Vance AI Review

What is Vance AI?

Vance AI, founded in July 2020, has in less than a year expanded from a startup to an international business.

It, now, owns its team of AI developers and experts that works on ground-breaking new tools for automatic photo editing.

While AIs have been strictly confined to expensive apps with steep learning curves, Vance AI aims to bring these tools closer to everyone – from photographers to small business owners, and everyone in-between.

Vance AI Pricing

Vance AI Pricing system is simple as it gets. To use any of the AI tools, you need to pay 1 credit for 1 image.

You can buy credits with two different monthly subscription plans or get 5 for free.

As always, if there’s a free trial, I recommend you take advantage of it to figure out whether Vance AI is right for you or not. After all, 5 images/month is a generous offer and more than enough to test the tool.

If you decide that Vance AI fits your needs, you can purchase credits with two monthly subscription plans that come with absolutely no commitment:

• Basic: $9.90/month for 200 credits/month ($0.05/credit)
• Pro: $19.90/month for 500 credits/month ($0.04/credit)

Additionally, with each subscription plan you get a desktop app for free.

What is more, as shown in the image below, you risk nothing by purchasing the subscription plans.

You are 100% guaranteed to get your money back within 14 days if you’re not satisfied with Vance AI. Plus, you don’t have to worry about commitments – you can downgrade or cancel the plan at any time.

Vance AI: AI Image Enhancer

This is my unbiased review of Vance AI: AI Image Enhancer Software, a product that promises to enhance your images to the next level.

Vance AI Image Enhancer is in contrast to the Vance AI Productivity and Creativity series, which is a downloadable tool. For now, it remains available only for Windows PCs, but I’m hoping that changes soon.

Let’s check out why.

What does AI Image Enhancer promise?

According to Vance AI, AI Image Enhancer can enhance image resolution up to 40-times. What is more, Vance AI promises that it does so by reducing blur and recovering original details.

If that’s true, and knowing artificial intelligence it might be, I am sold.

However, this piece of software supposedly also removes noise from images, producing clear and crisp results.

Therefore, AI Image Enhancer allows you to photograph with high ISO settings (think 2000+) in low light conditions.

Lastly, thanks to Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, AI Image Enhancer removes motion and gaussian blur in a couple of seconds.

AI Image Enhancer System Requirements

For now, Vance AI Image Enhancer software is only available to Windows 64 bit systems only.

Here are Vance AI recommendations for your PC:

	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	Intel 4th Gen or AMD 2016+	Intel i7 7th Gen+ or Ryzen 7
GPU	Nvidia 750Ti or AMD GCN 1.0	Nvidia RTV Series or RX 500 Series
RAM	8GB	16GB+

To find all the requirements, and supported GPUs and CPUs, check this page by Vance AI.

How to Get AI Image Enhancer?

AI Image Enhancer is available with Basic and Pro plans that cost $9.90/mo and $19.90/mo, respectively.

However, with the Free plan, you can still download the software and use 5 free credits. This way, you get the taste of what you’ll be paying for.

Here’s how to get (download and install) AI Image Enhancer Software.

1. Go to Vanceai.com/image-enhancer/. Click here to go to the download site.
2. Click on the button Free Download. A download will start.
3. Upon finishing, locate the downloaded file – vance_ai_image_enhancer_x64_online_1104_ee06050a – and double click it. You can find it in your Downloads folder by default.
4. Follow the instructions to install and click Click to install.
5. Wain until the download finishes.
6. Sign in with your account to get more than 5 credits.
7. You should now be able to use Enlarge, Sharpen, and Denoise modules.

Tools

• restart after downloading
• starts working on preview instantly, so you have to wait as soon as you upload an image
• sliders can’t be reset by double-clicking

Enlarge

Enlarge tool enhances image resolution up to 40x and recovers detail using AI.

While you can also enlarge images using AI Image Enlarger, which is a part of the Productivity series (read my Productivity series review), it’s only capable of enlarging by 2x, 4x, 6x, or 8x.

To try the Enlarge tool, I shrunk my photographs with Photoshop.

Example #1

In the example below, I reduced the resolution of the image to 200px in width (before). Then, I used the 40x enlargement to produce an image with 8000px in width (after).

