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How to make better holiday photos with AI-powered editing software

As we wrap-up the festive season and review the many family photos snapped throughout all of our holiday traditions, you may come across a few shots that are almost perfect.

Photographing holidays, like all live events, calls for a reportage style of photography: You’ll shoot quickly to catch the perfect moment, but sometimes the light will be a little low, or your shutter speed a bit slow, or the subject doesn’t quite fill the frame. Authentic moments unfold spontaneously, in real-time, and there are no “do-overs”. 

When you make that almost perfect shot — a great moment, with some technical flaws — all you need is a little help in post-production to make that image to shine. Topaz Labs offers a whole collection of AI-powered photo editing apps to help you rescue your photos.

Tackle low-light photos

Holiday lights look stunning in a dimly-lit room, but they are difficult to photograph. When you’re shooting in low light without a flash, you’ll struggle to shoot at a fast shutter speed unless you raise your ISO.

Higher ISOs increase the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor, so you can freeze motion even in low light. But this higher sensitivity comes at a price: noise. Noise is like a veil of static across an entire photo, muddling the details and depth of your image.

DeNoise AI uses machine learning tech to tackle heavy image noise, so your photos looks crisp and clean even at ISO 10,000 and above. It’s the perfect app to finish your nighttime holiday photos.

Sharpen blurry images

You’ve never seen a kid fly across a room faster than on Christmas morning! They’re all smiles as they tear into their gifts under the tree. These are the best moments filled with pure joy and lightning speed. But capturing those happy moments are difficult, because quick-moving subjects often leave us with a little motion blur in the final photo.

Correcting missed focus and motion blur is easy with Sharpen AI. You can choose from three AI Models Sharpen, Stabilize, or Focus to correct a soft image in one click. The results will give you more detail, for crystal-clear holiday memories. 

Make your photos perfect for printing

Sometimes you’ll shoot the perfect portrait if only your subject was filling the frame! If you need to crop-in to your photo to recompose the perfect shot, how many pixels are you losing? How much resolution do you sacrifice by cropping?

The solution is simple. Gigapixel AI makes it possible to upscale your image up to 600% with enhanced detail and sharpness. Achieve cleaner, crisper, bigger photos, ideal for print.

What's your biggest photo challenge?

Whether it’s capturing crisp photos or creating the perfect composition, we all have our own challenges with photography. What’s your biggest photo challenge? Let us know in the comments!

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How to quickly mask and replace the background in your photos

How to create stunning composite photos

Replacing the background of an image to create a composite photograph can result in stunning, creative works of art. Whether you want to completely replace the sky to change the mood of your photo, or totally isolate objects for your graphic design projects, your first step will be to create a mask.

What is an image mask?

A mask simply helps you select a portion of your image. After masking your image, you can can easily change background colors, make transparent images, or replace portions of your image without ever deleting a pixel from your original photo. Masking can require a lot of precision skill and effort to carefully refine complicated selections, like hair and fur.

Masking in Adobe Photoshop

If you’ve ever tried to replace the background of an image in Photoshop, you know how tedious this process can be. Even with Photoshop’s magic wand and quick mask tools, you’ll still find yourself zooming in at 1200% and carefully clicking away pixel-by-pixel to get a perfect mask.

The problem with masking in Photoshop is that isolating fine objects is time-consuming. You’ll need to switch through a variety of brushes and ideally use a digital drawing tablet to perfectly fade your brush strokes.

In the image above, you can see what you have to work with when you mask an image in Photoshop. Attempting to isolate the background from the model’s individual strands of hair could take hours to get just right.

Masking with Mask AI by Topaz Labs

Mask AI solves the problem of complicated image masks. Using the power of sophisticated neural networks, Mask AI can identify the content of your photo and make the most accurate masks in mere seconds. Finally, you can let your computer do all the complicated masking work for you, so you can complete your project in less time.

All it takes is a quick application of the trimap to compute a mask. Paint a blue line where you’d like the application to “compute” the mask, and drop a red paint bucket on the area you’d like removed. It’s that simple.

It only takes a moment for Mask AI to compute your mask, and just like that, your background is removed and details are preserved.

If necessary, you can tidy up the brush strokes, or refine the mask using sliders like Edge Strength and Foreground Recovery to get your mask just how you want it.

Mask AI has background replacement built-in, so you can finish your project without ever leaving the app. You can easily apply a solid color background, blur the existing background, or import a new background altogether.

Try Mask AI by Topaz Labs totally free

Try Mask AI totally free for 30-days, no credit card or commitment required. Mask AI works as a standalone application for Mac or PC, or as a Photoshop plugin to help keep your workflow running smoothly.

Buy Mask AI today and get 15% off with coupon code MASKBETTER

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Here’s Proof that Topaz Sharpen AI can Sharpen Out-of-Focus Images

You can now do the impossible with Sharpen AI by Topaz Labs: Fix your missed-focus images using the power of machine learning.

Every photographer has been there: you capture the perfect moment, in beautiful light, but somehow you didn’t quite get the shot. Maybe the light was a bit dim or your subject moved a little too quick, but your final, favorite shot ended up blurry. A fast-moving subject, camera shake, low light, and incorrect camera settings can all reduce the sharpness of your photo, leaving you with soft details, motion blur, and an imperfect photo. We’re here to fix it.

Sharpen AI application interface

We built a futuristic solution for blurry images

Using the power of machine learning technology, our cutting-edge software doesn’t simply “sharpen” your photo — it can actually help you recreate authentic details in your photo. With sophisticated artificial intelligence tech, Sharpen AI analyzes your image and compares it alongside a library of millions of photos to help you achieve the most stunningly accurate results. It’s your image, re-imagined the way it was supposed to be — with sharp lines and crisp detail.

Before and After Sharpen AI Stabilization - 200% Zoom

Download Sharpen AI for free and see for yourself

The only way to believe in our technology is to see for yourself. That’s why we offer a totally free, full-version, 30-day trial of all of our applications.

Download your free trial of Sharpen AI along with the original TIFF photo used in this article.

Comment below with your results or tag us on Instagram with #TopazLabs. We’d love to see how Sharpen AI helped rescue your blurry photos!