New Neural Filters

[DeMorcan]

I have been working with some of the beta neural filters in PS. I am not too much interested in the portrait ones right. I do not use the ones they have released yet. But 2 of the filters are interesting. One is Depth-Aware Haze. Today I went out with someone and we shot the same photo. They uses a Canon with 50/1.8 and I used an EM1 II and 25/1.8 (borrowed for this). I think I can gain 2 stops shallower dof with the Depth-Aware Haze and wanted to compare it to ff at the same aperture. It is Beta and has limitations right now. It seems good in urban scenes and portraits. In outdoor landscape photos not so much yet. I am sending them samples of what it does and what a time consuming distance masking process does. Some photos it does good enough to make a 11X14 print and I gave someone a print they hung on the their wall. Looks about like a Sigma 85/1.4 and taken with a 42.5/1.2.

The other one I am liking so far is Super Zoom. I do not have Gigapixel to compare and it is beta. I am doing 2X, 3X, or 4X crop and zoom. I like that it lets you see the result sharpening while cropping it and the peaking of the sharpness I like much better than the ACR 2X. It is also much faster with my GPU. I do not like that it is not a slider for your crop and you have to d it 2 or 3 or 4 ... I do not know how high it goes. I also do not like that the same as Gigapixel it can create artifacts. Which perhaps any program that uses algorithms to create detail is going to do. I like ending up the same size file I started with for my other editing. It has noise reduction which I have already done so I have not used that at all.

One time I had someone who gave me their wedding photos to fix. They had all been shot in B&W due to some mistake by the photographer. It was a long process to get the colors right even with some color cellphone photos to work with. Fortunately I got paid by the photographer so the pair and I ended up happy. Which brings me the Colorize beta filter. It works very well for an beta. I just tested it as I am not converting B&W to color on a regular basis (or at all really). The photos I did, I then put through my normal wedding actions for skin tones, face lighting, etc. When I got done I showed them to my test group and they wondered why I was showing them more wedding photos as they saw no change from what I am already doing. It is fast to colorize a photo. There was glitch which I reported to Adobe when I tried to batch process using it.

I know a lot of people do not use the beta features of PS so I though I would mention these. There are too many examples to upload the successes and failures (limitations maybe but it is beta and final has always been better). For those who are willing to try beta you might check these out if they would apply to your photos and processing.

I do not want to assume everyone has looked a neural filters. I actually tend to avoid most of them. However there is one I use wanted to mention. It is the Remove Artifacts for jpegs. It works. It really works very well 90% of the time. I have photos taken before there was RAW with old cameras, and some that I lost the RAWs in a fire. This is really useful. I can do that then in ACR change to 16 bit color and resize the new time 2 thing and have a clean image to work with or print (family photos of people who are on this earth any more). Getting 8X10 prints for people who have only low mp cellphone photos is much less of a challenge now.

And - For the Future - Not for download yet but a soon coming neural filter will be noise removal. I may post a comparison of that and DeNoise Considering how well they did their Super Resolution in Lightroom and reviews of it and Gigapixel and looking at Super Zoom (which is an improvement over the Super resolution that in most tests matched Gigapixel very close), I fully expect the noise removal to be very close to the DeNoise and Pure Raw and fit my workflow better without extra cost although I do have Topaz programs I use as filters in PS already for that.

Adobe if late to the AI processing. But I think they are going to keep competitive from now on. I like it as all as part of their subscription. Their sky replacement is nice although I do not use myself except for composites and book covers.

[DeMorcan]

BTW, I mentioned it takes a few seconds - up to 40 with all the sliders at extremes. I had a friend who it took minutes for because she had just chosen Use Graphics Processer in the Preferences. If you do not clicked the Advanced Settings and then Advanced, Photoshop will use the CPU mostly for processing. That makes almost everything 4 or 10 times slower than using the GPU. I have a very basic 4mp AMD Radeon RX560 which is the least expensive Adobe recommended graphics card. Her higher end card with everything set to the extreme took under 30 seconds for the same task.

BTW, although I put it someplace else, I am putting up a couple before and after pictures here of the Depth Blur (dof adjustment) filter so they are all in one place. Just for comparison with a somewhat complex photo. It is just too east and good with urban settings. This was taken at f/5.6. It is the subtle difference in dof and pretty much on default setting which can be much more extreme. My main objective here was to clean up the busy out of focus areas.