The tool did a fine job improving the resolution and also recovering the detail. However, as expected, it wasn’t able to recover the detail that was lost.

Example #2

In Example #2, I reduced the resolution of the original image to 500px in width, and then bumped it back up to 20,000 with Image Enlarger.

This is the result.

Overall, I was quite happy with the results of the Image Enhancer – Enlarge tool. Improving the resolution of an image by 40-times is seriously impressive.

However, I am not convinced that AI recovers details very well, but I believe that future iterations of this software will bring even more improvements.

Sharpen

Sharpening a blurry image has always been a virtually impossible task.

To test the tool that promises to fix blurry images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, I once again used my photographs.

Using Photoshop, I applied Gaussian and Motion blur using different “pixel” settings.

Example #1

• Photoshop settings: Gaussian blur 5px.
• Vance AI settings: Sharpness: 100, Suppress noise: 100.

Although I realize that using the maximum sharpening settings can lead to worse results, especially due to more noise, I wanted to see what’s these tools capable of. And I did not care about the noise.

Example #2

• Photoshop settings: Gaussian blur 50px.
• Vance AI settings: Sharpness: 100, Suppress noise: 100.

Just for fun and some limit-testing, I applied 50px blur to the image… and nothing happened.

Image Enhancer literally did nothing.

The human eye clearly recognizes a white dog in the image below. However, AI still needs a bit more training to achieve the same results.

Example #3

• Photoshop settings: Gaussian blur 15px.
• Vance AI settings: Sharpness: 100, Suppress noise: 100.

In the third example, I only blurred the image by 15px. The resulting image is still well-recognizable, although it’s blurry.

What surprises me more, is that the sharpening tool did absolutely nothing.

Apparently, it has a threshold where it still sharpens images and when it stops. Based on my experiments it’s somewhere between 5px and 15px.

Example #4

• Photoshop settings: Motion blur 50px, angle 0°.
• Vance AI settings: Sharpness: 100, Suppress noise: 100.

In addition to removing Gaussian blur, Image Enhancer can also remove motion blur, according to Vance AI.

However, in my example, it did not remove the blur. Admittedly, it did sharpen the image by accentuating the strike produced by the blur, but it did not remove it.

Overall, I added only a small amount of blur (before) and the resulting (after) image looks barely any different.

Example #5

• Photoshop settings: Motion blur 500px, angle 0°.
• Vance AI settings: Sharpness: 100, Suppress noise: 100.

As you might have noticed by now, I love pushing software to the limit.

In this case, I applied motion blur with the amount of 500px, making the image barely recognizable.

I was hoping that the AI would be smart enough to recognize the motion blur, especially because I made it easy for it by using a linear motion blur (i.e. 0 degrees angle).

To sum up, the sharpening tool does as advertised – it sharpens images. Although based on my experience Vance AI oversells this product, because it does not remove motion blur, at all – it just sharpens the blurry streaks. For now, I’ll stick with Lightroom’s and Luminar AI’s sharpening tools.

Denoise

Noisy images are one of the greatest enemies tonight photographers and those who don’t own a full-frame camera. Therefore, finding a tool that effectively removes noise while retaining full detail seems like a dream come true.

Such tools do not need a lot of texting – it either removes noise properly or it doesn’t. This is why I’m proving only one example. If you want to see more, contact me via email.

As you can see in the example below, the denoise tool removes noise as expected while, crucially, retaining the majority of detail.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, Vance AI Image Enhancer is a good alternative to other photo editors, with the difference that it’s more automated than its competitors.

Speaking of which, for me as a photographer, Lightroom remains the best photo editing software, closely followed by Luminar AI.

For now, Vance AI seems like a set of tools with great potential and I’ll eagerly follow its development in the forthcoming years.

Vance AI: Creativity Series Review

Vance AI Creativity Series is dedicated to automating the process of creating inspiring, creative, or restoring artwork.

In this review of the Creativity Series by Vance AI, I test AI Image Cartoonizer, AI Sketch Converter, and AI Photo Colorizer.

Since these tools carry very descriptive names, they don’t need any foreword. So, without further ado, let’s check them out!

