A.i. Gigapixel

I find it excellent, it intuitively adds "lost" information because its artificial intelligence algorithm recognises say hair or feathers and knows how to complete the data so the enlargement looks flawless. Can expand by 600% so there is penty of opportunity to make saleable work of cellphone sized photos.

Here is a facebook group dedicated to its use.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/topaz.ai.gigapixel/

It's fabulous for digital art. For photos, it depends on the image. On one of my photos, taken with a point and shoot camera, it added lines to the sky. For images taken with my professional camera, the results are better.

Wow! I was prepared to be unimpressed. I WANTED to be unimpressed so I wouldn't fall for their Black Friday sale. But it looks like $75 might be a valid investment after all. Have lots of cropped birds and other wildlife that would benefit from enlargement. The examples on the FB group page made me a believer, particularly the female cardinal by Kirk Sewell.

One more question - Have you found that your upsized files exceed FAA's 25 meg limit? That's kinda important.

Initially, yes. But that's no problem, because you can choose exactly how much you want to enlarge your image. You can choose 150%, 200%, 400%, 600% or a custom percentage.

Thanks, Elisabeth.

Rather than going off half-cocked, per usual, I'm downloading the trial. They highly recommend against trying to use this on a laptop but I will give it a go anyway. No way am I going to sit at a desk or table to work. My graphic card isn't top of the line but apparently there's a choice of running it through CPU rather than GPU. Thinking the CPU has enough muscle. We'll see.

I use it on a laptop without a problem.

That's great, Elisabeth. My graphics card barely meets their minimum requirement. Do you know whether yours meets their recommended requirement?

Taking forever to download. At this rate, the sale will be over by the time it installs, lol.

I have no idea, all I can tell you is that I have an HP Envy laptop.

My Mac Mini barely meets the requirements.

I gave some old Nikon D1 files, 2.74MP, a go and found too many artifacts.

The rest of my stuff is 12MP to 22MP and so far I haven't seen a need to try to uprez them.

My system ran the trial version well enough. I'm running an Intel i5 with 8GB of ram, Intel HD Graphics 530 onboard. Nothing at all special, just a very basic Dell desktop I bought 3 1/2 years ago for $600. It would take a few minutes to process an enlargement but it would do it.

I just tried it on a full res, but small dimensions, crop of a bird. Wasn't quite as sharp as the original at 400% so tried it at 200% and it was great. Actually a tiny bit sharper than the original, with no obvious artifacts. Not relying on it to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but seems that it does well enough when it has a technically decent image to start with.

It's working on cranking out a 400% version of a cropped wood duck now. It takes a long time to render so maybe I'll try using the CPU mode next time to see if that's any faster.

It works much better on 150% or 200% than on 600%! That's when you start seeing strange things ...

I used the trail for a and old canon 30d (is that the right number - the 6mp slr), for which I had needed a large image. It appeared to work well. And now that I've seen tis page I may actually have to buy it.

Does the sale end at midnight Eastern, or?

OK, I'm sold. Wow.

Way to go Kathleen Bishop!

The laptop thing is a weird distinction. A laptop can be as powerful as you like—the laptop-ness of it has little bearing on capability.


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bestilled.com

I watched the YouTube video on it and listen to the members testimonials and I am impressed.
Having quite a few miniature oil paintings in my collection, I can see a real use in this application of A.I.
I am very interested where this application leads to.

Drew, I'm a skeptic about all of these miracle cures. Fully intended this to be more snake oil. Not this time! I've taken tiny crops of birds that were shot at a distance and blown them up to print at as much as 72" without loss of quality.

Have found that it's important to go over the original PSD/TIF or whatever first to make sure there are no significant noise issues before converting to JPEG to run through the program. A.I. will deal with noise to some degree but that is offset by its sharpening (you can turn off both noise and blur reduction). I've also had to go over the output to selectively remove noise from areas that were a bit over-sharpened. No big deal.

Have begun swapping out the dinky files here for new big ones and they look every bit as good through the green square thingamajig.

i am looking into this software..how does the noise reduction in this compare to their AI Clear? one day left for the specials

Jon, I haven't used AI Clear but I do use the NIK set to remove noise before, and sometimes after. Found that NIK works better than Gigapixel for noise. If anything, Gigapixel magnifies existing noise as it sharpens. You can set Gigapixel "Reduce Noise and Blur" to Moderate, Strong or None. I haven't tried Strong.

