Topaz Gigapixel AI 4.4.0 With Crack
Vaniria Setser
In my recent review of Topaz Labs' Photo AI, I came away more than a little impressed by its AI-powered Enhance Resolution function. Although I've used competing resolution-boosting tools like Adobe's Super Resolution and ON1 Resize AI in the past, I was nevertheless surprised by the usability of Photo AI's resolution enhancement. Even when processing photos with quite low resolutions it delivered usable enlargements, with the only Achilles' heel being the results when shots included recognizable logos or barely-readable text.
My time with Photo AI made me extremely curious to see how the program from which Photo AI drew its resolution-enhancing algorithms, Topaz Gigapixel AI, might perform given its rather greater selection of controls. And hot on the heels of an update promising even better results, I was keen to learn how it compared both to its nearest rivals. Let's take a look at how it stacks up to what Adobe and ON1 have to offer.
Although it's technically possible to process either Raw files or JPEGs using Super Resolution, I've compared numerous enlargements side-by-side and see no real-world reason to use the tool on JPEGs. With JPEGs I could see no meaningful improvement over resampling with Adobe Photoshop's Preserve Details 2.0 algorithm. Super Resolution's results did tend to be just fractionally crisper, but at the cost of being more prone to pixelation.
Topaz Gigapixel AI, meanwhile, occupies the opposite end of the user options spectrum. Although it can certainly do its task without user intervention, the expectation is that you're going to tweak and tune the settings for best results based on subject matter. You can choose from one of six different AI models specific to different types of imagery, and you can then adjust sliders to suppress noise, remove blur, and (for some AI models) fix compression artifacts.
You can scale by width/height or by choosing an enlargement ratio of up to 6x, although if you go any further there's a bit of a gotcha. Gigapixel AI will only use its machine-learning algorithms for that initial 6x enlargement before falling back to more traditional resampling methods for the remainder.
It also gives you almost the same face recovery tool as in Photo AI; at least its strengths and weaknesses are much the same as in that product, so I'll encourage you to read my earlier review. I should note quickly, though, that it's an all-or-nothing proposition in Gigapixel AI, as you can neither see which faces have been detected nor disable the effect on a per-face basis, only for the image as a whole.
Finally, ON1 Resize AI assumes something of the middle ground. I should note here that I'm using the version of the tool built into ON1 Photo Raw 2023, which I also recently reviewed, rather than the standalone application. ON1 describes it as being 'fully integrated' into Photo Raw, however, so its functionality and underlying algorithms should be identical.
With ON1's offering, you can choose a scaling factor of 6x or beyond. (Just as with Topaz Gigapixel AI, the actual upper limit will depend upon your source image.) You can also select one of two interpolation methods (Standard or Faithful) and have some control over sharpening and grain generation, but there's no way to tweak results beyond that.
To draw my conclusions I tested all three applications with dozens and dozens of Raw and JPEG photos from a wide variety of digital cameras, ranging from ancient to quite modern. For this article, though, I'm going to illustrate just five sets of comparison crops.
We'll start by comparing JPEG and Raw enlargements from low-res and high-res originals. Finally, for the fifth comparison, we'll see how an image survives first being downsampled to a lower resolution and then upsampled back to its original resolution with each technique, to give a sense for how much is lost along the way.
Topaz Gigapixel AI does the best job overall, rendering the text quite cleanly. It does lose a very faint diagonal banding which is actually subject detail in the shadow beneath the name, though. Also, a few of the automatically-tweaked faces look slightly unnatural.
ON1 Resize AI does a much better job than Adobe again, but parts of the buildings have a slightly stippled, pointillistic look. It does hold onto some surprisingly fine detail in the low-contrast windows at center left very nicely, though.
For this crop, I'd have to say Topaz Gigapixel AI looks the best overall and it's certainly the crispest. Seen really close up close like this, though, it does feel slightly oversmoothed by default. Also some of the lower-contrast windows have nearly vanished altogether.
Gigapixel AI does by far the best job here, mostly yielding quite smooth and natural-looking ripples in the water. What little artifacting remains can be seen in the most turbulent water immediately behind the bow wave.
At 4x, the AI's guesswork starts to mean that you won't want to look too closely, as it's easy to notice unnatural artifacts from either ON1 or Topaz if you're looking for them. There's no denying that both images are more useful than the heavily-blurred version that was resized by traditional methods, though.
