p.2 #1 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
I think the discussion on Topaz JPG to RAW AI has value and I don't want to continue our discussion re shooting RAW on the iPhone here since it seems we are hijacking this discussion toward the iPhone Camera versus the Topaz software. So, charlyw, don't get me wrong, I would love to continue this discussion elsewhere, I am eager to learn more. Unfortunately, FM does not have a forum for camera phones (yet). So, perhaps we can continue this in another forum or by PM. I am becoming more knowledgeable about iPhone photography but am still a newbie but I do intend on shooting RAW. I would prefer to keep separate the camera app from the editing app and dislike LR anyway, so I am leaning more toward Pro Camera when I do jump in. In the meantime I am more concerned about using the Topaz stuff for my old JPGs and my Wife's HEIC images and how to improve them. I added a post about some of the problems I ran into with Topaz JPG to RAW AI and I hope others note any problems, benefits, etc with that bit of software.
p.2 #2 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Forget that Topaz snake oil conversion - it doesn‘t do anything but allow you to use the RAW side of you chosen software for common manipulations within very constrained limits. And if you chose DNG as the target format you must factor in a Lightroom subscription because DNG support in any other software is iffy for software generated DNG!
p.2 #3 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
I downloaded the trial version of JPG to RAW AI which was v1.0.3
Since I converted a number of images I thought I should go ahead and buy it even though at this point I still believed I was (and still am) mostly testing. On downloading the purchased JPG tp RAW AI it now takes longer to run even though it is the same version. It might speed up if I restarted my computer even though there was no guidance to do so.
So I took several files that my wife shot on her iPhone and I converted from HEIC to JPG using iMazing HEIC Converter. I refer to these as the original JPGs even though they were themselves converted from HEIC.
These original JPGs I then converted to TIFF using Topaz JPG to RAW AI. The resulting TIFFs were much larger but didn't look any better. Perhaps the benefit I thought is that they are now lossless TIFFs versus the original JPGs.
I then ran both the original JPGs and newly converted TIFFs thru TOPAZ AI Clear which I have come to like for removing noise and sharpening lately. Oddly, while the resulting JPGs looked better than the original JPGs, the results from the TIFFS looked worse. On saving the TIFFs in AI Clear the program saved them back as JPGs. I have not checked preferences, perhaps you can save TIFFs as TIFFS and not only JPGs.
So, lastly, I converted the JPGs that went thru AI Clear thru JPG to RAW AI and saved them too as TIFFs again. Those TIFFs looked worse than the original JPGs I processed through AI Clear as well as the first set of TIFFs I got from JPG to RAW AI. So, my plans of converting all my old small JPGs from around 2000 to TIFFs are on hold for now.
I think the files sizes may be telling too.
One of the original JPGs were 9191 KB
The JPG resulting from running the original JPG thru AI Clear was 18124 KB (the one that looked best)
The TIFF was 71,450KB created from the original JPG (and looked the same as the original JPG)
The resulting JPG from running the TIFF thu AI Clear was smaller at 12068 KB which I thought odd.
The resulting TIFF I got when I ran the AI Cleared JPG thru JPG to RAW AI was 71450KB. Weird in that it was the same size in both cases of converting the original JPG (9191KB) to TIFF and converting the AI Cleared file (18124KB) to TIFF.
I have stopped testing. I would like to talk to or correspond with Topaz's tech folks but as they have grown they have become more distant too. Lastly, I should point out that Topaz also makes a program called AI Gigapixel which has received good reviews and you can see it for yourself on Youtube. You can take any file and upsize it much like ON1's Resize program. You can save the result as a 16 bit TIFF (maybe DNG too) so I am asking myself why the JPG to RAW AI app, and why did I spent my money on this rather than AI Gigapixel. Still, Topaz has recently release several programs that were faulty on release but got better on later versions. AI Clear bogged down my system and didn't seem to work on release but now it is great. Topaz Impressions was the same. So, who knows, Topaz JPG to RAW holds some promise later, but not now in my opinion.
p.2 #4 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Charlie San wrote:
I think the files sizes may be telling too.
Nope, due to different compression schemes (one lossless one lossy) and different content (noise reduced images will compress better) the file sizes are what they are, they are completely without any informative value. Only if you take JPEG that came from the same source (say one specific camera) and were processed in the same way (like a camera preset) then the JPEG compression will be indicative primarily how much detail your image has, then noise and then sharpening.
p.2 #5 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
I'm no technic but I'm wondering if a jpg engine uses (a) algorithm(s) to compress data, it should be possible to 'reverse-engineer' it back?
I can see many cameramanufacturers using different algorithms but if there's metadata included with the jpg it should be possible for the software to chose the right conversion.
(guessing again)
I used a lossless compressed NEF from my D5 together (as a reference) with the originally by the camera's generated jpg.
I loaded the NEF in PS CC and tweaked the image lightly, bit of sharpening, and enhancing shadows, then saved it as optimal quality jpg.
Compared to the original SOOC jpg this looked better. (no surprise)
Then I put the original SOOC jpg through the converter and I got as a result a slightly less looking tiff, BUT I could tweak this tiff where it looked absolutely better than the SOOC jpg.
Then I used the resulting jpg of the tweaked NEF I found the resulting tiff to be subpar and needing a lot more PP and even then not resulting in a better or equal quality compared to the result of the tweaked Nef to jpg conversion.
So the less modified/tweaked the jpg the better the conversion.
I'm going to repeat this quick test and I will ad a jpg without metadata.
I have lots of scanned film from back in the days so I would be thrilled if this works for those files.
