Heavily pixelated photos in Photomechanic Plus

[meditux]

Hello, my .nef files that I export as DNG with Topaz Photo AI are only displayed heavily pixelated in Photomechnic.
What can I do?

Best Regards
Ewald

[Kirk Baker]

Ewald,

Hello, my .nef files that I export as DNG with Topaz Photo AI are only displayed heavily pixelated in Photomechnic.
What can I do?

First, I suggest trying to adjust the settings for DNG export in Topaz Photo AI and see if you can control the size/quality of the preview embedded in DNG files that it produces.

If there are no controls for that then you can run the DNG files through the free Adobe DNG Converter and set it to produce full size previews.  It will operate on an entire folder of images in a batch.  When that's done, then PM will show full size previews of those DNG files.

https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter.html

-Kirk

[meditux]

Kirk, I tried your solution and it works fine. Thanks for that!
I'm curious what TOPAZ says about it

Ewald

[meditux]

And this is the answer from Topaz:

Thanks for reaching out. I suspect that Photomechanic does not have support for the DNG files that Topaz Photo AI is producing. It may have support for the NEF raw files from your camera but the DNG files don't seem to be opening.

The pixelated version you are seeing is most likely the JPG preview of the DNG file and not the DNG file itself.

Do you have an application with updated RAW file support such as Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, or Capture One?

This is an additional step that is actually superfluous.

Ewald

[Kirk Baker]

Ewald,

And this is the answer from Topaz:

Thanks for reaching out. I suspect that Photomechanic does not have support for the DNG files that Topaz Photo AI is producing. It may have support for the NEF raw files from your camera but the DNG files don't seem to be opening.

The pixelated version you are seeing is most likely the JPG preview of the DNG file and not the DNG file itself.

This is an additional step that is actually superfluous.

If you could get the Topaz Photo AI developers to embed a higher resolution JPEG preview in the DNG files that they produce (they're currently putting in a low resolution JPEG preview) then your issue would be solved and there would be no need for further processing.

-Kirk

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Note that Photo AI also has the option to save the processed Raw files as TIFF, which in my test actually resulted in a smaller filesize than the same image saved as a DNG -- and the TIFF previews full sized within Photo Mechanic.

 For myself, I only use Photo AI as a plugin within Photoshop since there is always at least some further tweaking needed, so I'm saving those as PSDs which also preview well in PM.

Maybe those are options as well?

Mick