I made the plunge yesterday for $74.99 (regular $99.99). I've only tried it on a few images with my newish ASUS Zenbook 430. Here are my initial impressions. It works great at enlarging what you have. If your image is razor sharp at 100%, then the enlarged version is really good. But if you crop the original too much, you lose sharpness and that is carried over into the enlarged image as well. If you start with a small image that is out of focus, you will end with a large image that is also out of focus.

I did an experiment with an image that is not as sharp as I would have liked. I enlarged it 400% and was hoping the the added pixels would make if a difference if I then resized down the enlarged image, but unfortunately it didn't add any sharpness. Wishful thinking.

Overall, I'm happy with my purchase and plan on using it, but only when needed.

I've noticed that too, David. Need to start with technically good images otherwise it's garbage in, garbage out.

Working on enlarging some landscapes that were pretty big to start with. Going for ginormous.

One con: It is addictive.

Thanks for reminding me kathleen...and I have not heard that phrase for a while..I like it...

Chalk me up as another skeptical tester who was impressed enough to buy it. It's actually pretty remarkable. The sale price still seems to be in effect too (even though the countdown timer to the end of the sale has reached its end).


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bestilled.com

Ran a Ferruginous hawk through AIG to blow to 200%. Went over the output carefully at 100%, looking for issues. Sharp and clear as the original, so I uploaded. Then I looked at the patterned wing feathers through the green square, and they look more like a digital painting rather than a straight-up photo. Not so when I looked at it in PS at 100%. I'm wondering if the culprit is file degradation/compression to produce thumbs for display?

https://kathleen-bishop.pixels.com/featured/ferruginous-hawk-portrait-kathleen-bishop.html

Edit: Decided to swap it out for the original. Can't take a chance that a print will look like the thumb.

Yes, it’s not perfect. On some images you can get away with it, but it truly does depend on the image.

I wish there was a way to know definitely whether thumbs of enlarged files ONLY look crappy because the thumbs are so degraded, or if there really is an issue due to enlargement.

Many of the files I enlarged look crummy on my end but some did not. I need to hold off on posting the "good ones" until I know for sure. Too bad I can't do a few test prints.

Enlarging creates pixels where there are none

That degrades images as it's making things up

I just downloaded a free trial. I have an image of a jumping tuna that attracts a lot of interest but was a heavy crop. I enlarged it 200% and cropped it even more than what i had before. It looks clearer that the version I had up before. I am very pleased, even though it only makes a small print. I have a few more to do. I am not going to upsize my mages here unless it is really needed. I don't want to risk degrading the quality of everything just to make an occasional large image sale.
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/jumping-yellowfin-tuna-bradford-martin.html?newartwork=true

Question, Abbie: If the image doesn't look degraded at all when viewed at 100% on my hard drive, is it the compression of the file for the thumb display that causes the issues I see?

Great shot, Bradford! I may try that on a breaching whale that was used in a book but too small to upload here.

"That degrades images as it's making things up"

I'm sure it's interpolating pixels like any enlargement does, however they've added some kind of "AI" that does it intelligently. If the image is a reasonable size and good quality to begin with, in other words if the software has enough good material to work with it can produce results that don't look like an enlargement, in other words you wouldn't know if the artist didn't tell you. I was very disappointed with ON1, but very impressed with AI Gigapixel. It took my old 8mp photos up to 6000+ pixels with no noticeable degradation assuming the original photo was good, however the "garbage in garbage out" rule still applies.

Kathy, I have also noticed that my images under the FAA loop don't look as good as they do on my computer.

Update - have had good luck upsizing *some* files. Found it best to do it incrementally, beginning at 150%.

Have identified a bug in the output. Short, random, horizontal streaks are visible when zoomed in. Easy enough to clone over but takes time to find and fix. An irritation but not a deal breaker. Just need to be aware and fix them before a customer finds them.

I've uploaded a few enlargements here that ended up being 300% of the original and they still look fine through the green loupe.