A.I. clear

just tested the new release Studio incl. 1.12.6. AI clear.
The results are really really impressive !

chapeau !

Best
T-lam

Oh no, I just made the update a few hours ago. I use AI Clear to clean very low res images and the results with the new version are horrible no matter the auto/low/med/high settings. Can’t get any near the quality i could get with the old version
I was desperate because we can"t “downgrade” with Topaz and go back but thank God I used my last backup image of my system hard drive with my backup software and could retrieve the old version by replacing all the “Topaz Studio” in Program Files and AppData folders. Now back and stay with v 1.12.0 !

It seems the low settings with noise removal is gone in new version. The new low setting only sharpens now and give horrible results. If we go medium or auto the denoiser is too strong and give cartoonish results.

Please TOPAZ, bring back the old LOW setting.

I wouldn’t say the results are “horrible”, but it does feel like this new version is a lot more “heavy handed”, we could say, with some of the detail processing. A lot more often I am seeing basically oversharpening artifacts whenever there are clusters of small detail. Green an Pink pixels popping up etc.

The problem seems to be that somehow the noise reduction goes hand in hand with the sharpening - so even on LOW sharpening if we use HIGH noise reduction it also oversharpens the result. Will need to do some more research.

And I agree that it is unfortunate there is no way to compare with the previous version.

The old LOW model was the best for most of the images. Keeping things natural without oversharpening or overdenoising and removing artifacts. It seems the new version on contrary will reveal artifacts, particulary with jpeg or similar compressed images.
Maybe in some cases if the image is already good quality the new models bring better results. But I don’t see the point of such a tool on already good images.
What i also experienced with the new LOW model is some red pixels like if the noise instead of being removed was amplified.
Such a shame, I was thrilled when I see a new so called improved update of AI clear that results like a regression.

I have just purchased AI Clear and the saved result from the first image I processed is not very good. AI Clear does a reasonable job (see screen grab) but when I safe the image and open it is Photoshop (see screen grab) the file is full of artefacts that didn’t show up when the image was being displayed in Studio. This never happened when I was using the trial version. I tried saving the image as a TIFF and got similar artefacts.



I have the same problem. AI Clear used to be my go to plugin but not now. It way overdoes the effect. I can tone it down by selecting Low on the Remove Noise, 1.00 on Recover Details, Enhance Sharpness doesn’t seem to do much at this point, and finally 0.50 on the Opacity. Now after all that I get a sort of duplication of what I got with the previous version. Here are a couple of before and after with default settings.


Look what it does to the tree bark above.


Then a simple textured paint job on a bathroom wall becomes a pockmarked thing. Not sure why the color is off on the 2nd of each uploaded photo, the originals don’t have any color change.

I sure hope they can put the AI back in this thing on the next release because I’ve pretty much stopped using it after these results.

1 Like