Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

Some Experiments With Topaz Sharpen AI

Recently I’ve been trying programs like Topaz AI to correct some issues in photos that I that I messed up technically. Topaz and the other AI based filters (E.g. Luminar AI, Photoshop Neural filters) essentially work by artificially generating textures and image detail so in theory there’s no limit to how much they can sharpen, remove noise, or magnify the existing detail in a photo. But in practice, I find that sometimes it’s like magic and other times it produces garbage.

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Crashplan Throttling and Switching to Backblaze

I have been a longtime user of Crashplan’s cloud backup service. I signed up in 2015, initially on the home program for $5/month and then switched to the small business plan for $10/month. It seemed to work well and at the start I had a only few TB of data. The upload wasn’t super speedy but it wasn’t terrible either. I don’t remember exactly how long it took me to upload everything but it was probably a month or two.

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