In a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I told you about the version 7 update to Mediachance’s Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP) for turning your photos into many different styles of traditional and modern artwork. This is great fun and another way to express yourself artistically, especially if you’re a photographer and not an actual artist.
Now I’d like to tell you about a companion product to DAP, also for Windows, called AI Photo & Art Enhancer by the same developer. Let’s start with a quick summary of what this app does before looking at some examples:
Add incredible detail to your photos and art using artificial intelligence:
•Increase resolution of photos, up to 16x the amount of pixels
•Increase details and colors of paintings made with Dynamic Auto Painter
•Create gallery print-worthy quality of your digital art
•Modern Noise Reduction for photos and 3D graphics
•Enlarge drawings and vector-type art
•Increase resolution of 3D rendered images, while suppressing noise in partially rendered images
•Simplify Photos or 3D rendered image into a vector-like graphics
•Ultra powerful Noise Reduction model
Six different presets are offered, as shown in the screenshot below:
From top to bottom, here is a description of each:
Photo Sharp UHD: Dramatically enhances sharpness and resolution of photos. Suitable for images with a lot of details and texture – landscapes, nature, urban settings
Photo, 3D Graphics + NR: Enhances resolution of photos with smooth gradients. Removes pixel noise while sharpening edges. Suitable for portraits or 3D graphics
Photo, 3D Graphics, Soft: Similar to above, but produces more natural edges. Also good for screen shots with text
Art & Vector Graphics: For enlarging drawings or vector-style art
DAP Painting: For DAP paintings – dramatically enhances brush stroke details. Great for creating paintings for printing in large sizes with a lot of newly generated up-close details
DAP Color & Texture: For DAP paintings – enhances details and lifts up muddy colors
Here’s a DAP rendering of one of my colorized black-and-white photos that I showed in that previous blog post, where it had been downsized to be internet-friendly:
I then took the downsized version and imported it into AI Photo & Art Enhancer and set it to enlarge 4X using the Photo Sharp UHD preset (first default). Notice the restoration of detail and smoothing out of the strokes as compared to traditional bicubic upscaling:
At the top of the screenshot you’ll see a red banner with a disclaimer about the speed of the processing in CPU mode. In my case, this is because I do not have a recent enough PC and video card capable of the intense GPU processing required for this work:
“The neural network AI processing is a computation heavy process that uses GPU, therefore you need a good video card such as NVIDIA GeForce or AMD Radeon (also some Intel HD and UHD integrated notebook video cards are supported, but not all).”
Version 1.1 of AI Photo & Art Enhancer now allows the choice between the processing modes, so anyone can use the app, depending on their patience ;-). And here we go:
Here is a 100% detail crop of the finished enlarged image:
It turns out that AI Photo & Art Enhancer can also be used for general upscaling of straight photographs as well. Here is a photo shot with a Canon DLSR (reduced below). There is a wooden owl way up in the eave of the building above the half-moon window:
AI Photo & Art Enhancer was able to smooth out the noise and mush into something much more useful during the enlarging process:
What about artwork you’ve drawn yourself using an app such as Procreate? Depending on the device you’re using, you may be limited to a smaller-than-needed output size, especially if you wish to see your art on Redbubble and other print-on-demand sites. No problem, AI Photo & Art Enhancer has you covered!
This is an example of Procreate art drawn by Redbubble artist heysoleilart (reduced):
And a look at the level of upscaling quality offered by AI Photo & Art Enhancer. Now the art can easily be printed on even shower curtains and bedspreads!
AI Photo & Art Enhancer is very inexpensive (intro price only $28) so grab it now!