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How to make better holiday photos with AI-powered editing software

As we wrap-up the festive season and review the many family photos snapped throughout all of our holiday traditions, you may come across a few shots that are almost perfect.

Photographing holidays, like all live events, calls for a reportage style of photography: You’ll shoot quickly to catch the perfect moment, but sometimes the light will be a little low, or your shutter speed a bit slow, or the subject doesn’t quite fill the frame. Authentic moments unfold spontaneously, in real-time, and there are no “do-overs”. 

When you make that almost perfect shot — a great moment, with some technical flaws — all you need is a little help in post-production to make that image to shine. Topaz Labs offers a whole collection of AI-powered photo editing apps to help you rescue your photos.

Tackle low-light photos

Holiday lights look stunning in a dimly-lit room, but they are difficult to photograph. When you’re shooting in low light without a flash, you’ll struggle to shoot at a fast shutter speed unless you raise your ISO.

Higher ISOs increase the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor, so you can freeze motion even in low light. But this higher sensitivity comes at a price: noise. Noise is like a veil of static across an entire photo, muddling the details and depth of your image.

DeNoise AI uses machine learning tech to tackle heavy image noise, so your photos looks crisp and clean even at ISO 10,000 and above. It’s the perfect app to finish your nighttime holiday photos.

Sharpen blurry images

You’ve never seen a kid fly across a room faster than on Christmas morning! They’re all smiles as they tear into their gifts under the tree. These are the best moments filled with pure joy and lightning speed. But capturing those happy moments are difficult, because quick-moving subjects often leave us with a little motion blur in the final photo.

Correcting missed focus and motion blur is easy with Sharpen AI. You can choose from three AI Models Sharpen, Stabilize, or Focus to correct a soft image in one click. The results will give you more detail, for crystal-clear holiday memories. 

Make your photos perfect for printing

Sometimes you’ll shoot the perfect portrait if only your subject was filling the frame! If you need to crop-in to your photo to recompose the perfect shot, how many pixels are you losing? How much resolution do you sacrifice by cropping?

The solution is simple. Gigapixel AI makes it possible to upscale your image up to 600% with enhanced detail and sharpness. Achieve cleaner, crisper, bigger photos, ideal for print.

What's your biggest photo challenge?

Whether it’s capturing crisp photos or creating the perfect composition, we all have our own challenges with photography. What’s your biggest photo challenge? Let us know in the comments!

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How To Crop Your Photos and Recover 100% Resolution with Gigapixel AI

Sometimes you want to work with a portion of a photo, but "cropping in" reduces resolution. Gigapixel AI helps you crop images without compromising your pixel count.

It’s a great feeling to find the perfect image for your project, but what if you only want to work with a portion of the photo? Cropping into an image reduces the overall resolution which limits your use—especially for print, where every pixel counts. Let’s take a look at how Gigapixel AI can help you upsize your cropped photos by up to 600% and restore full-size resolution.

Crop and Resize with Gigapixel AI

Let’s start with a great image that would be made better with cropping. You can follow along yourself by downloading a totally free trial of Gigapixel AI, and downloading our free demo image.

The image we’re working with is 1920 x 1276 pixels, which is suitable for most uses but we want to crop tightly on the model’s face. 

Launch the image in Gigapixel AI, and click on the crop tool to select your crop. Apply your selection. After cropping, our image is now only 484 x 294 pixels—not much to work with here! Let’s see how Gigapixel can improve this crop.

In the main Gigapixel AI interface, we see a preview of 4X upscaling, which gives us an output of 1936 x 1176 pixels. You’ll see that the compression artifacts are gone, the model’s skin is smooth, and the details are sharp. But can we go even further?

We bump up our photo enlargement to 6X, or 600% larger than the cropped resolution. 

This gives us an output of 2904 x 1764 pixels — larger than our original uncropped image — and yet the output is still silky smooth with sharp detail in the right places. 

Gigapixel AI proves yet again to be an incredible image upscaling tool. But how does it compare to Photoshop?

Gigapixel AI vs Photoshop

 Let’s see whether Gigapixel can beat Photoshop, using the latest 2021 edition of Photoshop and its best image enlargement mode.

Using the same image and crop, we attempted 600% image upscaling in Photoshop 2021 using the Bicubic Smoother (enlargement) resampling mode.

The upscaling results in Photoshop were completely underwhelming. Compression artifacts are everywhere, and there is a lack of detail across the entire image. 

A side-by-side comparison says it all. Gigapixel drastically outperforms Photoshop even up to 6X image upscaling. 

Unlike older image editing algorithms, Gigapixel uses machine-learning technology to analyze your photo alongside millions of images to intelligently calculate the best output — this is why the results continue to shock and impress photographers all over the world. Try it totally free and see for yourself!

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The Beginner’s Guide to Topaz Studio 2

Want a fresh look for your photos? Topaz Labs, the leader in AI technology for your photography post-processing workflow, has launched Topaz Studio 2Whether you’re looking to edit photos or make stunning digital art, Topaz Studio 2 will help you achieve infinite photo effects that are as unique as your photography.

Read on for an overview of Studio 2 or check out our complete Studio 2 User Guide

Topaz Studio 2

Effect Filters Will Make Your Photos Pop

From basic adjustments to intelligent AI-powered effects, filters help make your photos pop by adjusting color, adding styles, and implementing a variety of fixes.

Topaz Studio 2 Filter Effects Panel

Getting started with photo filters is as easy as clicking the “Add Filter” button and browsing the different options. 

Looks Can Help You Achieve Anything

Within the Looks panel, you can choose from a variety of creative looks. You’ll find effects for artistic, grungy, abstract, vintage, dramatic looks and more. 

Topaz Studio 2 Looks Panel

Simply click any Look to preview and apply to your image.

Layers Let You Control Everything

Looks and effects appear in layers which you can stack and rearrange with blending modes and opacities to achieve the aesthetic that works for your image. 

Working with layers in Topaz Studio 2

You can stack and blend multiple looks and effect filters. The results are infinite and limited only by your imagination.

Topaz Studio 2 Looks

 

Download Topaz Studio 2 today and try it free for 30 days.

Be sure to check out the Studio 2 Guide to help you get started!