Use Sharpen AI either as a standalone software or as a plug-in for Topaz Studio / Photoshop / Lightroom Classic. Works wherever you currently edit your photos. In some cases, it can even recover image detail. noise - and then enhance just the detail. I could move Sharpen AI tasks to my Windows gaming PC, but that's not a great workflow.Sharpen AI was trained with millions of images so it could learn the characteristics of detail vs. While my current iMac struggles to run the focus and blur modes of Sharpen AI, Topaz are still migrating to Big Sur and M1 Macs, so, even if Apple had released the M1X iMacs - which is where my future upgrade plans lie (and where are they by the way?) - I wouldn't be able to to use all my Topaz products (yet). However, I certainly agree with your last statement. Also - thankfully - they continue to make the previous versions available, so a rollback means I can keep working. I like Topaz products in general (despite one or two foibles, which I've reported to them) and their support team have been very good at getting back to me. Nothing Topaz has done recently is encouraging me to buy any updates. If it does get 'the push' it will be off to other duties, rather than 'the holiday home for iMacs rubbish tip'. I wasn't planning to upgrade my iMac for a couple of years (and still may not). I'm currently still running Mojave on my iMac (Catalina on my - even older - MacBook Pro). Apart from cost, it’s not good for the environment if we have to junk our computers every few year. MacOS Catalina supports iMacs back to late 2012, and it should be getting security updates for another couple of years. My iMac's GPU originally met the minimum requirements - and only just failed to meet the recommended specs, but the needs of the new focus/ blur AI engine are possibly beyond it. It copes (relatively) well with everything I ask of it, including DeNoise AI 3.0.2, but the focus and blur modes of Sharpen AI v3.0.2 are giving it a serious workout (ironically, sharpen mode - the mode I use the least - seems to be a fair bit faster than with v2.2.4). Given the limited range of models I’d expect any good supplier offering Mac software to be clear about the models supported, and avoid big regressions in performance. Macs don’t have the fastest graphics, compared to high end Windows PCs. That’s from about 2015 isn’t it? My iMac is 2017 and I don’t think of it as ageing. Anyone speccing a computer these days will find that they are limiting their options if they don't factor in a decent GPU. In the old days the GPU was just needed to paint pixels on the screen. Now using a second processor ie the GPU is how software is finding increased processing power. With CPU power having plateued increasing the number of cores became the next power enhancer. However, on the basis of my experiences so far I'd say 26 minutes to enhance the focus of a 12MB image is achingly slow and you may want to consider rolling back too. I use the focus and blur modes the most, so I'll be rolling back to v2.2.4 again for a while. I suspect these two modes use the new AI engine to the greatest degree (and are therefore the most GPU dependent). With v3.0.1 performance depends on which mode I use - ‘Motion Blur’ and ’Out of Focus’ are significantly slower than ’Too Soft’ - taking maybe 4x as long to preview (1.5 minutes vs 30 seconds) and process (6 minutes vs 2 minutes). 3 minutes to preview/ 8-10 minutes to process a 267MB TIFF. I have an ageing iMac 27" (Core i5 3.5GHz, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2 GB) which struggled with v3.0.0 - e.g. I recently had feedback from Topaz Support and it's clear the new AI engine of Sharpen AI places increased demands on the GPU - with older systems (like mine) beginning to creak. That allows preview to run without crashing the app. I found a newer version of the 4200m driver from nVidia. And I am using the GPU with allowed memory consumption turned ON.Īnd I am finding that Denoise AI is also running faster than it did with the earlier release, which is different than what many are reporting. GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GTX970 with 4G of dedicated RAM and 8G of shared RAM. A RAW file of 24M pixels is taking about 50 sec to process. I decided to stay at 3.0.0 considering the problems I am hearing. (Assuming, of course the card is supported). 2GB is the minimum (works well with my M43s ORF files), with 4 GB OB ram for mostly OK for everything but the largest files, and 8gb O.B. It's not just the speed of the card, it is also the amount of on-board ram on the video card. The older version was re-selected & works OK, howbeit a bit slow. My problems were related to using an old computer which had an inadequate Video card.
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