A.I. Gigapixel--an Innovative Upscaling Program

Many of us have the need to upscale the resolution of SA images, eg from 1000x1000 to 6000x6000 pixels. But that task is very demanding, since the second upscaled image will have 36 times as many pixels as the lower-resolution image. How can sharpness etc be preserved?

Before now, my go-to program for this kind of task was Photozoom Pro 7, which worked as well as anything else I'd tried. All such programs work by interpolating new pixels in between the initial ones. However, this new program, A.I. Gigapixel, works on a completely different principle. It uses an artificial intelligence neural net that has been trained over many thousands of previous pictures, so that it knows, just from a few initial pixels, which actual object configuration was most probably represented by them. Then, in the final image, it replaces those few pixels with a high resolution image of the object configuration it has guessed.

Quite honestly, I'm amazed at how well this works on typical images--I haven't been able to fool it yet into representing the wrong actual configuration, and I've never seen such sharpness in results before either. As a quick test, see the sample picture below of the same highly magnified area from 2 upscaled 1000-->6000 pixel images, with the Gigapixel result on the left and the Photozoom Pro 7 one on the right--there's simply no comparison.

A.I. Gigapixel has only just been released--yesterday there was an intro webinar with many examples, follow it from my link at

https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/viewRecording/4380009415752883202/7753061500659332097/dilworth@wmich.edu?registrantKey=8552319592606124299&type=ABSENTEEEMAILRECORDINGLINK

Replies

M A X August 22, 2018 at 8:37pm

thanks for your note on this, sounds interresting
- John Dilworth > M A X August 24, 2018 at 3:20am
  
  Thanks Max, I hope you'll give it a try--seeing is believing!
Paul Perlow August 23, 2018 at 6:35am

Have you tried ON1 Photo Raw?

I have found the results incredible.

Paul
- John Dilworth > Paul Perlow August 24, 2018 at 3:18am
  
  Thanks Paul, I do have ON1, but haven’t tried the Resize module yet—glad it works so well for you. But Gigapixel is a completely different beast. Another example: I have a medium resolution (4000x) image with some imperfections. If I downsize it to 1000x, then upscale it back with Gigapixel, the result is BETTER than the original—the imperfections have been removed! No conventional upscaler could do that.
Dennis Miller September 16, 2018 at 6:22am

Agree that the results are great - best I have seen. Useful even at 400%, but there is a huge bug that causes the output size to be different from that requested by the user. I spoke with Topaz and they acknowledged this and I thought it would be fixed in the inline release, but it wasn't. And you cannot change the aspect ratio and resize at the same time - those might be the conditions under which the output does not match the user's requested values. But yes, a great tool otherwise.
Gad Eko Hendro H September 16, 2018 at 11:16am

is it possible to convert to vector? As we know, vector are better than raster when we talk about size we need
- John Dilworth > Gad Eko Hendro H September 16, 2018 at 3:08pm
  
  But even if you could convert to vector, you wouldn't see the improvements that Gigapixel can produce. Eg a distant cell tower or reflector dish may be just a blur in your image, but it can intelligently produce a larger image that looks much more like those originals. IE it is actually adding information that isn't in the original image--vectors can't do that.
  - Gad Eko Hendro H > John Dilworth September 17, 2018 at 3:05am
    
    Thanks John.This tool is very usefull.
Bernard Bunner September 18, 2018 at 11:48am

Hi John, thanks for posting this info.

I downloaded trial Mac version. I made different tests. When I take a detail of a portrait picture, exemple eyes, so yes, AI giga brings a good result, better than Artis Software Super Resize that I'm using.

But if you want to enlarge all the picture, the result is not better than Super Resize, that works more faster than AIG. And I'm not limited to 600%. I just tested 1500%. My source was a 1600x1307 picture and the result was 24000x19605 png file.

Photoshop opening 1500% file :

Super Resize and AI Giga at last
- John Dilworth > Bernard Bunner September 18, 2018 at 3:00pm
  
  Thanks Bernard. As long as Giga has good results, speed is unimportant to me--I'll mainly use it in batch mode while doing other things. Also, Giga can do 1500% in two passes--first 600%, and second 250%, so there's no upper limit. Give it a try, and see if it compares well!