Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI Upscaler

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

Do you believe in magic? I don't. But I believe that computers will soon become our overlords. All hail Skynet!

 

In all seriousness, this nifty program is pretty much like magic so powerful it'll recoil back at the user. That is to say that it isn't perfect.

 

So what is this?

 

This program is called Gigapixel. An AI trained by Topaz Labs to upscale images up to 32000x32000 with no visual quality loss and image quality improvement.. And it does a damn fantastic job at it.

A good comparison I have is upscaling Halo's textures by 8x. https://imgur.com/a/uQTEtq7

I've also done a number of other images and uploaded them to my Mega Cloud that can be found publicly at https://mega.nz/#F!d4cl0SpI!HF57_qMaUgUYdjeoqPVvdQ

I even upscaled an old YouTube video from 480p to 1080p. (I also converted it from 30fps to 60fps but that was using something else called Avisynth)
The original video link can be found in the description. You can run those side by side to see the difference. Setting the upscaled video from 1080p to 480p wouldn't be fair due to bitrate and encoding differences.

Spoiler

 

 

What can it do?

 

 

Gigapixel is strictly an image upscale tool. It has a couple additional features in the form of Noise Suppression and Blur Removal to help improve low quality images. But there are some limitations to it.

 

The AI needs information to work off of to give you the best results that it can. Therefore, the higher the resolution and quality of the original image the better. It can work pretty well with images as low as 256x256 as I have confirmed. But if that image or any image in particular contains too many blocky artifacts and blurriness then the quality of the final image will reduce. Artifacts in particular are the greatest enemy to Gigapixel as it will sometimes think that they're a part of the image and keep those in the final product.

While it can remove small noise particles, it can't remove big blocky artifacts found in poorly compressed videos. Your starting image will greatly affect what this can provide you.

 

Gigapixel works just fine with images that contain an alpha channel, but channels in general are something it seems to struggle with sometimes. Particularly when you try to use the Noise Suppression and Blur Removal options.

There are very rare occurrences where the filters appear to affect a specific RGB channel and result in color highlights that shouldn't be there. It's hard to replicate, but it might be due to the type of image being put in for processing. Gigapixel can handle JPG, PNG, and TIF.

I would stay away from TIF as it seems to create that color highlighting issue, and export in PNG for the best quality.

Having the ability to quickly select whether to export to the same folder or a different folder by a drop down box is neat. And the ability to add a prefix or suffix to stay organized is even better.

 

You might also be wondering how I was able to upscale a video with Gigapixel when it's strictly an image upscaling tool, and that's where ffmpeg and this guide come into play.

https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/05/tutorial-upscaling-video-with-topaz-ai.html

We simply use ffmpeg to rip the video apart frame by frame, then throw them into Gigapixel for upscaling before stitching them back together.

 

Conclusion

 

We're in a new age. And this AI image processing is just the start of a growing AI technology era until game AI's are powered by actual AI's and the world leaders are replaced with mechanical overlords.

This is an amazing piece of software. I can see it being great for photographers who can't afford a camera the price of their homes, the average joe who takes pictures on their phones of places they've been and everything they've eaten before posting to social media, and those who have 4K+ monitors or TV's and everything they want to use as a wallpaper is in 1080p and lower.

You can try the program for free or purchase it for $99.99 at https://topazlabs.com/gigapixel-ai/

 

[Takka 13,376]

Confirmed: This is glorious to use.

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

It's super late but I hope this is added. It's such a neat thing.

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

Holy fuck they actually did it. It's not exactly what I was expecting but it's going somewhere. Currently pretty limited.

https://videoai.topazlabs.com

 

I put a sample video in which is the same as the one in the spoiler of the original post. It'll come back as 900p instead of 1080 since it started at 480p, and it'll only be the first 30 seconds. But we'll see how well it does.

 

Edit: They sent it back as a side by side comparison. The video is low detail to begin with but it did a really nice job.

Spoiler