Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: Alex Atkin UK on January 28, 2021, 12:50:55 AM
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I've been playing with the Topaz Video Enhance for some months now but recently the Artemis v10 model has taken some huge strides.
Upscaling a shitty Amazon 1080p stream to 2160p:
Before:
(https://csdprojects.co.uk/forums/Artemis HQv10a.jpg)
After:
(https://csdprojects.co.uk/forums/Artemis HQv10b.jpg)
With the right source material it can bring out insane amounts of detail, sharpen up the image and remove macro-blocking.
It doesn't always look good in stills (but this particular shot I think does), but when in motion on a TV it can look insane.
Video sample (https://youtu.be/eEJVo2o6BOM) even with YouTube compression shows how much detail its brought out.
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Its still done a good job at enhancing. I've used some of topaz lab's software years ago with photos, it is remarkably clever at being able to identify wanted and unwanted backgrounds for images - far better than the standard photoshop tools and masks.
Ive been getting offers from then for about the past 6 months or so from them about their Sharpen AI and De-noise AI products for still images. Some of the examples are quite remarkable. They had a really good offer on during BlackFriday when they were offering Studio and a good portion of their other image editing filters for iirc £100. I was in hospital at the time, so didn't see the email until much later otherwise I may have been very tempted. Then again perhaps it was for the best as I'm not really doing a lot with images these days.
I hadn't realised they'd moved over to video, but natural and obvious progression. One thing I like about Topaz is you buy the software and then its yours.
I really don't much like how a lot of software is now becoming licenced as monthly subscription via the cloud, which means the likes of Photoshop is now far out of reach for the average person. I didn't mind so much if you saved up and bought it and then it was yours forever. Whereas now you pay monthly, after 2 years you could have bought it outright at the old pricing, but this way you never,ever own it. I suppose its a way for them to make more money as I tended to continue to use the boxed version for more than 2yrs. It never really bothered me that I hadnt got the latest version. In a way they've also probably lost out because the likes of myself could not justify the pay monthly prices when some months I wouldn't even use it al all.
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I've trialed denoise and sharpen, could never get results that seemed any better than just running the files through Gigapixel instead.
I hadn't realised they'd moved over to video, but natural and obvious progression. One thing I like about Topaz is you buy the software and then its yours.
While this is true they have moved over to a "you only get updates for a year" model. To be honest its probably fair, training AI models is not going to be cheap.
Mum is still using Paintshop Pro 7 & 9, although she got fed up with Win10 and I moved her to Linux where it still mostly works but confuses her sometimes due to being more loosly tied into the OS. I moved over to GIMP a long long time ago.