Sigma will announce a new 15mm f/1.4 diagonal fisheye L-mount lens!

Damn what a surprise! Around February 21 (day varies according to timezone) Sigma will announce two new lenses:

  • 500mm F5.6 DG DN OS | Sports
  • 15mm F1.4 DG DN DIAGONAL FISHEYE| Art

And that 15mm f/1.4 is a never seen before kind of lens. Nobody ever made such a fast Full Frame Fisheye lens before. The only lenses coming close are the Olympus 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO (it’s a MFT lens so FF equivalence is 16mm f/3.6) and the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM Lens. Having a f/1.4 fisheye lens will likely open some new possibilities never explored before. Bold move Sigma! But I wonder how big this lens will be! I bet it’s going to be massive! I hope trusted sources can soon share some images and full specs of this lens.

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Circular vs Diagonal Fisheye:
The circular fisheye effect gives a 180-degree angle of view across the whole periphery.
A diagonal fisheye effect captures a roughly 180-degree diagonal angle-of-view and a greatly distorted view of the image periphery. This effect is also known as a “full-frame fisheye” effect because the resulting image covers the entire frame.

Reminder: Sigma 500mm f/5.6 specs:

  • Lightweight lens…less than 1,5kg and so the lightest telephoto prime lens you can buy.
  • Very fast AF on Sony A1 (lens has linear motor)
  • The lens sharper than the Sony 200-600 G
  • very low chromatic aberration
  • Coming for Sony E and Leica L mount cameras
  • Price just under $3,000
  • Announcement on February 21.

 

Topaz Photo AI v2.3.0 released…and a new teaser for the next launch

There is a new v2.3.0 update for Topaz Photo Ai (get it here). At the same time Topaz CEO Eric Young launched a teaser for the upcoming new version:

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Hi, and thanks so much for trusting our products with your work over the past few years.

In 2024, our photo and video products will experience the most significant evolution since our first AI product six years ago. I wanted to share what you can expect out of our products in the next few years.

We believe that generative AI should improve your work rather than replace it, so our product development philosophy focuses on three principles:

  1. Enhancement vs replacement: for improving your work without altering its core essence.
  2. Natural and photorealistic results, vs fantastical: for your photos and videos where preserving reality matters.
  3. On-device processing, vs cloud: for a faster workflow, more editing options, and private processing.

We think that these principles are essential for professional use cases, but currently undervalued in AI research. As such, we’re accelerating this direction with our three core products:

Photo AI
Photo AI is designed for photographers, and solves many photo quality problems like noise reduction and sharpening better than anything else. In 2024, we will use generative AI to greatly improve the quality and experience of other photo editing tasks.

Video AI
Video AI delivers you sharp, steady, and smooth footage without motion artifacts. In 2024, you will see improved AI model quality, a better app experience, and more integrations for professional editing workflows.

Gigapixel
Built for everyone, Gigapixel 7 brings improved upscaling model quality and better usability. Later this year, we’ll release fundamental improvements to our upscaling models that unlock another level of quality, better than anything else you’ve seen yet. Afterwards, we will bring Gigapixel to more platforms than just desktop.

We’re incredibly excited about this direction, and you’ll soon see some of these improvements in the next few months.

We’d also love your feedback as we’re filling our roadmap for the rest of the year. What would you love to be able to do with your images and videos that you can’t currently? Is there anything you wish our current products would do better? We will read and consider every comment.

Thank you again for trusting our products, and we will do everything possible to continue earning that trust!

Thanks,
Eric Yang
CEO, Topaz Labs

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 v2.3.0 Press release:

This week we have several new additions to the app and updates to existing tools as well. There are 2 new upscaling models – Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2, as well as update to the Remove model for Windows machines. Please see the notes below for more information about these models. Additionally, the Object Selection Brush is now available for use in the Remove tool. Finally, the Adobe Lightroom Classic plug-in will now add images back to their original Collections once exporting is done.

Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2:

  • For Standard we’ve improved the deblur consistency (blurry patch issue)
  • For High Fidelity we’ve improved the grain preserving consistency for low denoise/remove jpeg sliders
    • For use cases requiring keeping original noise/grain, select this model and tune down the two sliders.
  • For High Fidelity we’ve fixed the tile blending artifacts
  • For both models we’ve fixed the tile artifacts on Apple Silicon Mac’s Neural Engine
    • There is an option to turn off Neural Engine but it will slow down processing
  • For quality in general, the models should be more generative

Remove Model:

  1. Improved the speed of the tool via steps distillation
  2. Solved some quality issues via larger data augmentation

Note: If you are experiencing issues with the Remove tool on macOS Sonoma a potential fix is updating to the latest version of Sonoma

LEAKED! Lightweight Sigma 500mm f/5.6 E and L-mount lens will be announced on February 21

The image on top show the new 500mm f/5.6 Full Frame E-mount lens that will be announced on February 21. The additional info I got says:

  • lightweight lens
  • very fast AF on Sony A1
  • very low chromatic aberration
  • Coming for Sony E and Leica L mount cameras

I am working to get info about the price that surely will be MUCH lower of that of the expensive Sony 400mm GM (Click here) and Sony 600mm GM (Click here).