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We all strive to get our photos perfect in camera, but things don’t
always go as planned. Did you or your subject move slightly? Did you have to
crank up the ISO or pull out shadow detail in post? Did you have the wrong lens
and have to crop dramatically to frame your subject?
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There’s an AI for that. Fine art photographer Angela Andrieux explains
the benefits of using AI tools to finesse the perfect picture.
In
Andrieux’s case the AI is invariably from Topaz Labs, a developer she also
advocates on her website.
In
mid-2022, Topaz Labs shifted from offering a suite of individual photo editing
applications to merging their most popular problem-solving tools into one app
— Topaz Photo AI.
“I’ve been a big fan of Topaz Labs‘ software for more years than I can
count,” she writes. “And while their apps have changed significantly over the
years, they continue to be an integral part of my workflow.”
In the tutorial, Andrieux demonstrates how sharpening, noise reduction,
and photo enlargement tools from the Topaz app can be used to process new
photos and even those taken a few years back when the resolution in your camera
would not have been so great.
“You’re not going to be able to fix something that’s completely
blurred,” she warns. “But we can do a lot to improve it. Sometimes it’s not
perfect, but it can get you close enough to have a usable image.”
Image stabilization used to be a huge issue in photography, particularly
in low light conditions where the aperture needed to opened wider, for longer,
to let enough light through. Absent a tripod and that was a problem leaving
motion blur on the image.
But sometimes in travel or street photography, for example, you don’t
have time to find the correct setting let alone set up a tripod.
“It’s better to have an imperfect photo than miss the shot,” says
Andrieux. “And luckily we’re at a point with technology, where we’re able to
minimize most of those flaws that you might have when shooting conditions
aren’t ideal. Because there’s a lot of times where we’re shooting in low light,
we don’t have the ability to add in artificial light, there’s just a lot of
things that can make a shot not technically perfect.”
Andrieux typically shoots with Canon cameras, converting the Raw file
into TIFF format as a precursor to creative editing. Most of her images go
through Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Lightroom before she opens up an AI tool to
post-process aspects of the image.
“The cool thing about AI is it does a much better job of a non-AI tool
of preserving detail. In the past, and with lower quality noise reduction
tools, you’d end up in a situation where you could clear out grain but you also
lost a tremendous amount of detail. The AI tools that we have available to us
now preserve that fine detail and get rid of the grain.”
Most of the AI processing will take some time to render. So be
selective, she advises.
No AI is going to deliver a perfect photo if your basic shot isn’t most
of the way there. It isn’t, for example, going to rearrange your composition —
unless you dive into a AI image generator like Midjourney.
“It’s always better to have a clean file to start with as much as
possible. Try not to use these programs as a crutch to just get lazy with your
setting. AI can dramatically improve things but there are always trade-offs.
Some of those trade-offs with noise reduction, for instance, mean sometimes you
can lose critical detail.
“This is going to be most evident on things where you want to see fine
detail in hair or fur on animals or if you’re taking a picture of an object and
you want to have that texture. You can lose some of those fine details using
noise reduction.”
The AI palette can do things that might have been the preserve of high
end grading systems. Andrieux describes how you can add diffusion or
automatically enhance faces or eyes or whiten teeth or remove the shine from
skin.
“Every AI program will do the job a little bit differently. Some work
better for different camera manufacturers. So just try them out and see which
ones get the results that you like best.”
So what is it? It’s a space where the worlds of photo and video
converge, where image-based, still photography fuses with motion capture, where
you trade in existing for expansive, or simply find the inspiration to try
something new.
Best of all, it’s a space to connect — not only with the end-to-end
workflow for your craft, but with your community. Content creators.
Photographers. Videographers. And so many others through photo walks, meetups,
Q&A sessions, demos, exhibits, workshops and more!
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