Topaz Photo Studio Sharpening Algorithms Compared

Unsharpened eye detail from image crop, 85mm f/1.4

The Topaz Photo Studio program can work quite well for sharpening photos, but it’s easy to go overboard with it. The shot shown above sorely needs help with sharpening.

For portraits, sharpening often fails miserably when considering the skin. For that reason, the Photo Studio masking feature is basically mandatory.

This program (and Topaz Photo AI) also offers “Super Focus” for sharpening. This feature, in either program, crashes my computer every single time. Every version that Topaz offers still manages to crash my computer. My Windows computer has 64GB RAM and 10GB memory for the GPU, which should be overkill. I’m presently using Photo Studio version 1.0.2 and Photo AI version 4.0.4.

In this article, I’m going to concentrate on what works (and doesn’t) for portraits. Mainly, you want to have sharp eyes. Sharpened skin is a bad idea.

In my examples, I used a high-speed lens that has poor resolution when shot wide-open. I want to show how Photo Studio can help make the lens performance appear somewhat better. Note that the lens has longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA), and it makes a slight red border on some of the eye lashes. The shots are all at f/1.4. When viewed at normal magnifications, the red coloration around the lashes is basically invisible.

The photograph used was shot in raw format, so any sharpening is purely due to Photo Studio. The eye is cropped from a shot where the face fills the frame, and at 100% magnification.

Start by selecting a Custom mask

Select the ‘Custom’ option to create a mask for the eyes.

Draw a mask over the eyes and lashes

Adjust the brush to have a diameter suitable for just selecting eye detail, and then paint over the eyes and lashes. Include the eye brows, too, if you wish. I typically don’t sharpen anything else in portraits, but sometimes I’ll include the mouth.

Select a sharpening style, and then adjust its strength

I find that Photo Studio default settings generally sharpen too aggressively. The strength is determined by its internal artificial intelligence. There’s a slider to adjust the strength. The photos below are all using the default strength setting, as determined by the program’s ‘artificial intelligence’, unless otherwise noted.

“Natural” sharpening option, with mask used

“Lens Blur” sharpening option, no masking

“Lens Blur v2” sharpening option, no masking

“Motion Blur” sharpening option, no masking

“Refocus” sharpening option, no masking

“Standard” sharpening option, no masking

‘Wildlife’ sharpening, no masking

“Strong” sharpening option, no masking

The slight red cast on the lashes, due to the lens LoCA, is difficult to see at normal magnification. It’s due to the lens, and not the fault of the program.

Adding the ‘Recover Faces’ filter

‘Strong’ sharpening, no masking (without 'Recover Faces')

‘Strong’ sharpening, no masking, Recover Faces v1

‘Strong’ sharpening, no masking, Recover Faces v2

A subtle, but sometimes useful step is to add a ‘Recover Faces’ filter after sharpening. It’s quick and requires no masking. The skin gets softened slightly, but it also slightly affects the eye detail.

Summary

The Sharpen algorithms that leave white edges along the black lashes seem unsuitable for portrait shooting. When using an under-performing lens like this one, something like the ‘Strong’ sharpening works pretty well.

Differences among many of the sharpening filters are very subtle, but it depends upon the subject being sharpened.

In all cases, sharpening of the skin is undesirable. Masking can be a bit tedious, but using it to avoid skin sharpening is nearly always preferable. It’s worth trying the ‘Recover Faces’ filter first, since it’s quick to add, but I don’t think it works as well as masking does.

Topaz Photo Studio should be used before doing other editing, and it can be invoked from inside most other photo editors. If you edit a raw photo before sending it to Photo Studio, those edits are ignored. If you send it raw-format photos (you should), then it will return raw output, in the DNG format.

Topaz Photo Studio doesn’t have the tools to perform all of the edit steps necessary for something like portraits. I prefer to call this program from within editors like Capture One or ON1, giving it the raw photo. After the sharpened, DNG-format photo gets returned to my editor, I finish the rest of the editing.

Using this program is a cheap way (compared to buying high-end optics) to make a low-performing lens look much better than it actually is. Since skin usually looks pretty bad at high resolution, a cheaper lens can in some ways be an advantage when shooting portraits.