Vance AI Image Cartoonizer

AI Image Cartoonizer, also called Toongineer Cartoonizer, is Vance’s popular creative tool that effortlessly turns photos into cartoons. The tool is 100% automatic – all you need to do is upload an image and convert it. Alternatively, you can use Photoshop to do so, but it costs more (from US$9.99/month) and it’s a lot more difficult to use.

I’ve used Photoshop for years and have become adept at photo manipulation, so it gives me more control over the cartoons. However, for those of you who have zero experience with Photoshop (or similar tools), AI Image Cartoonizer is an amazing tool.

Example #1

For the first example, I uploaded a photo of daisies with a resolution of 6240×4160 px (3:2 aspect ratio) which was then converted to 3000×2000 px by Vance AI. Vance AI only accepts JPEGs, JPGs, and PNGs with a maximum resolution of 3000×2000 px. Although my input and output files were 3000×2000 px, as reported by Vance AI (see the image below), the truth was different.

Upon downloading the file, I noticed on my large screen that the file is only 1080×720 px (see the image below).

To be honest, I do not know how that happened.

Regardless of the resolution problem, I was pleasantly surprised by the result.

Example #2

In the second example, a similar thing happened as in the first example. I uploaded a 1650×1100 px image, Vance AI reports a 1650×1100 px image, but the resulting image is actually 1080×720 px.

In the second example, I cartoonized an image of a dog?

Example #3

I was not thrilled with the result of this cartoonized portrait. In my opinion, the girl in the photo lost a lot of her character. For example, freckles are gone and I’d love if they showed in cartoon.

Overall, AI Image Cartoonizer does exactly as the name suggests and it does its job well. Images retain just the right amount of detail, so they look like cartoons.

The only thing I missed was more settings. For example, at least one slider that would allow you to decide to what level you want the image cartoonized.

Vance AI Sketch Converter

AI Sketch Converter is an AI sketch generator that creates a linoleum drawing from your photos. It automatically identifies the lines, and then removes all other details and turns the photograph black and white.

Vance AI also promotes this tool as an alternative to your everyday Pinterest or Reddit uploads – with an unusual drawing, you might win more likes.

Example 1

I’ve always loved architectural drawings made with pencil only. Using the AI Sketch Converter, I created a pencil black and white drawing within a couple of seconds.

Example 2

This tool is also capable of converting portraits to sketches. In the settings, you can choose between converting an entire image or just a face.

In this example, I chose Convert face only.

Two things I noticed and disliked:

1. The results were cropped: the image on the right is the result and it was already cropped when I downloaded it. I guess this tool understands “Convert face only” as “remove everything else”.
   I’d be a lot happier if it was capable of sketching only the face and leaving everything else untouched. I can still crop it out later by myself.
2. The tool aged the girl: Drawing people is difficult, but it should be easier when you’re an AI and you have an original image. AI Sketch Converter emphasized some facial features too much and some too little.
   The result is an inaccurate sketch.

Example 3

For the thirds example, I used the same photo, but I checked Convert’s entire picture. What stands out, is the mangled face – especially the eyes. As a result, this sketch picture is virtually unusable.

Overall, with AI Sketch Converter, you can easily and quickly create realistic sketches, even if you can’t draw.

As with any other Vance AI tools, I miss more control over the entire process – at least a slider that lets you choose to what degree you want the filters to be applied.

Vance AI Photo Colorizer

AI Photo Colorizer is Vance’s pride and joy. This tool 100% automatically restores colors and details in your photos. It doesn’t only work with black and white photos, but also with older, vintage-like photographs that have poor color contrast.

Example #1

In the first example, Vance AI Photo Colorizer nailed the skin tones – I actually love the result. However, it unfortunately also colored parts of the guy’s shirt and trousers and parts of the background. This little “oopsie” makes the resulting photo barely usable.

Example #2

In the second example, I uploaded a black and white photo with a moose and some spruce trees in the background. The Colorizer tool properly painted trees green; however, their colors could be more vibrant. Additionally, it left the moose black, although they are usually brown. But I guess that’s cherry-picking.

Example #3

Once again, I was surprised by how well the AI Photo Colorizer painted the skin. However, there are 3 issues bothering me:

1. Whites of the eyes were also colored.
2. The neck is not fully painted.
3. The skin tone is too red and orange.

Example #4

I was simply amazed by the 4th example. Vance AI Photo Colorizer not only properly recognized the sky and the sea and painted them blue, but it also added a colored (yellow) haze to the photo.

