Hello there, my name is Richard from Silent Peak and welcome to this review of Topaz Photo AI 3. So what is Topaz Photo AI? Well Topaz Photo AI is an all-in-one photo enhancement studio for PC and Mac and by all-in-one I mean it combines noise reduction, blur correcting, sharpening and upscaling. Topaz Photo AI is a standalone application, meaning you can use it independently of any other software. However, if you prefer, you can indeed use Topaz Photo AI as a plugin for Lightroom, Classic, Photoshop and Capcom.
one. So what is new in Topaz Photo AI? Well we now have Super Focus. Now as the name suggests Super Focus expands on Topaz Photo AI's existing capacity to correct poorly focused images. And we also have another exceptionally well named tool the Remove Objects tool which you guessed it is an AI powered erase brush for removing unwanted elements from your photo and we will talk more about these features later.
in this Topaz Photo AI review. A single lifetime license of Topaz Photo AI will cost you a one-time payment of $199 US dollars. However you can expect a discount if you are upgrading from an older version.
So if you like what you've heard so far and you would like to try Topaz Photo AI for yourself you can add in the description below there is a link to your free Topaz Photo AI trial. So what does it do and is Topaz Photo AI? any good?
Well to make the most sense we're going to break Topaz Photo AI into its sort of main components as in upscaling. noise reduction and sharpening. Let's start with noise reduction. Now Topaz Photo AI is one of the best noise reduction applications I have tested. Its ability to clear noise is exceptional as is its ability to retain and recover fine detail.
Using Photo AI's noise reduction is very easy. We can apply our adjustments manually by choosing from one of the various different AI models. Or we can leave the whole thing in autopilot and let Topaz Photo AI do our noise reduction for us. Next let's talk about sharpening.
Now sharpening in Topaz Photo AI is exceptional. So on the most basic level we can use the sharpening to provide artifact-free general sharpening to soft images. However Topaz Photo AI's sharpening can go well beyond this.
In fact it is capable of correcting poorly focused or motion blurred. images to an impressive extent. Now while sharpening in Topaz Photo AI was already exceptional and quite possibly market leading we now have Super Focus.
Now Super Focus new to Topaz 3.3 is an expansion of Topaz Photo AI's existing capacity to correct poorly focused images and having tested Super Focus I have found indeed that Super Focus offers marginal gains over Photo AI's typical AI powered sharpening. However those gains are going to cost you in terms of local render times. Whereas rendering an image with a standard AI sharpening model takes just a few seconds, applying super focus will likely take more than a few minutes. Moreover as you wait for your render you are unable to use Topaz Photo AI for anything. else nor do we have access to a Gigapixel 8 like cloud renderer service to speed things up.
Nonetheless despite its flaws Super Focus does represent a new feather in Topaz Photo AI's cap and is certainly a welcome addition. So let's talk upscaling and quite frankly Topaz Photo AI's upscaling is the best there is on par with Gigapixel 8. When it comes to upscaling poor quality image Topaz Photo AI takes the leads because not only does it upscale like a gigapixel but Photo AI's sharpening and denoise capacity means it is even better when it comes to upscaling noise-ridden or blurred photos. Therefore if you are looking for the best upscaler for all conditions you're certainly looking for Topaz Photo AI.
Remove objects does exactly that. Simply brush over your unwanted object and Topaz Photo AI will remove it and make it look like it's never been there at all. Now as with many other AI erase brushes I have tested Topaz Photo AI's recover objects can be unpredictable. In some cases when a deletion appears to be an easy one Topaz Photo AI will struggle yet on other occasions it will make a magnificent job of something that appears almost impossible.
Having tested so many AI erase tools in these last months alone I can safely say that Photo AI's remove objects tool is one of them. Topaz Photo AI also has an updated face recovery system. Now the idea is is whenever you apply your noise reduction, sharpening or upscale the face recovery system gives us the opportunity to use face detection to identify the faces and then basically dial back or dial up the amount of processing.
But the irony here is that Topaz Photo AI is already extremely gentle with natural features and skin tones. Thus it needs a face recovery feature far less than some of the alternatives on the market today. What's more when applied the face recovery feature tends to make skin tones look rather waxy and features look sort of slightly off and uncanny. Nonetheless there are occasions when I have found Topaz Photo AI's natural output just a little bit over processed and I have successfully used face recovery to dial it down a little bit. So again it is a nice feature.
just not a particularly compelling one. Topaz Photo AI also has various different masking options enabling you to apply enhancements to your entire image or just to select areas. To that end we have automatic masking so for example we can apply a mask instantly to our photo's subject or background or we can amend our mask or apply a mask entirely using manual brushing. Topaz Photo AI also comes stocked with what we might call traditional photo editing tools, namely a crop tool, adjust lighting which serves to sort of rebalance your photos exposure by pushing up those shadows and dragging back those highlights.
And we also have balance colour which I can only really describe as sort of a white balance sort of tool. Now the crop tool is fine as you might expect but I'm not awfully fond of balance colour and adjust lighting. principally because each time you try to sort of adjust these features, so by moving a slider left to right, the preview can't keep up with your adjustments in real time.
So instead, as we move our slider, we must wait a few seconds, you know, sometimes about 10 to 15 seconds to see the effect of our adjustment, leading to a somewhat jarring workflow. However, these tools do serve a purpose. They do reduce top pass photo AIs. dependence on sort of secondary photo editing application and of course reduce the likelihood of you having to spend your time bouncing your image from Topaz Photo AI to your photo editing application.
But make no mistake, these features do not replace your photo editing application. So what? is Topaz Photo AI like to use?
