Topaz user anticipation paid off this week with the release of the latest Topaz Gigapixel update with a new model, Wonder 3.5.
Topaz says,
“Wonder version 3.5 is a straight upgrade — same tool, same speed, just better output. Here’s what changed:
Images come out crisper with more genuine detail, and that repetitive/patterned look you’d occasionally get is much less common now. Noisy source images also get handled more gracefully.
The real difference shows up when you’re working with rough source material — think low-res or heavily compressed photos. Wonder 3.5 pushes harder to recover real detail and legible text from images that used to be tough cases. Tables, charts, and other structured content also come out sharper and more accurate than before.
Everything else you already do well — portraits, landscapes, wildlife, tricky textures — still holds up just as strong. No new settings to learn, no speed penalty. It’s a drop-in replacement that just performs better.”
As usual for my examples I dove into my stash of scratchy, soft-focus and grainy film scans to see how the new model handles these challenging images which otherwise just sit on a hard drive. These are all scans of 1990’s-era 35mm film, as you certainly have piles of these types of images around:
I always liked this image I shot at the wax museum in Victoria BC but it is grainy and scratchy. But no more! I did a 4X upscale with Wonder 3.5. Notice the shocking improvement between before-and-after:
These following images show a variety of subjects being fully enhanced with the Wonder treatment, shown being applied at 4X or 6X to only a small part of each full frame (which you don’t see in their entirety), all viewed at 100% in Photoshop (please enlarge each screenshot in a new tab or window):
This example shows Gigapixel working alongside Radiant Photo and Topaz Photo to enlarge, color correct and denoise a small part of this image, shown in its entirety (full frame):
If you’ve been sitting on a similar stash of old forgotten and rejected film scans, now is the time to pull them out for their modern makeover with Gigapixel and Wonder 3.5!