Topaz Labs Photo A.I. 2 - InDepth Review

[@Eigil_Skovgaard]

Thank you for the tour. I am an amateur nature photographer with years of experience using Topaz' software - long before AI. My litmus test for noise reducing software is to expose them to small branches in the diffuse background with a bright sky behind. They all fail to some degree to make the foliage and branches look nice in that specific case. Topaz Photo AI delivers the least pleasing result in my tests so far. DxO PureRAW 2-3 is slightly better without a real improvement with XD. And to be honest I don't know any longer how ACR AI is doing, but it's probably the best so far (October 2023). Having kissed Adobe definitely good bye per January 2023, I have accepted that Adobe's improvements will be out of my reach. My latest DxO PhotoLab 7 features DeepPrime XD, and that noise reduction works perfect for almost everything but the branch-sky-contrast problem. I am dealing with that detail though in other ways. That said I find it a bit strange that AI in general can't be trained to cope with that specific detail too - even after one year with new and supposedly improved AI models. Or is it just the circumstantial stuff that constantly is improved with the potential of creating the false assumption that AI also improves?

[@Andyhutchinson]

My testing results were similar to yours and I've been recommending DxO Photolab to anyone that asks. In my experience the Topaz suite has actually got a little bit worse with the new models and the results vary enormously depending on the origins of the RAW file you're processing. I got the most consistent results with DxO across all the various RAW files I tested. I'm stuck with Adobe due to having a massive LR catalogue of 250,000+ images many of which are stacked bracketed shots. I use the built-in denoise in 90% of use-cases and it does an excellent job - when it fails to meet my expectations I utilise Photolab and that always gets me across the line - but it's more convenient to process everything within LR, rather than round-trip it through an external processing tool. :)

[@Eigil_Skovgaard]

@@Andyhutchinson Right. You could as well recommend Darktable as a very good raw manager. I use it in the place of Adobe Camera Raw, which I also liked a lot - except for the Adobe politics following. But Darktable is a free software and have no affiliate system attached, and that of course makes it less popular in an economic context. But for those who have dug into it - it is popular for all the practical reasons.

[@MedusaJellyFish300]

Thank you for going out of your way to do this wonderful review. I enjoyed very much it. Most likely, I will buy around November when Black Friday comes around this month... ❤🎉❤🎉❤

[@Andyhutchinson]

Glad you enjoyed it :)

[@BlackPrimeMinister]

Interesting what these new tools can do. Some of my favourite images were taken on my iPhone 4 over 10 years ago. Perhaps I can extract something useful from them now.

[@Andyhutchinson]

That's definitely one of the applications I've been using these tools for - returning to otherwise unusable photos and getting the software to clean them up. :)

[@ArminSteiner]

I was arguing a long time getting it or not. Finally I was biting the bullet ad got it. So far I like it for denoising and sharpening. Now the 2.0.2 should have fixed some issues, lets see what it does now.

[@Andyhutchinson]

It's definitely improved a lot since I checked in on it, but that was pretty much the day of release when they made it available for free to anyone that had the main suite.

[@andiphotogirl]

I find myself using it quite a bit, and I would call myself an advanced amateur photographer. Sometimes it doesn’t get it right and I have to lock it back, but for high noise images, It does a pretty good job. Sharpening tends to overcorrect at times and I have to walk it back. I have better luck in Photoshop. Overall, glad I have it. They are constantly making updates to it. Also which is good. I think they’re almost fixing things on the fly. For most users, I think it’s a good purchase.