes bokeh on a higher iso image melt better (when good to start with). I typiicaly use it now on anything over 800iso.

Topaz Sharpen AI, i seldom use. Typically if i am, it means i am trying to recover an image, which means that most likely it is just for personal satisfaction. Sometimes it is like magic. It is also really slow (the other products have been greatly sped up, but not sharpen so much). There may be more for me to discover in Sharpen (?), however, for general purposes, the sharpening in Denoise is all i need. Denoise is also intelligent, i.e., only sharpening what is in focus.

Gigapixel is an amazing product for upscaling. I use it in two ways. Sometimes i have an already good photo shot on a 42 pmx sensor, and i want to get the best possible (larger) print, so i will upscale it 2x with standard, and then adjust it in photoshop for 600dpi and final print size (typicaly bicubic reducer) before printing (canon pro printer). This replaces print sharpening for me, and i allow the Canon pro printing software to do the final automatic sharpening based on paper type (which is gentle). Also i will use gigapixel when using a photo from an a6300 that has been cropped (often at 4x).

The other way i use it is to recover old photos. It is really amazing what it can do. For some kind of pics, it can take a 50 or 100kb compressed jpg and make it look like an original. For this i am often at 6x and experiment with different modes. The art mode often works best, particular with block colors. It is hit or miss with highly compressed faces with extreme upscaling. It might get part of the face correct, but grossly distort other parts (when there is not much to start with). It also does really good at removing jpg compression artifacts (i have some really old scans and 1 mpx images from the first nikon digital cameras).

Topaz is getting better and better at keeping photos looking more natural after processing.