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Re: [OM] [OT] Topaz Studio 2 artistic explorations

Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] Topaz Studio 2 artistic explorations
From: Bill Pearce <billpearce@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 13:25:07 -0400 (EDT)
I have a problem with the use of the words artistic expression with purchased 
plug-ins. There may be some artistic expression involved, but it's someone 
else's artistic expression, not yours. I knew a guy who graduated from a super 
big deal photo school in California who when he went digital, got a "magic" 
filter. It cost hundreds of dollars, and was only available as a dongle. He 
applied it ti EVERY image he shot. Some were OK, ubt others looked more than a 
little overcooked. Everything had a distinctive look, appropriate to the image 
or not. 


As far as I know, the Topaz filters are still just photoshop actions.you can 
come up with your own. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Wayne Shumaker" <om3ti@xxxxxxxx> 
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2019 12:00:16 PM 
Subject: [OM] [OT] Topaz Studio 2 artistic explorations 

I have been having fun and exploring Topaz Studio 2 ability to stylize images 
into artistic expressions. There are a lot of controls to twiddle to create 
interesting effects. The ability to layer effects further increases the range 
of possibilities. Here is an example: 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/UoKTZWifQtd4E3FE7 

I took the picture of a cactus flower - original - and first created an 
Impression filter. I then layered two different AI Remix on top of that. 

The Impression filter has a number of slider options and a brush stroke option. 
I was curious if one can import a brush stroke and explored how TS2 works. The 
Impression filter you select a brush. You can vary the brush characteristics. 
To start exploring there is a slider called "painting progress." If you dial 
that down to 0.01 and slowly increment, you can see the progression of strokes 
added. If you are curious I recommend looking at the first few strokes, varying 
the other slider to see the effect of the brush at a low level. The brushes are 
PNG files that have transparency regions. They are in the Local AppData with 
....Normal.png in the name. 

I next applied two different AI Remix filters on top of the impression filter. 
With the AI remix filter, you select a thumbnail of an image and it will apply 
an AI Remix using that image as a style. Exploring all the JSON files in 
C:\Users\you\AppData\Local\Topaz Labs\Topaz Studio 2 sub directories you can 
trace the association to the style - JSON files. (or you can save your Look and 
then look at the JSON file that created to see all the settings). 

This AI remix exploring lead to associations with *.pb files. These are 
TensorFlow model files. Further exploring TensorFlow.org there is a project 
called "magenta". 

https://github.com/tensorflow/magenta/tree/master/magenta/models/arbitrary_image_stylization
 

and an in depth article here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06830 with link to pdf 
called: 
"Exploring the structure of a real-time, arbitrary neural artistic stylization 
network" 

TensorFlow seems to be at the basis of most of the TopazLabs AI tools. 

TopazLabs has a new way to create artistic effects using TensorFlow. I imagine 
in the future they will continue to add to the AI library. What would be really 
cool is to add the ability to create one's own TensforFlow objects. 

Not pure photography, but a lot of fun. I find knowing what can be done with 
such tools has changed how I see with my camera. There are many other effects 
still to explore. 

Geek On - WayneS 

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