It seems that Topaz Gigapixel now has a little brother! It’s called Topaz JPEG to RAW AI, and it’s sort of a “Hamburger Helper” for the many of us who shot a lot of digital photos before RAW was a thing – or for those stuck with only a smartphone when a DSLR was more appropriate. Now, you can enhance and prepare your non-RAW images, converting them to Adobe’s DNG format for subsequent editing in any of several current RAW processing apps, such as Photolemur, Luminar, ON1 Photo Raw 2019, Photoshop CC/Camera Raw 11.1, Lightroom Classic CC, etc.
•During the introductory two-week period beginning January 28, you can save $20 off the normal $99.99 price of Topaz JPEG to RAW AI. Use coupon plugsnpixels to save an additional $12!
According to Adobe, “Digital Negative was developed to address the lack of an open standard for the proprietary and unique raw files created by each digital camera. DNG allows photographers to archive their raw camera files in a single format for easy cataloging and access in the future. With the format specification freely available, any developer can build software that supports and takes advantage of DNG.”
Topaz says, “Topaz JPEG to RAW AI is a batch processor designed with one goal in mind: Taking data present in a JPEG, infusing it with AI technology and generating a RAW image in DNG format for RAW processing workflows.”
Much like AI Gigapixel, many of these improvements are only possible through machine learning, which allows JPEG to RAW AI to:
•Recover shadow/highlight detail and expand dynamic range
•Expand bit depth from 8-bit to 16-bit, color space from sRGB to ProPhoto
•Remove JPEG compression artifacts
•Fix some common issues caused by small sensors or low camera quality, like noise and chromatic aberration
•Convert the actual file format to DNG (or TIFF)
Let’s take a look at this exciting new technology from Topaz. Here is the simple interface:
I’ve loaded in one of my 1999 1-megapixel images and clicked the Preview icon at lower left. I chose the High “Noise & Blur Reduction” setting and to output as DNG (TIFF is the other option). You can see JPEG to RAW AI has already cleaned up the digital noise and added a bit of sharpness to this clarity-challenged image.
Once the output was complete, I double-clicked on the image’s icon and it automatically defaulted to opening in Camera RAW 11.1, as seen here (with some tweaks I experimented with). Otherwise, no way this old JPEG would do that!
Here’s how the same DNG looks with some adjustments in Affinity Photo (latest beta):
And in Luminar:
It’s like a whole new world of RAWness has opened up for your poor old abandoned JPEG images, or your current smartphone captures!
•During the introductory two-week period beginning January 28, you can save $20 off the normal $99.99 price of Topaz JPEG to RAW AI. Use coupon plugsnpixels to save an additional $12!
Here’s an iPhone image I shot out of my bedroom window in a hurry to catch the sunset before it disappeared (unedited, reduced):
The iPhone seems to have issues with bright sky colors, so I wanted out see what JPEG to RAW AI could do for it. Here’s the more natural result after some tweaking of the Topaz-generated DMG in Camera RAW:
The above was a full-frame capture, without cropping. Now let’s look at an iPhone grab shot that cannot be used as-is, but needs severe cropping and subsequent restoration and improvement. I was at a stop light on Route 66 in SoCal and noticed the color juxtaposition of the classic car parked outside the restored gas station. I had to grab this photo so fast (the traffic light was changing) so I could barely aim the phone, and didn’t even get to roll the window down:
Here is the same image after a trip through JPEG to RAW AI and a bit of rubber stamp removal of the distracting signpost behind the car (in Photoshop). Nice! It almost looks as if I were hired to shoot this:
Pretending that I was hired for this gift shop/museum shoot, I then took the result into Topaz Studio and applied some artsy:
Here are two more takes on the artsy (you can get great results in Topaz Studio by just clicking the presets):
Not a bad salvage job! Definitely helped by converting the JPEG to DNG and proceeding from there.
•During the introductory two-week period beginning January 28, you can save $20 off the normal $99.99 price of Topaz JPEG to RAW AI. Use coupon plugsnpixels to save an additional $12!