picture a day: sep 17
[Content warning: close up of a spider!]
I'm adding a bit of text here so that you don't immediately see the picture I took today, if you're squeamish about bugs.
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I was in the backyard looking at sunset clouds, trying to take an interesting picture of them when I was startled by the huge spider in its web at the end of our outdoor dining table. Luckily I hadn't walked into its web! 😱
I went back inside and got my Olympus TG-3 which has amazing macro capabilities and tried to take a picture of the spider. It was having some trouble because of the lights behind the spider (and all of the other subject matter behind the web), but I got a decent initial picture.
The above picture is enhanced using Topaz's Gigapixel AI iOS app. I have a Topaz photo-enhancing app on my MacBook Air, but this iOS app is a newer, seemingly better app. I was really impressed with the details it was able to pull out of the original image. In the past when I've used these kinds of apps, the enhancement hasn't been as notable, but I was wowed by the results here. To be fair, the initial picture already had a lot of detail, but it was noisy and a lower-res capture, thanks to the older camera sensor.
Here's the original picture with the same edits I applied to the enhanced picture above:
Not bad! I would've been happy to post this picture as is, but I hadn't tried out Gigapixel on my phone yet, so I thought I'd give it a chance.
The details on the spider in the enhanced image are much improved, but don't look artificial to me. There is some weird artifacting in the lower left corner of the enhanced picture where it tried to increase details of out-of-focus areas it should've ignored, but it doesn't bother me that much, since the spider is the main draw.
Unfortunately the cost of the service is fairly expensive, especially if you don't pay for the subscription annually, so beyond the initial trial, I probably won't continue paying. I don't have a regular need for this kind of photo enhancement for the subscription to make sense. But in the future, if I need something like this for a certain batch of photos, maybe I'll spring for a short-term subscription.
