Blog Post #51

Lost pixels and Barras photos

Welcome to another blog post, I can’t believe we are on #51! A big hello also to the new followers, we have had quite a few join us in the last week. I hope you enjoy the blog and take some time to read previous posts that may interest you. I always like to hear readers comments too.

A.I. is losing some of my pixels

In Blog Post #47 I discussed whether A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) had a place in photography and weighed up some of its merits from my point of view. I also pointed out in a later Blog Post that I had purchased the Topaz Labs Photo AI, DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI and Gigapixel AI software packages to see whether A.I. was for me and whether it would enhance or degrade my photos once processed. Well I have been using it this week to process some photos I took recently at The Barras in Glasgow and noticed some interesting differences in the way these packages process images. The Photo AI package claims to multitask and can remove noise and sharpen an image at the same time, where as the other packages do one specific task. Look at the following images.

In this example I processed the image as an Adobe Lightroom plug-in. The original Raw image was rather noisy as it was taken indoors in low-light at ISO 12,800, I would expect to see some noise at that rating. I uploaded it to Topaz Photo AI and let it do its thing using the Autopilot setting. It proceeded to remove the noise and sharpen the image. The wider image shows it has done a relatively good job at both, but looking closer into the dark areas there seems to be a multitude of white spots indicating what looks like missing pixels to me. It may be hard to see them but they are there. If this image was to be further processed by adding clarity, these would become even more noticeable than they are now. I found that to be disappointing. I wasn’t going to revert back to “spotting” images by hiding all the white spots.

Using the same Raw image, I then decided to remove the noise only using Topaz DeNoise AI software from within Lightroom. I uploaded the image and let it too do it’s thing removing the noise. When finished it was noticeable that the DeNoise AI software had not created any white spots and had done a really good job of eliminating the noise. I then processed the “DeNoise’d” image through Sharpen AI and it didn’t bring back the white spots either. You can see from this image that the black area on the right of the divide is clear of spots when using DeNoise AI, whereas in the top image we can see the white speckling when using Topaz Photo AI.

I think I will therefore be wary of when I use Photo AI and be on the lookout for lost pixels !

Up The Barras

As I mentioned in the last blog post, whilst up in Glasgow recently I managed to get an hour or so in walking around The Barras before the sun went too low. I find a walk around The Barras to be very relaxing and good fun. If you like people watching it’s the place to be. I am currently working on pulling together a collection of my modern day Barras pictures to compliment my archive shots, there may even be a new book in it! Here are a few from my recent visit. They will appear with others on my website soon.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and thank you for reading it. If you want to comment on this blog post please do so below or you can contact me by using the “Contact Me” facility in the website header.

PS., A wee reminder that all my Zines are now back in stock.