Life after Photoshop

Topaz Photo AI review

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Image credit: Rod Lawton

Topaz Photo AI verdict

Rod Lawton

Features
Results
Usability
Value

Summary

$199 is a lot of money to pay for a simplified AI photo fixer and there’s not even a trial version, just an ‘unconditional’ money back guarantee. When it works, Photo AI is good, even spectacular, but the image and its problems have to fall within its window of fixability. Photo AI is also slow, over-aggressive with noise reduction and can only fix the right sort of blur.

3.3

For

+Sharpening can be spectacular. Can be
+Noise isn’t just reduced, it’s obliterated
+Blurry faces are magically enhanced. Kind of

Against

-Very expensive for something that may help or may not
-Slow to install and to use
-Remove Noise doesn’t reveal much (or any) detail
-Sharpen can’t fix all blur types, despite the claims

AI is everywhere in photo editing software right now, from subject recognition and masking, to sky replacement, to noise reduction and detail recovery. We’re told AI can work magic where traditional photo editing science has failed. Either that, or it can achieve in seconds what it might have taken us hours to do manually. It can put expert adjustments in the hands of amateurs.

It’s not always easy to figure out how much of this is snake oil and how much is genuinely effective and Topaz Labs – and this is just my opinion – steers carefully down the middle. Its marketing can sound like snake oil, its results can sometimes be impressive.

Topaz Photo AI takes three of its separate programs – DeNoise AI, Gigapixel AI and Sharpen AI, and bundles a simplified version of each into Photo AI, which will analyse your photos and fix what needs fixing with the magic of artificial intelligence, deep learning and neural networking.

Results

Topaz Photo AI can automatically apply a series of adjustments using its AI technologies to remove noise, sharpen details and fix blur, reveal detail in faces and – if you need it – upscale images to much larger sizes.

Topaz Photo AI’s noise reduction is impressive, until you compare it to, say, DxO DeepPRIME XD. Also, the ‘before’ example is always a worst-case version and does not reflect what rival software will do. Image credit: Rod Lawton

Let’s start with the noise reduction. It is spectacularly effective, in that it will leave no vestige of noise whatsoever. But it doesn’t really leave a lot of detail either. It doesn’t create that smudgy watercolor effect you used to see in cheap point and shoot cameras, but it does leave you with disappointingly ‘glassy’ detail.

I thought I’d check it against DxO’s DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD processing, and it was like night and day. The Topaz results are not in the same league for detail recovery and yes, I did try all the settings. And can I point out that a Topaz Photo AI license costs almost as much as PhotoLab 6 Elite?

I don’t often need to extract the best quality from ultra-high ISO images, but if I did, I wouldn’t use Topaz Photo AI.

This is my best result from the Sharpen tool, but even then the Autopilot didn’t pick it up and I had to do it manually. It completely fixed/hid the diffraction softness of my MFT lens at f/16 – good job! However, I found it ineffective for all the focus blur or camera shake examples I tried. Image credit: Rod Lawton

The Sharpen feature is a different story, in a way. I found that on images that were slightly soft, perhaps from very mild camera shake or diffraction from small lens apertures, it was spectacularly effective. I won’t deny it. Yet on images with obvious camera shake or poor focus it didn’t do much at all except draw attention to the issue.

The face enhancement can be quite remarkable or can be quite ‘plastic’. I can see it being useful for people shots where somebody important is slightly out of focus either in the foreground or the background. Topaz Photo AI brings out facial features in a fairly obvious ‘processed’ way, but it will definitely please family, friends and fussy clients.

Topaz Photo AI found these faces automatically and gave them a smooth, processed ‘Facebook’ look. Not to my taste, but effective. It’s even better on blurry faces in backgrounds. Image credit: Rod Lawton

The upscaling feature is where, I admit, I have a problem. As I found in my Gigapixel AI review, the results are very impressive, though more with textures than straight lines and man-made objects. My problem here is why you would need it.

Good reasons include lost originals where you only have a low-res copy, images sent by family, friends or clients who don’t know how resolution works, and component images you need to upscale for multi-layer composites.

Topaz Photo AI has upscaled my 20MP Olympus E-P7 to 80MP with remarkably convincing natural looking textures and details – though you still can’t properly make out ‘Shimano’ on the brake caliper. Image credit: Rod Lawton

But I can’t help thinking of the bad reasons, like low res images scraped from the Internet that people want to use as their own.

Either way, I just feel that upscaling software is a sometimes effective solution to a problem you shouldn’t have.

Verdict

There are some things that Topaz Photo AI does that I think are genuinely remarkable. But there’s plenty more that isn’t. I particularly dislike its marketing. It seems to suggest you can be a pretty hopeless or unlucky photographer and that buying this software will fix it. To be honest, I think if you do buy it for $199, you’re the one who’s been ‘fixed’.