Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy01
Marc, Fred, Rodney & Ben, thanks for your comments and contributing to an interesting discussion about ethics/techniques and these new trends in post processing. 
Ive loaded a comparison image here, where you can see the starless 7hr Ha stack before (right) and after Topaz NR (left). Previously in my workflow I used Topaz NR sparingly at the very end of the process, but in this case I used it on each stack prior to assembling the image.
I'm not sure if I can agree though, that the Ai is introducing something that isn't there, rather in the style of a scene from the original "Blade Runner" movie, it's enhancing what's there already.  (with the exception of two artifacts at 10 and 11 o'clock that resemble dustlanes, I could have softened/blurred these but I chose not to for the sake of the exercise.)
As I mentioned though, otherwise I've used it sparingly, it is indeed possible to push this technique further, and that's when Marc's observations certainly ring true. 
PS: Welcome back Fred, I found your image of this to be very interesting when researching this target. |
Interesting discussion
Firstly the final image looks really nice Andy, the colouring is rather Metsavainio'ish
In the comparison you have made, what processing was done on the right hand image?
Assuming nothing was done already to the right hand image to create, shall we say, fake features...then carefully comparing the two images, it looks pretty reasonable to me
There are a couple'a "enhanced" features here and there that made me go... yeah?..ooo-kay
but overall, it looks generally believable to me. I have previously been jovially vocal about the often horrendous use of decon and wavelets sharpening, resulting in details being made into very obvious little dots and worms that some people seem ok to happily believe are real detail
but in this comparison and if your right hand image had no form of sharpening applied already, then comparing the two, there appears to be little change between features but rather, as you say, just some obvious enhancements and smoothing/blending and on a very fine scale too and the noise reduction looks to have been quite effective and natural looking to me in the intervening spaces
Have to say and just like tell tail decon
, it appears, this application will give an image it's own characteristic "look" so it will likely be rather easy (at least for me
) to pick when it was used now, so thanks for that
... and this is a negative IMO, when you get it right, the viewer shouldn't be able to tell what application/filter has been used on an image. In fact I can see now that other imagers have obviously been applying this, or something similar, to their images and I wasn't sure how they did it and I think have "over" applied it in many cases. It has an air or look about it that will make it fairly easy to over-apply in the quest to satisfy the need to make your images "look" really high res
...but at least for now and from what you have posted at least, this "look" is more appealing to me than the dreaded decon/wavelet look
Topaz huh...?
Mike