Topaz Labs Photo AI review: Powerful but not quite perfect

[@Stedmen]

Your audio is always such a dramatic improvement from whatever I'm watching prior! So good!

[@frederichore1890]

Some great tips! I first used Photo AI on some rather grainy Fuji colour slides shot under low light from a Cessna 137 plane over Uluru (formerly Ayer's Rock) at sunrise and was surprised by how much it improved the images shot... in 2001! The clarity and sharpness was incredible - even better than the Digital Ice on my Nikon LS5000 film scanner! I've since used it on some noisy low light digital images with great results. Now after watching some of your suggested settings, I will have to try it again on some more images shot in low light, especially high ISO aurora photos. An excellent tutorial with a smooth delivery, clear audio and great video too! Cheers and thanks from Montréal. 🙂

[@milansaffek8052]

Thank you for vid!.. i was always fan of Topaz Gigapixel AI, which I use in office and results are mostly very good, sometimes surprisingly good.. Now I have just bought Photo AI, mainly because of unblur faces and improve details on blurry photos I shoot by my Google pixel 6pro. Just started using program, it seems to do job well. Note : you can apply settings to all images in batch when clicking RMB on thumbnail..

[@PMCN53]

A good & frank review Todd 👍🏻 I think i’ll have a closer look at this editing software.

[@TrevorMcGrathPhotography]

Some great advice here. I've only started using the software and am impressed. I shoot music/concerts and in smaller venues the lighting can be crap so I need to use higher ISO's. On first impression, the software does a great job. The one piece of advice I give here is that I found is to run this before any adjustments in Lightroom

[@ronphoto3234]

It was entertaining, easy to watch, and informative. Thank you.

[@Granfoss]

I've used it a bit and like it. A little bit trail and error but on most photos it works great. But it requires a little bit of manual correcting sometimes.

[@thenakedtruth0205]

just me - and what I seem to see is the TIFF file was subtly softer than the DNG file. That is user preference I suppose - meaning you are not wrong. David

[@CJoel5]

8:03 but how can i convert raw into TIFF? through photoshop or lightroom?

[@normdorosh]

Very good info and I agree its still not perfect and you still sometimes have to tweak, because sometimes the faces on people can look too smooth or unnatural. But what I didn't like is buying the app and then finding out later that you had to pay an annual subscription fee.. Most apps are either purchased or subscription based but not both.. And they don't really show the subscription clearly on their site, its referred to as buying seats...And I didn't know what that meant until contacting them. And when I told them that I bought their photo ai app and didn't realize you also had to pay for any upgrades or updates after one year, they didn't respond. So they gave me a refund without any questions asked.

[@tdmdchannel2339]

It says on the website at the bottom "Buy once, own forever You own the version you bought forever. You also get 1 year of unlimited upgrades with your purchase". When they will come up with version 2.0 next year. You will have to pay to upgrade. But Version 1.x will be yours forever. That's how I see it.

[@rafaelsermeno1952]

I have a bunch of jpgs that I would like to enhance (the raws are long gone) can I use them in this software?

[@sclogse1]

Shhhhh...don't tell anybody...I have the demo. I've been testing it on my older jpegs and tiffs. The ones from my pocket Canon 310 Elph and the earlier pocket 5 and 8 meg pics I have.. all jpegs originally, but saved as tiffs. If they're vertical, then I rotate them to horizontal before loading them into Photo AI to maximize screen size. Of course it makes a big difference to have a 27" Retina 5k monitor... I let Topaz do it's thing, then I screen grab the results. With this Retina screen you see no pixels. A 2.5 meg image winds up being over 25 megs. And I'm in demo mode. I'll buy the thing in a couple months after the usual Dec. money crunch, though. Topaz Photo AI is big fun, but I wish it would tell me what IT thinks clarity is....and I agree about adding noise. There can be areas of failure with Topaz that have to be touched up in Photoshop. A little noise added after the touch up helps, especially with skin tones. A little..like 1.6.

[@ZombieRofl]

Topaz Sharpen is pure magic. The tool is buggy and very slow, but the exports are priceless.

[@davidpearson3304]

I tried this all in one program a few times but found that the individual apps seemed to give me better results. Definitely more time consuming having to run an image through 3 separate programs though.

[@KellyPettit]

totally agree.

[@prodigy10690]

Are they still available stand alone?

[@erick_fernandez_78910]

I love the look of this video - how the blacks are seemingly raised.

[@KellyPettit]

I've been using Topaz Denoise and Sharpen AI for a good while and recently trying their Photo AI. So far, I find, if it's a photo I like then I need to go through their original apps to get the best results. Photo AI is "ok" for photos I'm not so interested in because the results IMO are not as good. Thanks for sharing this video. Love your channel.

[@just_eirik]

I’ve completely moved over to editing on my iPad so if there is an iPad version, I’ll try it.

[@MrTimetunnel]

I am scanning old 35mm negatives, some of which are very soft, will this software help with this?

[@jonathanhay5407]

Did you test this w/ jpg images too? I typically go from raw to jpg. I was wondering if your tif comments apply to jpg.

[@antoniobento7538]

Very impressed with this app, specially if I want to improve resolution

[@Burritosarebetterthantacos]

I see alot of back and forth about DXO vs Topaz. I have an older version of sharpen AI and really never use it.

[@alsteiner7602]

Would this be the best choice for very old photos? Archival stuff?

[@lizzgrey1965]

Very get review, I hope they listen to you. 🙌

[@SinaFarhat]

Nice! :)

[@dice3809]

So can you buy it once and don't upgrade for fee years or do you have to pay for subscription every year?

[@Night6436]

As far as I'm aware with Topaz products. If you buy it, then you get to keep it for life with no subscription. You will get 1 year"free" updates for that product. After a year, you can still use it, but the updates stop.