Somehow I managed to catch a cold right nice at the end of the summer. And while my head hurts, I really hate to sit at the pc and do anything. So instead of a new photo, how about some new wallpapers. Cropping those is much faster than editing :)
Don’t forget to check out other available wallpapers:
From the page stats, it looks like the most popular wallpapers are from Dubai, so how about even more of those.
I mentioned before, that though I share super ultra-wide wallpapers with you, I never have seen how they look like on a screen. Since I don’t have a wide enough monitor myself, I can’t try them out. But yesterday, I stumbled upon this photo on Reddit and of course, I immediately recognized one of my photos. And I’m sharing that photo here today with you, with the permission of the Reddit user phauk, whose computer setup this it. It does look great, doesn’t it?
If you use one of my wallpapers, not only the super ultra-wide ones, and have taken a photo of your setup, feel free to send it to me. The next time I do a wallpaper update post, I will include it.
And for today, how about even more super ultra-wide wallpapers for download. As always, these are all free for personal use and you can share them further, just link back to this blog. No commercial use without my permission.
Don’t forget to check out other available 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.
I did an article about Topaz Gigapixel AI before, but with all of the recent updates, I thought I do one more. I am quite impressed by the results and have been using it right from when it was available. The ability to enlarge a photo by a lot, and still have a great result is just priceless.
Today, I will go through some of the uses for it and will add a few more comparisons against photoshop at the end.
There are few different uses for Topaz Gigapixel AI so let’s go through them.
As you can see, you can use it in quite a lot of cases.
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.
As before, I would suggest you give this one a try, if you ever need to enlarge a photo. You can get a 30 day fully functional trial from the Topaz Labs website here.
The number of wallpaper downloads is going up every day, so for those that like them, here are even more 4K ones.
All wallpapers are for free and can be distributed further, just link back to this site (of course only for personal use, no commercial use allowed without my permission).
Don’t forget to check out other available wallpapers:
This time all the new ones are from Amsterdam, as usuall with 4K wallpapers, they are all in 3840x2160px resolution.
Some people like to crop the photos they take, some don’t. I used to be in the second camp for a very long time. I would just never crop my photos, never change the aspect ratio. Only very rarely, when I needed to clean up the edges. But I changed my mind in the end. And today, I will share with you some of my reasons and thoughts about that.
The biggest reason I never cropped my images before was that I always felt like I was losing something. I always tried to get the composition I wanted right in the camera. But over time I just found out this is not always possible. Especially when you start using prime lenses or some ultra wider or fisheye lenses, you will inevitably capture more than you want or need. And that makes for a lot of empty space, like the extra ground, extra empty sky, extra walls and so on, that just doesn’t make the photo better.
This is an example of this. This photo was taken with the fisheye lens, and the extra ground just added nothing to it. Removing it made the composition tighter, more focused on the subject of the photo. And yes, I removed the camera shadow in post-processing.
The second reason to not crop was that I like consistency. I like it too much. It just feels nice when you look through your photos and they all fit into a nice grid, all with a nice 4:3 ratio, perfectly aligned. I very rarely even took portrait shots, as they would not fit nicely. I know, it’s a strange reason. But then, when I started to do many vertoramas and panorama, this was no longer achievable at all. Every photo was different, everyone had a different aspect ratio in the end. So instead of my photos being consistent in size, now every single one is different. And I think it looks even better than before.
Almost each of my photos is now of a different aspect ratio.
My last reason was the loos of quality. When you are shooting with a 12Mpix camera or even 22Mpix camera, cropping of half of the photo will degrade the quality quite a lot. But that’s really not the case anymore. Most of my photos now are 30Mpix to 100Mpix in size. I can crop away really a lot, and the quality is there. Also with the progress of the cameras and good sharp lenses, the quality of the photos is better, even if you zoom in. And with tools like Topaz Gigapixel AI, you can upscale you photo 2, 4 or even to 6 times the size, while still being of great quality. Gigapixel AI is probably the most impressive photo editing application I seen in a while.
This was a huge panorama, where I cropped really a lot from it. It’s still a huge image anyway.
In the end, it’s everybody’s own decision if to crop or not to crop your photos. But it’s much easier decision now than it was only a few years before.
