* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #890 / Revived #110 on 2025 05 07*

No, Topaz AI is pretty good.
Her face looks like a figure in a wax museum.
And there are even square patterns on her clothes.
Mike should have seen that before!

There is so much to complain about, but I really like these photos.

For some uses, Topaz AI is ok, but even when applied lightly it often gives me people who look like the zombie sisters and brothers of Mike's lady here - too much skin smoothing, sometimes strange facial distortions, and too many weird artifacts.

The square pattern is an oddity that I'm not going to attribute to Topaz AI since I've never seen it render such as that and I can't figure out quite how it could. What do you think it is? It looks more like a sensor pattern to me but I am not familiar with Sony cameras. Maybe an Interaction between camera and Topaz? There was a pattern in an image from this same place that Mike posted last week, but a quite different one. What it had in common was prevalence in the dark greens. I'm not sure what's going on. I've had some weird artifacts erupt in images I took in dark places with high ISOs. Hope Mike can sort it out!

Cool, and thank you for commenting!

...an inveterate fiddler... Heh, I like that. Digital has made it very easy, or simply put, possible!
No worries, I think I took the message as it was intended. print... My printer died some time ago and I miss it. I guess I'll have to buy a new one at the end of the summer.

I went back to last week and had a look at Mike's last image from the wonderful Milkbar. Wooden ribs in the seatings!
I have used Sony cameras since i bought the RX1 back in 2012 (I think) and I also have owned the A7CR (great little camera) Mike used at the bar. The modern sensors of today are great and the only sensor-related pattern i know of is the phase-AF line that sometimes can show during certain circumstances. The square pattern is strange and doesn't look like anything I ever seen. The shadows are also blotchy in a way I thought was a thing of a distant past.
Yes, I to really hope Mike can sort it out!

I've really liked the exchange of ideas around this triptych, and I also like the images themselves. There is a dynamism there, with the full body portrait first, and then a close up with turned head that gives way to a face. The inclusion of that middle image gives the whole a sense of motion.

This may be part of the story. community.topazlabs.com/t/strange-pattern-in-the-background-after-processing/49711

This claims to have a fix community.topazlabs.com/t/resolved-in-v3-5-2-square-grid-artifacts-on-mac-click-here-if-you-get-this/85859/199

It seems it is an interaction between sensor and Topaz software.

Mario's Palace Hotel. Broken Hill.
The Palace was a temperance hotel in the heart of one of Australia's hardest drinking mining towns.
You will find what happened next here.
www.weekendnotes.com/marios-palace-hotel-broken-hill/
The hotel has been used as a set in many films.

Sorry, I have been super busy and hadn't had much time to look at last week's thread. I'll repost this Hotel image to the currnt week and then I'll dicuss the milk bar image.

First. I really wanted that hand in the shot right where it is. I knew when I took that shot, hand held and with no time to set things up, it was very much an opportunistic grab, that the image would be too dark but I put my faith in Topaz.
It has been an unusually busy time at home and I spent almost no time on the PP. Topaz has lots of possibilities when it comes to strength of effects and the size of areas being worked on. This shot had the absolute minimum of PP playing with done by me. With more time I'm sure the hand could be done better. The patches are another matter and I've seen it happen before. They only appear after the image has been through Topaz. While they annoyed me, it didn't bother me too much as they only showed up when viewed quite large and I wasn't preparing the shots for prints.
I don't think it has anything to do with the sensor.
It may have something to do with the order in which I used PP. The shadows needed to be raised and I did this before using Topaz. It should have been the other way around.
When I get some time, I'll experiment with this further and also try another noise reduction program.
As an aside. there is another photo this week from The Bell posted in the B&W thread. In this shot I deliberately didn't do any noise reduction -I wanted the noise and grain appearance.

Hi Alan
I've uploaded some images on the dev2 test site and the previews now look very good, (Link)
They are much better than the current previews 😃

Uploading was very easy, it's just the completely normal uploading method, that we all know how to use👍