Enlarging photos with Gigapixel AI - Photoshop Tutorial

- Topaz has a series of tools that incorporate AI into your workflow, in this case machine learning has trained the software to make better decisions to speed things up. We're going to start with Gigapixel AI which is designed for up-ressing images. A lot of times you might have historical images, scans or low quality JPGs and you can't access the high quality originals. This can make it difficult to use these in projects or to further enhance them, but with Gigapixel you could pre-process the images and make them larger. Unlike traditional tools that use interpolation this relies upon machine learning to create the new pixels. It doesn't just double or quadruple the pixels it creates new pixels based upon information and best guesses. I've got two images here and I'll select them and choose to open this with Gigapixel. Now this tutorial on startup will walk you through what it's doing, but effectively it's analyzing the image to create new content. So I'll re-open those and let it analyze the files. What you'll see is a preview here. It takes a little bit of time but it's attempting to sharpen and add in detail. Let's go up to the bird's eye here and you see that it's created new pixels that are also pretty sharp. Now you've got a few options here. But typically what you're going to want to do is stick with one of these straight simple math. 2x, 4x, et cetera. You can also enter in a custom size if you want but I find you get best results by sticking with one of these pre-size amounts. The auto option is going to just analyze the image and create new content. But you can go ahead and take a manual setting here and in this case since there's a lot of noise in the image in can decide to suppress the noise and it's going to remove that. You could also be more aggressive with the blur removal if you want for a shaper photograph. If there's pictures that have faces, be sure to take advantage of face refinement, although this particular image does not since these are human faces it's looking for. You then decide where these go. I'm going to save it back to the source folder for now and it will automatically add the extension Gigapixel, if you want you can convert the file formats so we can go from the lossy JPG file to a higher quality 16 bit TIF file. You also can create other files here and if this was a RAW file you could output a new DNG. Feel free to take advantage of the higher quality 16 bit, but I do suggest maintaining the current color profile for accuracy. Now when you're ready, you can click start. The process is a bit time intensive it has to go through and analyze all of the pixels so depending on the speed of your computer and the speed of your hard drive as well as the original resolution, this may take a few minutes, let's let it finish. Now that the images are done we can click and it will open up that file. Here's the enlarged image and as we zoom in, you see that it's held up quite nicely. Let's compare that to the original, in this case if we zoom in to a similar composition you see that the image goes very soft. Let's pull these apart for a second, and what you're seeing on the top here is the original, compared to the enhanced version. Look at the detail around the eye and the face, this is a technology that I'm really quite impressed with, and it does an excellent job on sizing, not every image is handled perfectly. But it's really come a long way. Let's take a look at the other image we enhanced, in this case a landscape image, and here's our original, we'll zoom in and take a look at some of the details and here's our enhanced. And as you can see it's done a nice job of pulling out the details, now certain areas. For example these cars here have a few artifacts you notice that this car hood looks a little dented. If we look at the original here, it's hard to tell what was there, so in some cases it's not perfect, but it still brought out quite a bit of detail. Notice how this car is just effectively a blob, and comparatively it really found quite a bit and was able to unleash that. As we take a look at the image as a whole here, let's put these two side by side, and you'll see with similar compositions that quite a bit more has really been brought out. If we take a look at that metal texture there you see the original and the new one and just quite a bit more detail. Look at those rivets, and here so much softer. So we're able to really bring things out with AI Gigapixel, and it's an excellent tool for resizing. This can really come in handy if you need to do print output or if you're dealing with low quality sources. It is a bit time consuming and only runs as a stand alone application, but it does support batch processing. Additionally if you don't get perfect results be sure to experiment with the settings and run it again. I find that a little bit of tweaking can warrant different results.