There is a common house spider visible in this picture. Really. There is. — All photos ©Charles G. Haacker

Topaz Labs: A Shameless Plug for Topaz Post-Processing Apps

Disclaimer: I do not work for Topaz Labs, nor am I affiliated. I use their products and enthusiastically endorse them.

I will return later to Topaz Labs and their astonishing Artificial Intelligence applications for digital photo processing, but first…

Arachnophobes probably ought not to read any further as my subject happens to be a tiny, innocuous house spider. He (yes, he is a he) set up a web between my sink and mirror and challenged me to photograph him in situ. I was crammed into the door frame to my left, too-ample stomach pressed into the sink, handholding my Sigma 70 macro, using the screen flipped out as getting to the eyepiece was impossible. The goal, as ever, was to Get The Picture.

You can see him and gauge his small size. His web is so delicate it is invisible. By some estimates, as many as 80% of common house spiders are male. I did not know that.

I braced the back of my left hand on the countertop, manually preset the lens to 1:2, and focused by incrementally advancing the camera while watching the focus peaking on the screen. I pushed the ISO to 6400 and got about 1/100-second f/11-ish using only the overhead lights in the bathroom. The shutter was still nowhere near fast enough for this level of magnification. I compensated by firing short 3-fps bursts. Most were mush, but a handful were sharp enough but predictably very noisy.

This was where I knew I could make good use of Topaz to the Rescue with one or more of their astonishing AI apps for post-processing.

I dislike using a tripod. I have an excellent one, but it usually stays in the car. I like the handheld freedom to adjust my height and angle quickly while exploring a subject. The downside is that it forces me sometimes to use stratospheric ISOs to get an acceptable shutter and aperture. Often I use my monopod with its shooter’s vee bracket instead of a head. In addition to only needing to adjust one leg with flip locks, I can put the leg at an angle to lower the camera without changing its length.

— All photos ©Charles G. Haacker

But no tripod or even a monopod could be crammed into the space available to get the spider in extreme closeup. It was hand hold or fuhgeddaboudit. I handheld.*
* A beanbag would have been perfect but I don’t have one (note to self).

This is one of the underexposed untouched raw captures. Spidey held perfectly still.

If you enlarge this raw as big as possible, you’ll see it is subpar. Very subpar. And it is one of the better shots.

Above is the raw capture after standard post-processing in Lightroom only. Enlarge it, and you’ll still see noise, color noise, and overall mush.

This is where Topaz Enters the Picture (see what I did there?).

Topaz has three quality enhancers: DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, and Gigapixel AI. None are inexpensive, but they are cheaper bundled. I have all three, plus the new Topaz Photo AI beta, which combines elements of all three into a single app. You still need to own the bundle, and each has different features and effects, including masking (which Photo AI does not) but I have been using the advance beta copy of Photo AI for weeks since I had the first three.

Oh, boy, is it ever impressive.

This iteration has been run through Topaz Photo AI beta. It has been automatically and intelligently sharpened and denoised, including color noise, in a single pass. If you have a high-rez screen blow this up and compare it to the Lightroom-only version. If you want to view the highest rez image, go to this link and click twice on the picture to get maximum enlargement. That will show you how incredibly effective Topaz DeNoise and Sharpen AI are. You will even see he has lost his left foreleg; there is only the socket where it was.

He is head down, and the prominent “boxing gloves” on his head show he is a male.

I squidged around to get a slightly different angle on my little pal and did the same sequence in post-processing. His body measures about 2mm, or about .08-inch. He is an itsy-bitsy spider, but I love getting up close and personal, and he didn’t mind.

CAVEATS:

Topaz apps are expensive, immensely powerful, and demanding of your computer. I now use a big gaming tower because I run Topaz plus full Adobe Creative Cloud (Photography). I was using an all-in-one Windows 10 machine with Adobe CC and had no clue that things were stodgy. It was frog-in-the-pot. I thought slow was normal. When I first saw Topaz offering DeNoise AI (their most popular offering), I jumped for it and pretty much bricked the computer. I could run CC or DeNoise but not both.

Well dang.

I consulted and learned that AiO Windows machines are generally underpowered going in, and most in my price range cannot be upgraded. A Mac was out of the que$tion.

I looked up the minimum specs for running Adobe CC plus Topaz, added them up, added another 15%, and found a gaming machine with the right specs. It was already obsolete and entry-level, but I am not a gamer; I just needed the power and memory (16 GB of RAM and everything upgradeable). I got a steal of a deal and boy-o is it ever fast.

ETHICS

Those who know me know that I don’t see anything wrong with Post-Processing per se. Dodging, burning, retouching, and other manipulations are as old as photography, now approaching 200 years. I shoot only raw which must be post-processed or there is no image.

Manipulation of images for journalistic publications is forbidden except for a bit of cropping, color balancing, and opening of shadows. Cloning is strictly verboten and can end in a photographer being fired and banned for life! The same is true of forensic, evidence photography.

The war against the machines has begun: photography site bans AI images

But I am neither a photojournalist nor a forensic photographer. I just wanna make pretty pitchers.

In this brave new age of imaging, things that were once impossible are now possible, even indetectable. Would you know if I never told you that my final spider images were enhanced using an AI?

As a courtesy, I usually disclose when I have, say, replaced a sky or cut-and-pasted a flight of Sandhills into a sunrise. The sunrise was there when the birds weren’t, and the birds were there when the sunrise wasn’t. I made both pictures within the same hour. I had arrived at dawn to get birds against the sunrise, but the furshlugginer birds overslept (wildlife don’t take no direction).

The linked article is raging about AI-generated art and photography, with a human maybe even taking credit for work they did not make. The mere thought of AI creating something from scratch scares the bejeebers out of many humans, especially those in the arts.

What I do is Not That

I edit. I retouch. I dodge and burn and adjust color and contrast. I use all the tools and skills I have to make something vaguely artistic. Photographers have done it for nearly 200 years. Is it wrong? Unethical? I do not think so but I know many that do. I use AI as a creative tool, not turning it loose to create on its own.

Comments? Observations? What do you think? 🤔🤨

As always, thank you for looking and reading. I truly appreciate it! 😊