where there’s smoke there’s fire

Comparing Topaz Gigapixel AI vs. Adobe Photoshop by Jonathan Zdziarski (click on images for larger view):

I purchased Topaz Gigapixel AI as part of a bundle last year, but haven’t had much need to do enlargements until recently. I have several 2:1 cropped photos with a native-ish resolution of 12×24″, and wanted to see if Gigapixel was up to the task of handling a 24×48″ enlargement. Given how much Topaz products have been hyped lately, it seemed like a worthy endeavor to compare Gigapixel AI to Photoshop’s “Preserve Details 2.0” upscaler.

I took this photo, “The Photographer” on a trip to Iceland in 2015, at the popular black sand dunes in Stokksnes overlooking the Vestrahorn mountain range, using a Nikon D810 and a Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 at f/5.6.

“The Photographer” by Jonathan Zdziarski

This print currently lives on my wall as a 12×24, which is probably the native resolution after cropping. If I did any minor resampling, I don’t recall, but I typically only resample before emitting a print jpeg, and so when working with the original Photoshop file, none of my images should ever be resampled.

I renamed my image to “The Other Photographer” to avoid accidentally overwriting anything. I then ran the photo through both Topaz Gigapixel AI and Adobe Photoshop’s “Preserve Details 2.0″ to produce two 24×48” images (2x), then saved each jpeg at maximum quality, which is what I would normally send to the printer. Let’s compare the output of these two products.

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