New super ultra-wide wallpapers

There is no theme this time, I did a random selection. Even so, each one is from a different country. You have here Netherlands, France, Austria and Slovakia.

Bright spot in the Business Bay

Back to Dubai with today’s photo. Most of my photos from Dubai are of the skyscrapers, but this one has a bit less of those. You can only see them a bit in the background. I found this spot in the middle of the Business Bay, and I think it was something like an exercise area. I think I remember seeing a poster for that nearby. Not completely sure anymore.

I really like how it stood out compared to the rest of the area, and how the middle was much brighter than the rest. So I also enhanced it in my editing, keeping the borders quite dark. This is also a shot done with the 12mm Laowa lens, so while I was standing really close to the palms, I still got a big part of them in the shot.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop. I probably used the Night Light filter from NISI with this photos, but can’t really tell.

Vineyards in Austria

Let’s do a more sunny photo today. I took this one already few years ago, but since I never edited or posted it, I’m doing so today. There are still thousands of photos I taken over the years I never posted. My photo library is really quite big.

This photo was taken from the top of the Durnstein castle in Austria. I used the 200mm lens to zoom in on the area on the other side of the Danube river, with all the vineyards around. The result made for a really hazy photo, as the day was very hot and sunny. I’m including a comparison to the original image, just so you can see the difference here.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file.

Green and golden fireworks

I’m just tired today. Had a bit stressfull day and I think I caught the cold somewhere. So no long post today, just a quick one. Here is another photo from the St. Stephens Day fireworks, this time I went with a green and golden one. I really like when each of my fireworks photos goes into a different color. I even push the white balance, and the tint of the shadow, to enhance this color.

This is a single exposure, double processed and then blended back together in Photoshop.

Different uses

There are few different uses for Topaz Gigapixel AI so let’s go through them.

• Enlarging photos – Of course the most basic one is what it was made for, to enlarge photos. It works great for this and now, if I need to print one of my older, smaller, photos, I first enlarge it here. With the latest update, it also detects faces, to make the enlargement even better.
• Enlarging drawings – While it works great on photos, the results with drawings are even better. Anything with sharp lines and bigger color areas is upscaled perfectly. Can’t really show an example, as I don’t draw and don’t want to use anyone else’s image, but if you try it out, you will be impressed.
• Oversampling images – For this I did a guide here. By upscaling the image in Gigapixel AI and then downsizing it back to the original size in Photoshop, you will end up with much cleaner and sharper image.
• Creating high-resolution photos form videos – I had few occasions recently, where I needed to make a printable photo from a video clip. I like to use Media Player Classic as my main video player, and in that one, I just hit Alt+I to save an image of the actual frame. Upscaling that in Gigapixel AI crates a very good quality image to further work with.
• Upscaling videos – And while we are at upscaling one frame, you can upscale a whole video like that. Just search on youtube for Gigapixel AI upscaled videos. The process here is to first break up the video into frames, upscale those and then combine them back into video. I will not go through detail on this here, but here is one of the ways to do this.

As you can see, you can use it in quite a lot of cases.

Comparisons

Let’s look at few comparisons here. Just to show you how powerful it is. All are compared again a standard upscale in Photoshop, at 100% zoom. I upscaled smaller images here, so it’s easier to see the difference.

First one is a regular photo. Upscaled from 1580×1050 to 6320×4200. That’s from 1.6Mpix to 26.5Mpix. You can see the original file from which this was upscaled here.

The second one with a human face in the photo, as Gigapixel AI now recognizes faces. The difference here is really huge. Upscaled from 1350×900 to 5400×3600. That’s from 1.2Mpix to 19.4Mpix. You can see the original file from which this was enlarged here.

And for the last one, here is one enlarged from a video frame. So going from 1920×1080 to 7680×4320. That is from HD to 8K resolution.