The Westport Break

[AlanLichty]

Topaz updated their PhotoAI program over the weekend so I decided to try it out to see if they had done anything earth shattering. Spoiler alert - yes it works a little better but still isn't in the same league as what DxO offers. It does however work on JPEGs which is something that DxO doesn't do and does a fairly decent job with their denoise and sharpening.

I went looking for old JPEG files looking for a candidate and found a stash of shots I took one day out along the Washington coast at the town of Westport. At the time (2008) I had a Canon 20D which had an Action Mode where it could shoot at 5 frames/second but only in JPEG mode. The camera might not have been wonderful by today's standards but I did have a brand new Canon EF 100-400 f/4 L lens to play with. There wasn't a lot of good landscape scenes around Westport so I wandered over to the area around the jetty and saw a bunch of surfers taking advantage of a nice break. This is the result of processing one of those shots.

C&C always welcome.

 

[Trent Watts]

Looks fantastic to me Alan. The details in the water and splash show off nicely. I never know with water but the colour is on the green side. Is that the colour in that area?

 

[AlanLichty]

Looks fantastic to me Alan. The details in the water and splash show off nicely. I never know with water but the colour is on the green side. Is that the colour in that area?

Thanks Trent - The water color can vary quite a bit among the Pacific NW coastline depending on the season and weather conditions but in general from ground level it's more green than the Atlantic. I was quite surprised to see a lot more of an aqua shade when looking down at the Pacific from a drone since it's not what I am used to from the ground. Westport seems a bit more of a green hue than the southern Oregon coast.

 

[JimFox]

This looks really nice Alan!

I like how with your angle you captured the water seemingly split by the surfboard.

 

[AlanLichty]

This looks really nice Alan!

I like how with your angle you captured the water seemingly split by the surfboard.

Thanks Jim - when I took this image I had no idea what I would ever do with it but was bored and it seemed like an interesting exercise. I was shooting in continuous mode so I had a fair number of shots to choose from to get a good moment like this one. Nothing even vaguely close to what a current generation camera can do of course but I don't shoot in jpeg mode with any of my current cameras.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice freeze action shot. Not sure what your original jpeg looked like but whatever Topaz did, it did a nice job with it.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice freeze action shot. Not sure what your original jpeg looked like but whatever Topaz did, it did a nice job with it.

Thanks Jameel - Topaz relies almost entirely on AI to clean up photos as opposed to DxO using camera and lens specific testing to create a database of corrections to apply. For old jpegs PhotoAI does a decent job of cleaning and sharpening which worked quite well for this old JPEG which was a bit noisy at ISO 400 for the old 20D. I did use 1/2000s which helped with both freezing the surfer as well as the wave.