Gigapixel from Topaz is an image enlarger. The hype on the website says it uses machine learning to create more detailed enhancements. The website also shows lots of comparisons between Photoshop and Gigapixel. I was intrigued but at the same time very sceptical of the claims, so I decided to try it out on some of my images. You can see one of these in the video below which I just published on my YouTube Channel.
If you decide to try Gigapixel (and I strongly recommend you try it before buying), please use the link on this page. It’s an affiliate link which helps me cover the costs of running the Lenscraft website, this blog and producing YouTube videos, but it doesn’t cost you any more.
Friday Image No.219
This week’s image is another from my recent trip to the Highlands of Scotland. If you subscribe to the Light and Landscape free magazine (it really is excellent) you may already have seen this in my interview.
The image is a great example of matching the content to the conditions. The conditions at the time were surprisingly calm and the loch which was usually very choppy became like glass. There was also a thick blue haze in the air which tended to fade the distant hills. This allowed me to throw more emphasis onto the island and its reflection.
I captured the image using a Fuji X-T3 camera and a Fuji 18-55 kit lens. I mounted the camera on a tripod, and I set the ISO to 80 and aperture to f/14.0. This was to slow the shutter to 1/6” so that the surface of the loche was smoothed a little and the reflection became more broken by the ripples. I tried other speeds, but they didn’t work as well as this. A Kase 0.9 Soft ND grad was used over the sky to help balance the exposure.
Iridient X-Transformer was used to convert the RAW file to the DNG format before processing with Adobe Lightroom. The colour image was then processed to black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro.
Lenscraft Newsletter
For members of my Lenscraft website, the latest newsletter goes out on the 4th May. It’s also published on the Lenscraft Newsletter page on the 4th May.
I hope you like the Friday image and have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Wow, great image indeed. As usual, impossible to identify the use of the grad filter, well done.
Next week I’ll take my RX10 to the Andean mountains of Peru. I’ll spend two weeks with my girlfriend chasing llamas and the perfect mountain shot. Have a nice weekend, greetings from Brazil.
Thank you. I can’t take all the credit for using the grad. The soft filters from Kase do make it easy as they are quite soft.
Yes I tried it and cancelled it – not for me! Regards Chris
No, I don’t think it will be useful for everyone or even liked by a lot of people. That’s why I encourage people to download the trial and make an informed judgement. I think it might be useful where you have a small original taken a long time ago. I have a lot of nice images from a Canon 300D which was only 6MPixels. Gigapixel seems to let me create large high-quality prints. At least it does if I can leave it running on a spare computer.
Beautiful image. Thanks for the tutorial on Gigapixel, interesting for sure and will come in handy.
Thank you. I’m pleased you like the image and hope the information in the video will be useful.