Undoubtedly, this result blew me away. I love the orange and yellow tones on the horizon that bring some warmth to the image and produce a feeling of a sunrise or sunset, or as we photographers call it, the Golden hour.

In my opinion, AI Photo Colorizer is one of the best tools by Vance AI and is worth every penny.

Final Thoughts

The Vance AI Productivity Series is a great option for anyone looking to achieve artistic and creative effects without purchasing expensive software or spending years trying to learn how to use something like Photoshop.

Especially AI Photo Colorizer stands out as an extremely useful tool that’s capable of automatically colouring black-and-white images within seconds.

Vance AI – Productivity Series Review

This is my ON-HANDS review of Vance AI – Productivity Series.

In this post, I’ll discuss and describe:

• Vance AI Pricing
• My results of using Vance AI Productivity Series
• Mention some alternatives
• Tell you what I liked and disliked
• My conclusions

Let’s get right into it.

AI Image Enlarger

Loss of quality is a common nuisance in photography and printing because large prints require high-resolution images that only the very best cameras are able to produce.

If your image lacks resolution, Vance AI offers a viable and affordable solution – AI Image Enlarger.

It is arguably the most useful tool of Vance AI Productivity Series and totally worth the cost, which is not high, to begin with (only $0.04 per image).

This tool is capable of scaling images up to 800% (8-times) without any loss of quality. What is more, with the built-in AI, it will also improve the quality of any image.

To test the AI Image Enlarger, I used a photo of the Alps that I took at sunset a couple of months ago.

(I reduced the image quality for the web.)

I uploaded a JPG with a resolution of 4787 × 3191 px and 300dpi. However, upon upload, Vance AI shrank my photo to 3000 × 2000 px.

While I assume that this might be due to a rigorous AI algorithm, reducing the resolution from 15.2 megapixels to 6 megapixels doesn’t make a lot of sense. After all, this is a 2.53x reduction in size – by a tool that is supposed to improve the resolution.

I ran the image through 4x, 6x, and 8x enlargements with the Super Noise option checked and Remove Blue unchecked (later, I compared the two options).

I didn’t do the 2x because it would result in an image barely any larger than the original.

The resulting images had the following resolutions and sizes:

• Original: 4787 × 3191 px, 3.80MB
• 4x enlarged: 12,000 x 8,000 px, 9.84MB
• 6x enlarged: 18,000 x 12,000 px, 8.52MB
• 8x enlarged: 24,000 x 16,000 px, 12.10MB

As you can see, although the resolution improvement is huge (64-times), the size of the file only increases by 4-fold.

Of course, this is reasonable because the images are JPG and not raws.

Additionally, the uploaded image had a resolution of 300 DPI, while the resulting image had a resolution of 72 DPI.

Regardless, below, I compare the results zoomed onto the highest peak (see the image above).

The original image had quite some noise around the edges, which was removed by the AI Image Enlarger.

However, the 4x image looks weirdly posterized, for some reason. I tried redoing it to see if I made a mistake, but I got a similar result.

Both the 6x and 8x images look slightly less sharp than the original and also lack some texture and colour detail. However, these are minor flaws that are not visible when the image is zoomed out back to 100%.

In conclusion, the AI Image Enlarger does a great job of upscaling images up to 8-times without any significant loss in quality. I would recommend it to anyone looking to improve the resolution of their images.

A good alternative to the Vance AI Image Enhancer is ImgUpscaler.

AI Image Denoiser

Shooting at high ISO values produces noise in images, which decreases detail and reduces the overall quality of an image.

Virtually every photo editing app is capable of reducing noise in images. However, reducing noise is a delicate task because you can easily overdo it and end up with a “soft” image.

This is where AI Image Denoiser by Vance AI comes into play, with its automatic denoiser.

To visualize what this tool does, I tested it with one of my Milky Way photos at various denoise settings.

Below, I compare the zoomed-in results.

For these particular photos, the 50% denoise setting produced the best-looking result. The image is not noisy anymore while retaining full detail.

