NOTE: I left all of these images unsharpened for comparison. If you’re looking to achieve an identical level of sharpness with Preserve Details 2, applying the most basic sharpening filter in Photoshop seems to do the trick. The first thing immediately noticeable is that Gigapixel AI tends to sharpen the final image more than Photoshop does. You’ll see several examples of the two here, and it feels “over sharpened” in my opinion, but that is largely subjective. Let’s compare the output of these two products.

I then ran the photo through both Topaz Gigapixel AI and Adobe Photoshop’s “Preserve Details 2.0″ to produce two 24×48” images (2x), then saved each jpeg at maximum quality, which is what I would normally send to the printer.

I renamed my image to “The Other Photographer” to avoid accidentally overwriting anything. If I did any minor resampling, I don’t recall, but I typically only resample before emitting a print jpeg, and so when working with the original Photoshop file, none of my images should ever be resampled. This print currently lives on my wall as a 12×24, which is probably the native resolution after cropping. I took this photo, “The Photographer” on a trip to Iceland in 2015, at the popular black sand dunes in Stokksnes overlooking the Vestrahorn mountain range, using a Nikon D810 and a Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 at f/5.6. Given how much Topaz products have been hyped lately, it seemed like a worthy endeavor to compare Gigapixel AI to Photoshop’s “Preserve Details 2.0” upscaler. I have several 2:1 cropped photos with a native-ish resolution of 12×24″, and wanted to see if Gigapixel was up to the task of handling a 24×48″ enlargement. I purchased Topaz Gigapixel AI as part of a bundle last year, but haven’t had much need to do enlargements until recently. Adobe Photoshop by Jonathan Zdziarski (click on images for larger view):

Gigapixel upscale video