AI Gigapixel - Is it worth it?

I get a laugh from watching the internet photo gurus telling me in order to get the best possible shot, fill up the frame. Off hand, you go Duh! The guru will then pull out, I'm guessing from a back pocket, a 500 mm prime lens. The guru will then produce a fantastic shot of some colorful small subject. On one hand, if I had a 500 mm prime lens, it would be my walk around, cuz that would be my only lens.

With all due respect to the above mentioned internet guru, I support his site and have purchased some of his ebooks.

The rest of this post is for pixel peepers only. My philosophy is if it looks good at 400%, it'll look good everywhere. Software exists for a reason, to be used. And use it I will.

The rest of us have to use the poor man's 500 mm prime lens, the post processing crop tool.  For most small crops of a shot from a 20 to 25 megapixel format, there isn't a noticeable distortion.  But when the crops get more 'aggressive' the quality of the shot will suffer.  My final test is a 1920x1080 showing up crisp on a 27 inch monitor.  If I had to get a larger print, may need to do even more.  Enter Topaz's AI Gigapixel.

Piggy backing on an aggressive crop process, I will sometimes use some of the camera's image size options, of reducing the size of the active pixels by approximately 1.3%.  It is a way to turn the max reach of the 70-300 lens to 600 mm.  Fill that frame.  Problem is, you can't crop as much, if you still need to.  I tried Photoshop's enlarging processes and to be fair, they were OK.  Useable OK.  But I was up late one night and one thing led to another and the next thing you know, I have a license for AI Gigapixel.

I don't do a lot of printing anymore.  And as I pointed out, if it looks good on the monitor, it's OK by me.  Then I saw a photo I'd taken in August of 2019 (More 2019!) of a juvenile Eagle in flight.  Original post here.  Kinda far away.  And.  And I was using the D500's 1.3 frame size.  Those pixels growing out of control.  Takes a 20.9 pixel sensor to a 12.3 pixel sensor.  The D500 to a D90.  Great photo to test on.  Here we go.

The original shot.

This is the original shot, at 600 mm.  ISO was at 125 - so it's pretty clean.  And under the lucky category, it's pretty much in focus.  And the shot would be great, except I want less greenery and more bird.  Max reach of the camera, only software left to bail me out.

In the original post, I used aggressive cropping and Topaz's AI Clear.  I get lost in the math here, trying to figure out how close I am, but here is a close up of the posted shot.

Looks OK, eh?  Put that on a 27 inch monitor and you will see a lot of imperfections.  Mostly the edges between the upper edge of the bird and the greenery.  It ain't bad, but it's there.  Pixel Peeping.  I reprocessed the shot using AI Gigapixel and enlarging the shot 1.94%, then matching the same frame.  An came up with this.

If you know what to look for, you can see a much cleaner edge.  Also, looking at the leading edge of the eagle's wing, you can see definitions between the lines (?) in the wing - alternating brown and white.  And the tail had a bit more definition as well.  This is basically a 2x image growth.  I've done tests with small images on the net, blow them up to 400% - and they look OK.  Emergency use only, non subject.

I'm a big fan of Topaz's AI software.  I think the AI DeNoise does a real good job and is part of my workflow process.  I try to stay out of needing AI Gigapixel, but sometime you have to go where the situation leads.  Nice to have this in the toolbox.