However, at 75% and 100%, the detail started to fade away, which is a classic sign of an “over-denoising” image.

AI Image Sharpener

Sharpening blurry images is no easy task; thus, it’s best if your images come sharp straight out of the camera.

Vance AI Image Sharpener promises automatic sharpening of blurry images using its AI algorithm.

To test how good it is, I repurposed a photo I took to test the sharpness of one of my lenses. (Taken with Canon 18-135 f/3.5-5.6 IS STM)

I have previously already sharpened this image using Lightroom, but it was not perfectly sharp, yet.

I then processed the original with AI Image Sharpener using 50%, 75%, and 100% settings.

In the image below, I compared the zoomed-in results of each processing setting.

AI Image Sharpener significantly sharpened the image; however, it didn’t do the job any better than other photo editing programs, such as Luminar AI or Lightroom.

In every setting, but especially at 100%, a strong halo can be seen around the edges, which is the consequence of every sharpening.

In conclusion, while AI Image Sharpener by Vance AI did as it says – it sharpened the images, I expected more from AI.

AI Background Remover

Removing backgrounds with Photoshop or other similar programs has always been a giant pain in the neck.

AI Background Remover by Vance AI performs this task automatically, effectively saving you a lot of time for a small price.

A downside to this automatic background removal is the lack of control you get. For example, if you’re not satisfied with the result, there’s very little you can do.

Nonetheless, a picture speaks a thousand words, so let’s look at examples.

In the first example, I tried removing background leaves from a green leaf that stands out very well.

AI Background Remover properly recognized the green leaf but forgot to include the leaf stalk. Additionally, the software included some darker parts of the background around the leaves, which significantly the reduce overall quality of the result.

For the next example, let’s pick a more difficult image to remove the background from. And also cuter. ?

Removing the background from images where the main subject has hair or a similarly complex outline is always a difficult task. Kudos to the software for properly masking out the dog’s paws.

However, I disliked how it included the dark background within the fur, especially on the left side. I think that’s something an AI could simply fix.

Overall, I was happy with the results of the AI Background Remove by Vance AI. It is very good at removing background from images where the main subject stands out well, but it has some difficulties with precision.

AI Photo Retoucher

AI Photo Retoucher by Vance promises to retouch photos in one click.

This editing supposedly includes the removal of halos, artifacts, and chromatic aberration (also called chromatic distortion).

Additionally, this software will also fix the exposure, contrast, details, and boost saturation.

Unfortunately, it does not accept any raw format photos – only jpg, jpeg, and png. Hence, the resulting quality is much worse than it could be.

Let’s look at the first example. It is a JPG photo that I converted from my original HDR raw format.

The resulting image (after) is worse than the original (before).

Firstly, the contrast was improved, although the original does not lack contrast. Secondly, saturation was increased too much, to the point where the image looks too colorful. Thirdly, the final image “received” a blue streak on the left side – for some reason.

Lastly, the final quality was worse, due to the texture being improved so that the image became noisy.

So, I decided to try another one. This time, I used a JPG I took with my phone (Huawei P30 Pro).

This time, AI Photo Retoucher nicely improved the saturation of the flower blossoms, but unfortunately, it also increased the saturation of the mountain, giving it a purple undertone in the process.

In conclusion, the AI Photo Retoucher by Vance AI is not a bad tool for automatic photo editing and enhancement. However, it emphasizes the issues with the current AI technology when it comes to photo editing and the drawbacks of using compressed formats (jpg, png) in post-processing.

Vance AI – Productivity Series: Conclusion

In my opinion, the Vance AI Productivity series provides a decent solution for simple and automatic photo editing, such as removing backgrounds, sharpening photos, or improving the resolution.

Hence, at a reasonable price of $0.04 (and upwards) for each edit, Vance AI is well worth your money.

However, I disliked three aspects of this AI software.

1. It does not allow raw uploads.
2. The maximum upload size is 3000 × 3000 px.
3. You get virtually no control over edits besides the very basic settings.

With that being said, I am a photographer used to Lightroom, Luminar, and other software that gives me full control over my editing process.

Undoubtedly, for those who don’t have access to professional photo editing apps and don’t have time to learn how to use them, Vance AI is an elegant, all-in-one solution.