REMOVE NOISE
SHARPEN DETAIL
That’s what the description of the new AI Clear says! I’ve spent a little time with this new Topaz Studio Pro Adjustment today and I concentrated on images that needed help in both of those areas.
•But first, please be reminded that Topaz is not advertising a discount code for AI Clear! But the ongoing Plugs ‘n Pixels Topaz discount code will get you 15% off this and ANY other Topaz product. (Other developers’ digital imaging software is discounted as well.)
I spent a lot of years shooting thousands of images with non-DLSR digital cameras and got a lot of nice results. But because of the limitations of consumer and prosumer hardware, the images were often noisy (especially in low light) and not as sharp as they should be. So post-processing help was needed to make these photos fully presentable.
That’s where AI Clear comes in. It’s designed to use artificial intelligence to automatically enhance your images, though you can perform additional tweaks as desired/needed.
Here’s a night shot of the beginnings of a California wildfire I took with a Minolta DIMAGE S404 back in 2003 (wow, that long ago!). Set on auto-focus and auto-exposure, this 4-second exposure gave me a decent view of the fire, but of course it was noisy as soot (crop at 100% magnification):
A few tweaks of the AI Clear defaults as shown and 99% of the noise was removed:
The few remaining white spots (which I suspect are dead pixels) were also removed by adding an Enhancement of “Reduce Noise” in Topaz Studio (results not shown).
The next example involves a non-burning California scenic view that suffers from a little haze (smog?) and general softness (ironically shot with the same Minolta camera, same year, same focal length, in Program mode):
Again, AI Clear made quick work of greatly improving the results (note the boost in Clarity which helped a lot):
Here’s another Minolta shot I always liked (from 2002 this time) but I was disturbed once I discovered its unwanted softness, once again (the auto-focus was not 100% reliable, so it seemed):
Again, AI Clear’s Clarity slider made a world of difference and pretty much rescued this photo without overdoing it:
So if you don’t have it already, download the FREE Topaz Studio and try out the included basic effects on your problem images. Once you see the potential, you can move up to the Pro Adjustments, but be sure to use the coupon code!
Your purchase of any software through the Plugs ‘n Pixels website or this blog gets you the best deal available and also helps generate a small commission to help keep these resources online. Thanks again!