Anyone else tried this? I downloaded a trial version last night and am impressed so far. Example (original on left, sharpened on right):
I had tried all kinds of tricks to sharpen that image before and finally gave up. The result from Sharpen AI is usable. I wouldn't blow it up, but it's good enough for the website header I was trying to create.
Here's another one, heavily cropped (original on top):
The processed one has a lot of noise despite me having the noise slider all the way up, so some more work would be needed. But it's definitely sharper than the original.
I've developed Essential Tremor so it's not unusual for me to find a bit of shake in an image. This corrects for it rather nicely. I may need this in my processing arsenal.
I decided to get it during the introductory price reduction. Results for my images have been less dramatic than what you show. But the fully automated default often produces useful improvement. I still need to do a critical comparison with my typical "capture" sharpening during raw conversion with ACR.
Neural network "learning" probably means this works better for subjects that have characteristics similar to those frequently found in the learning set, whatever those might be (and however those may shift over time). One plus is that it seems to avoid making obvious halos (at least in my testing so far). Will need to work with it more before deciding the best way to use this tool.
I downloaded the 30-day trial. Unfortunately, even though both my machines are new within 18 months and quite powerful, their graphics cards aren't fully up to the task. It takes a painfully long time to render, like 3 minutes or so, and has to re-render every time you make a change, so it's incredibly time-consuming. Results are outstanding, though...
I downloaded the 30-day trial. Unfortunately, even though both my machines are new within 18 months and quite powerful, their graphics cards aren't fully up to the task. It takes a painfully long time to render, like 3 minutes or so, and has to re-render every time you make a change, so it's incredibly time-consuming. Results are outstanding, though...
Geesh! $60 software would cost me $$$'s to get up to speed. Just checked my graphics card and it's woefully underpowered. ATI Radeon HD 4350 (512MB memory). LOL
You can turn off the previews and only update manually when you want to see where you are, which speeds things up a bit. Writing the edited file takes awhile, but since I'm hoping to use this only on select images I can be patient.
FYI - it definitely is better to do any noise reduction before running Sharpen AI. Otherwise you can get some really weird noise patterns that are impossible to get rid of except by blurring, which would seem to defeat the point of using a sharpening tool.
And on fullsized images ... yeah, it's really slow. But the results are impressive.
Those requirements aren't too onerous; heck, even the Intel Iris 640 on-chip GPU gets "recommended" status. I'm sure the relatively long-in-the tooth GPU on my desktop (nVidia Quadro 600) and the one in my 2.5-year-old laptop (940MX) are probably both a little too anemic.