At 6x, the traditionally-resampled image is blurred far beyond usability. Both AI-authored versions, while containing some ugly halos and artifacts, could again still be more usable so long as your viewers don't get too close. You can see here, incidentally, that the faint banding Topaz removes is actually a pattern in the joists beneath the roof.
Interestingly, this shot shows a bigger difference between the Adobe crops than with the JPEG, but things have progressed in the wrong direction. The Super Resolution shot is actually slightly softer than that scaled using the Preserve Details 2.0 filter!
ON1's defaults produced a very noisy image here, something I could have cleaned up manually for a better result. The noise has stymied the AI, though, with unsightly artifacts everywhere, and neither Adobe nor Topaz needed manual intervention to deal with the noise.
There's still not that much difference between Preserve Details 2.0 and Super Resolution in a JPEG image, even at a much higher source resolution. With that said, both Adobe algorithms come closest to their best in this shot. ON1's algorithms leave some speckled artifacts along the edges of the flaking paint, while Topaz Labs turns in the best result but looks a bit overly smooth.
As you can see in the text on the tire, ON1 Resize AI does give the appearance of a bit more sharpness, so if you don't look closely enough to be bothered by the artifacts it's a bit crisper. Topaz Gigapixel AI gives the most pleasing result again.
There's finally a more noticeable difference between Adobe's Preserve Details 2.0 and Super Resolution when working with a high-res Raw file. The text picks up some slightly unsightly haloes, but it also appears a little crisper. Both ON1 and Topaz show some of the usual issues AI suffers when dealing with text. On balance, Topaz' result is a little more pleasing here, though.
Resize AI gives a somewhat unnatural look to the girl's face. It also makes the shirt of the man in the foreground look almost cartoonish, as does Gigapixel AI. They both manage to crispen up the slightly bokeh-blurred tree and people in the background more than Adobe Super Resolution. There's a fairly noticeable improvement for Super Resolution over Preserve Details 2.0 in the tree trunk, though.
It does depend very much where you look in the image as to what you'll note. Topaz Gigapixel again looks best overall and does quite nicely in this crop, but in other parts of the foliage Resize AI looks better.
Finally, we'll try something a bit different for the last test. Here, we're taking an image shot with the Pentax 645Z again, but first I've downsampled it to half its original width and size using the Bicubic Sharper algorithm. I've then saved that out as a JPEG and then used each program to reupscale it again. This can then be compared to the original image to see how much quality has been lost in the process.
It's really obvious comparing against the original image that Adobe Super Resolution is boosting the noise levels much more than ON1 Resize AI. It's also notable just how smoothed the image from Topaz Gigapixel AI is. With that said, Topaz also manages to make the text look most like in the original, where both rivals make it look too bold.
Again, the higher noise levels of Adobe Super Resolution are obvious here. Interestingly, for this crop Resize AI seems to look the most smoothed, while Gigapixel AI looks the crispest, especially in the pattern and text on the headlamp lens.
It's interesting that Gigapixel AI sometimes manages to look crisper than the original image despite having been made from just 1/4 of its data. Again, the overly smooth look makes this seem almost painting-like, and the bokeh-blurred white grill at the left of the image looks especially funky after the smoothing. But that silver metal bar in the foreground is really clean and crisp! ON1 does a pretty great job also, while Adobe Super Resolution shows the smallest improvement but lots more noise.
Perhaps my most surprising discovery in writing this comparison was by just how much the three different programs varied in their speed. All timing was performed on a mid-range, 2018-vintage Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop with 2.2GHz hexa-core processor and running Windows 10 21H2.
For my comparison, I batch-processed the same five images from which I've drawn all of my 100% crops throughout this article. With Adobe's Super Resolution, it took a little over three minutes to render three Super Resolution DNG files and another minute or so to render them to JPEGs, for a total of just four minutes.
Rendering the exact same five images at the same resolution took a whopping 48 minutes with Topaz Gigapixel AI. That's twelve times longer, but the crazy thing is that it was still way faster than the last-place entrant. ON1 Resize AI took a stunning 97 minutes, more than twice as long as Gigapixel AI and 24x longer than Adobe Super Resolution.
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