A number of things have happened since I took the image of a Red Kite looking down at me at The Red Kite Centre at Llanddeusant back in 2011. It was the first outing of a new 70-300mm lens on my old Sony DSLR-A700 which only had a 12Mp Crop Sensor. Those images are shown in an early blogpost here. [NB If you want to see the EXIF data for the images, just click on an image and you should be able to see it.]
Time moved along, as did technology, and in a release of Photoshop in 2021 you were able to “add more pixels” to get Super Resolution and also do Sky Replacement. I wrote about what I was able to do with those 10year old images in this blogpost.
And then along came Topaz with it’s DeNoise AI, Gigapixel AI and Sharpen AI plugins in Lightroom – to me a game changer. I subsequently got the first release of Photo AI and that’s now become an integral part of my post-processing workflow.
So the image above (and to the right below) is probably the best I’ll ever get of the original image, which I share with you on the left below …
… I kid you not, that’s what I started with. Below are some other images from the same shoot back in 2011, but processed in 2023 using the latest Topaz Photo AI v.2 software accessed from Lightroom from the File Menu > Plug-in Extras > Process with Topaz Photo AI. [Doing it this way ensures that the image returned is as a DNG file which can then be edited as if it was a native RAW file.]
I think if you click on these you can see the impact of adding enhancement by Photo AI in both images, and then editing them in Lightroom.
Topaz Photo AI – a game changer for me, and now part of my workflow for a lot of my older images, and I’ll use it where appropriate (ie High ISO) with new images as well.
These images are amazing. Such beautiful birds and I saw them close up at Rhayader.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful photos
Thanks Jen, they are indeed a wonderful bird, and to think they were almost driven out of Wales back in the sixties.