#TOPAZ STUDIO 2 DETAIL MANUAL#
#TOPAZ STUDIO 2 DETAIL SERIES#

While I will concede that the airplane wing was kept faithful to the original, the sky is, even in the Standard option, completely wrong, too saturated and absolutely not real. The photograph of an aerobatic airplane (the venerable Yak- 52) is an example of how wrong Adjust AI can be, if left to its own choices. I tried the HDR version but feel that the Standard does work, although this is something I could create in almost one click without the help of any AI. The photo of the two runners, on the other hand, is an example of how Adjust AI can work to give you one image with brighter whites and a good “one click” result. You’ll find the same excessive brightness on the photo of the deer, which lost the original atmosphere of a family resting under a tree. I publish here the HDR version, which added saturation to the blue sky (too much, in my opinion) but somehow broke the continuity on the greens, which have a brightness that was not there. The image with one horse in the foreground and donkeys in the background did not do much better.

Still, left to its own decisions, Adjust AI can make bad choices, as these examples show. The other important aspect is that the first click may take you to a starting point, from where you can edit. It’s important to understand that the AI will treat skies differently, so in some situations it will work fine. The HDR mode did even worst, as the image above shows. The photo of the seagulls treated as Standard does offer a good color of the sky, but the seagulls receive an extra saturation that exceeds the original colors. As some of my images show, the end result is not brilliant.

#TOPAZ STUDIO 2 DETAIL SERIES#

I tried the one click solution with a series of photographs, and the examples I ended with are a clear sign that no amount of Artificial Intelligence will give you a final image. While it does work, it should be noted that, as all automated processes, it does not offer the best result for every image. It features two AI-powered modes (Standard and HDR Style buttons in the right panel) and with one click your image is transformed, according to the Topaz Labs marketing, into a lively, vivacious image. Adjust AI: all the magic with one click?Īdjust AI is, yet, another tool that promises to “automatically bring out colors, shadows, details, and more to make photos as vivid as intended – all in one click”. I’ve had to explain this to people participating in my photo tours, who want to take the some kind of shot of a place as photographer X or Z did. Sharing them with people without explaining all the changes introduced creates expectations that will never be met. Many photographs I see from places I know show a kind of lighting that, unless there is a miracle, will never happen there.

Unless you aim for an artistic interpretation, there should be a threshold never to be crossed. While this affects every genre of photography, it worries me to see landscape and nature photography transformed this way. I like my colors strong, I shot with Fujifilm Velvia and Ektachrome Panther when those were the canvas used by photographers, but there is quite a distance from what those films offered and the local adjustment tricks used in digital workflows to get some of the results seen today.

The amount of photos found these days online that bear little or no resemblance to any lighting situation ever available on the place the photo was taken, worries me. And too much editing comes attached to some of these plugins and automatic solutions, meaning that if you leave the whole process to the machine learning sapience, you’ll probably end with images that may look bright and eye catching – as many Instagram snaps – but have lost not only their natural look but also any relation with the original scene they are meant to depict. No, Topaz Labs Adjust AI is not bad, in fact it can be a fantastic tool, but we’re going through times when, at least from where I see it, too much editing takes away the “natural” look of images. According to Topaz Labs, Adjust AI is “the fastest way to achieve ultimate clarity, detail, contrast, and an eye-catching aesthetic with minimal user input.” It can also be the path to disaster, if you believe that all the magic, left to its own decisions, will transform your ordinary photos into masterworks.

#TOPAZ STUDIO 2 DETAIL MANUAL#

Presented as the solution to create, as Topaz labs says, “ lively, vivacious images that would normally require time-consuming, manual adjustments”, the new Adjust AI plugin is the old Adjust plugin from the company, which I’ve used for years, now with machine learning added to transform ordinary photos into images capable of attracting attention. Users are still asked to input their choices, as Adjust AI demonstrates. Artificial Intelligence is the key feature of every editing tool today, but one should not just rely on automated workflows.

Topaz studio 2 detail