Would be nice if you guys would conduct this same tests to read about your experience.
p.2 #6 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Thern wrote:
I'm no technic but I'm wondering if a jpg engine uses (a) algorithm(s) to compress data, it should be possible to 'reverse-engineer' it back?
No it's impossible because JPEG is a lossy compression (yes there is a lossless JPEG compression but that isn't used in this case) - because JPEG models a 4x4 block of pixels as a wavelet function and the quality of the JPEG compression describes the precision of that modeling. The not modeled variations of the pixels in each block is irretrievably lost as they are discarded!
Edit: A lot of other algorithms do influence the quality of the JPEG modeling, the more sharpening or noise reduction is applied the further the JPEG restored pixels will deviate from the ground truth that is the RAW file!
p.2 #7 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Charlie - Why did you output to TIFF instead of to DNG for your testing? A TIFF is not a RAW file.
I did try it out myself. I don't see any additional information in blown highlights or shadows...their AI algorithm that 'smartly interprets the smallest amount of data' doesn't do much. However, when taking JPEGs where I had a bit of blown sky, and then pulling the highlights in the JPEG vs pulling the highlights in the generated DNG of the JPEG, the DNG produced MUCH smoother gradients in the final output, while the JPEG was a blocky mess.
Based on this limited information, it obviously isn't going to recover information that isn't there, but it does seem to intelligently remove the compression and interpolate smartly between the compressed blocks, making editing that file a lot cleaner if you have to do any major adjustment.
There is some oversharpening in the DNG, but that's because it did my standard RAW sharpening and I didn't adjust it...if I adjusted it, those wouldn't be there.
p.2 #8 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Jman13 wrote:
However, when taking JPEGs where I had a bit of blown sky, and then pulling the highlights in the JPEG vs pulling the highlights in the generated DNG of the JPEG, the DNG produced MUCH smoother gradients in the final output, while the JPEG was a blocky mess.
That's probably down to the software you use and what kind of processing is available - probably JPEG are internally still treated as the 8-bit/channel color data that the format mandates while DNG are inherently treated as 16 bits/color RAW files which then allow different algorithms to be used. If you load the JPEG into Photoshop, see to it that the layer it is on has 16 bit color depth and then do your changes the result will pretty much be equal...
p.2 #10 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
No.....
This is just a fancy plugin that guesses at what might have been. They can't claim it to be RAW and they state that in the first line, "Edit JPEG as if you shot it in RAW."
p.2 #12 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
In all of my two card systems, I always shot RAW with the best quality JPEG available (on the slower card, usually SD). This is a fast and hopefully "good enough" backup in case of card disaster. Over time and varying cameras a high rez jpeg has been 20% to 30% the size of RAW. Last I checked our current theories of "universe" do not allow for making "something out of nothing." What's actually happening is that the software (no AI involved) is averaging and extending the existing data. Likely uses some farily fancy simultaneous non-linear differential equations, perhaps the still developing fractal tools. By definition, an "average" is not the thing. No way it can be. What you get is more of the same, slightly puffed up and squished. Still, I'm sure Topaz will be more than happy to take your $$$.
p.2 #13 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
jose120photo wrote:
No.....
This is just a fancy plugin that guesses at what might have been. They can't claim it to be RAW and they state that in the first line, "Edit JPEG as if you shot it in RAW."
No that’s not their claim, they claim that you can use the RAW tools your software offers (which often go beyond what said software can do to JPEG) - they just hope that people read it your way and thus can make money from that snake oil...
p.2 #14 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
charlyw wrote:
No that’s not their claim, they claim that you can use the RAW tools your software offers (which often go beyond what said software can do to JPEG) - they just hope that people read it your way and thus can make money from that snake oil...
Is it still snake oil that Photoshop will allow you to open jpeg files in ACR and use very same tools (sans White Balance) or if Lightroom will allow you to Export jpeg files as DNG. In the past, even the DNG converter would allow batch conversions of jpeg to DNG wrappers. Granted, the reality of doing so is not what some folks think ... still wondering, if Adobe offers these options, is it still 'snake oil' as well for them since they once listed these capabilities as a marketing point?
p.2 #15 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
Snake oil, that's funny.
jpeg to raw is more like just saying 8 bit to 16 bit. Seems like straightforward interpolation. Here's a simple example:
Say you have a file with data that can go from 0-10: 2, 3, 8, 4, and so on
Now you want to expand this to be in the range of 0-100, so it would look like 20,30,80,40, and so on.
But this new, bigger file needs to have numbers in between, so we start interpolating: 20,25,30,55,80,60,40
That's all that a smart 8 bit to 16 bit conversion does, just fills in the gaps in luminosity for the red, green, and blue values.
Using AI to do this makes it just slightly smarter by using real world examples of 8bit and 16 bit photos to train a neural network to do the interpolation.
p.2 #16 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
It's not at all like 8 to 16 bit. What you need to compare is the pre de-mosaiced black and white raw sensor data to a de-mosaiced RGB jpeg. Now snake oil seems a lot more reasonable.
p.2 #19 · JPEG to RAW...yes you read that right...gimmick or not?
AI is really machine learning and there is no "intelligence" involved other than the software programers. One cannot convert a 4096 value data file into a 65,000 value one without guessing at the intermediate values and no software can do this. One need only look at the tonality lost when doing simple image sharpening with any of the NR applications to get some idea of the issues involved.
The greedy people at Boeing thought that "AI" would take care of the 737 Max with its new engines and new engine placement on the fuselage. Even this "fix" required a manual override to prevent a crash.
I can understand the appeal to the gullible people who saved pennies by shooting JPEG files and now want to use them in an editing program to fix problems that should have been dealt with at the time of capture.
