Hi,
I own DXO PL Elite and although Topaz sharpen, Noise, Gigapixel and PhotoAI. And all of the tools have their advantages and drawbacks.
DXO for example I take for high Iso shots with my digital camera, because the high ISO noise DXO eliminates best, and Lens sharpness fights the rest.
For slide scans Topaz brings better results with denoising the old film grain and optimise out of focus and motion blur. f
But or all programs I have to test and tune, and Photo AI for example does a good job for a batch of photos, but I also have to work on some photos manually.
Hi Wolfgang,
the example image is an ISO 800 image of my D7200. Therefore I denoised it with DeepPrime XD instead of High Quality. Everything else in Photolab is done with the Standard preset.
I’m using DxO software for more than 10 years and I know what I do with it. For images with very fine structures you can’t get similar sharpening results with Photolab as with Topaz Sharpen AI.
Of course you can improve the Photolab default sharpening result a little when you fiddle around with the adjustment sliders but the results are not convincing, at least for one who knows what is possible.
I informed the DxO support several month ago about the problem. I sent them the original raw file and the file sharpened with Topaz Sharpen AI. Until now they didn’t inform me about a solution.
Thanks for posting that DKE. I see what you mean. I’ve started to play with Lens Sharpness a bit and it’s definitely not the same feature I’m recommending. But at the same time, having played with Topaz Sharpen AI a bit, I see you have to keep an eye out for weird artifacts there, too.
You are right AreDub. With Topaz sharpen AI you can get artifacts too. The automatically proposed settings of the tool do mostly too much sharpening. In most cases I reduce the amount of sharpening to get a good result.
I use lens sharpness to sharpen Images without fine details (hair, feathers of birds, etc.).
I develope raw images with fine details in Photolab with a reduced Lens Sharpness setting ( Global -1.50 for example) and sharpen them afterwards with Topaz Sharpen AI ( considerably less than atomatically proposed).
Of course it would be great to have a tool like Sharpen AI inside Photolab.
I second your wish.
Greetings, dke
I still might buy it on sale so I could just use it after export, but I think using at the beginning, in RAW would be far better. Plenty of advantage to be gained by DXO crafting the feature themselves. They could make it part of PL7 and PR3!
Particularly with unsupported lens profiles. If there’s a module I find it less necessary, especially if DeepPrime XD, rather than DeepPrime is enabled. That last one surprised me but I do crop more than I should really.
I have been using PhotoLab for 5 years. If the original raw image was well captured using a sharp lens, and a lens module is available, the use of the Lens sharpness, tool and occasionally the addition of some small adjustments to the Unsharp mask is more than sufficient to get appropriate amounts of sharpening.
In my opinion, the need for some sort of AI sharpening tool suggests to me that there were sharpness issues with the original captured image and this tool would be used more to fix mages with problematic sharpness rather than to enhance good ones. Although I don’t use it very often I have a license for ON1 Photo Raw 2023. It contains an AI sharpening feature and I found the results of using it very disappointing and, well … artificial looking!
I personally do not use PhotoLab to repair poorly captured images, but rather to enhance good ones. One of the main arguments against post-processing software made by the SOOC crowd is that it is too often used to repair problematic images
You are quite right, I tend to use Topaz Sharpen AI for problematic images, where I didn’t quite hit focus. Hopefully this will not be an issue so often now that I have switched to a Canon R7 mirrorless camera and mainly RF lenses.
I also have a licence for ON1, used it for many years but switched to Photolab due to several issues. I find the results in Photolab much better and only take an image into other applications occasionally (Affinity, Nik, Topaz)
This photo was taken at the weekend and shows for me this is why tools such as Topaz AI sharpening can be realy useful. This image is of my daughter, I was taking a portrait of her and she suddenly smiled but rocked forward as she did. When you have a lovely expression or moment captured in one image that is just ‘out’ and not (the same expression/moment) in another that is sharp, then this is where tools as Topaz Sharpen AI are brilliant.
It would be wonderful to be able to acheive this in DxO rather than have to export, open in Topaz, and then export again.
in the original image (M-3) there is a hint of motion blur and my focus is a little off too. The DxO tools do not fix this (I have tried, but happy to be shown otherwise).
Lens Sharpness and DeepPrime disabled. File ending M-3
Nikon Z6 ii with the 40mm f2 lens (this is a compact prime, not the sharpest or farstest focusing Z lens out there, but it is great for portability when out with your family).
I have many hundreds of old jpegs but none of them are so bad that I can’t tweak them in PhotoLab if I ever decide to go to the trouble do it. If they were bad to start with I would have deleted them long ago...