Well it is very good to use indeed. Its interface is extremely streamlined, well presented and stocked with reasonably named tools and adjustments. Each particular enhancement is sort of kept within its own tab and the sort of adjustments you have for each adjustment are sensibly named and very very easy to use indeed. If you are new to photo enhancement applications or just simply in a big rush, you can rely on Photo AI's reliably excellent autopilot feature which assesses your image and applies whatever enhancements it thinks will work best.
In terms of performance, Topaz Photo AI is a mixed bag. Each time you apply one of its adjustments such as denoising or sharpening, you will have to wait usually between 10 and 15 seconds for that preview to update to reflect your chosen settings. and this will repeat each time you apply an enhancement or adjust the settings within the enhancement.
The situation grows worse the more enhancements you add. So for example if we are sort of denoising a blurred photo we are going to have to apply noise reduction and sharpening. Thus you can expect delays to be at least twice as long.
Now in my opinion the weight is entirely worth it. given the quality of the result. However you may feel differently or you may indeed be using slower or faster hardware.
Therefore I strongly recommend you assess Photo AI's performance yourself and that is as easy as going to the description below, clicking on the link and downloading the free Topaz Photo AI trial. So I like Topaz Photo AI a lot however not everybody needs it, at least not. all of it. So what are the best alternatives to Topaz Photo AI?
So let's talk about Lightroom. Now in terms of noise reduction Topaz Photo AI and Lightroom are similarly capable. So the bottom line is if you are purely interested in noise reduction I do not see a need for any Lightroom subscriber to choose Topaz Photo AI.
Now it is an entirely different matter when it comes to To upscaling now, Lightroom does indeed have its own AI powered upscaler in super resolution. However, unless you are willing to endure a rather clumsy workaround, super resolution is limited to just 200% upscales, while Topaz Photo AI goes up to 600%. But more than that, Topaz Photo AI is simply a much better upscaler. It is better able to reproduce fine detail.
and it does a much better job upscaling portraits as in sort of safeguarding natural looking skin tones and features. Now none of that is to say that super resolution is particularly bad. If you only have infrequent upscaling needs I'm sure super resolution is more than good enough but if it is important to you to have the best upscaler possible Topaz Photo AI is the way to go. When it comes to sharpening light room is completely out.
Lightroom relies on traditional sharpening technologies which sort of add contrast to the edges, sort of painting over the effect if you like. Whereas Topaz Photo AI uses AI to effectively reconstruct the image and this is why it is capable of actually fixing poor focused images or indeed correcting motion blur. So if you are looking to sort of get artifact free sharpening or to push the envelope further and correct those blurred images. Topaz Photo AI is vastly superior to Lightroom.
So what about DxO PureRAW 4? Now DxO PureRAW 4's noise reduction is actually superior to that of Topaz Photo AI. In fact it might be superior to just about anything.
Furthermore DxO PureRAW has outstanding raw conversion and correction. What it will do is it will sort of make your colors pops apply fantastic tailor-made sharpening designed to correct the faults inherent with your particular camera and lens pairing and fix distortion, remove chromatic aberration and a little bit more. In other words the moment you open your RAW images in DxO Pure RAW they look fantastic. Therefore DxO Pure RAW 4 is the sort of application that I would be happy to use for about 90% of my images.
But when it comes to sort of fixing those really important photos. that didn't come out quite right. Quite simply, DxO PureRAW is not as capable as Topaz Photo AI.
For instance, while DxO PureRAW 4 can do a very good job cancelling out lens softness, it can't fix poor focus or motion blur. Nor does DxO PureRAW 4 offer any kind of upscaling. However, if you are simply looking for the best possible noise reduction app, along with some rather outstanding RAW conversion, you can find the best possible one. DxO PureRAW 4 is well worth a go and I will put a link to a free trial in the description below.
And finally you might consider Gigapixel 8. Now when it comes to upscaling good quality images, Topaz Photo AI and Gigapixel are equally superb. Traditionally my recommendation would be based on this. If you are upscaling good quality images you may as well go with Gigapixel because it costs half as much as Topaz Photo AI. But if you plan on upscaling blurred or noise-ridden images, Topaz Photo AI becomes the vastly superior option.
But since Gigapixel 8, the waters have been muddied somewhat. Gigapixel 8 has a new recovery tool. With the recovery tool, you can sort of remaster old, smaller, low-resolution images, at least in theory.
And it is possible that Gigapixel could actually outperform Topaz Photo AI in these areas. Now I say possible because I can't really prove it. The problem with Recover is that it uses generative AI technology and is very very unpredictable. In some cases Recover underperforms compared to Gigapixel's standard AI upscaling and other times it can produce rather impressive results. But you never exactly know when.
This problem is made much worse given how computationally intensive Recover is. So for example if I'm rendering a small 1 megapixel image it takes more than 5 minutes to render it. I aborted my efforts to run Recover on 20 megapixel files after waiting more than 3 hours with 0% progress.
Now of course you do not have to wait for your machine to render these images locally. Instead we can take advantage of Topaz Labs cloud renderer service. So for a small fee, you can basically send your render to the cloud where it will run in the background and run much faster than it will on your local hardware.
But to reiterate, the problem is you're not entirely sure what kind of result that you're getting for. I often found that the result differed from. one in the preview and like I said earlier sometimes the results were quite disappointing.
Therefore for all of these reasons I still recommend Topaz Photo AI the best upscaler for upscaling noise ridden and blurred images. So to conclude is Topaz Photo AI free any good? Well yes it combines top tier upscaling noise reduction and blur correcting sharpening and puts all of that in a very tidy.
easy to use interface. However you might not need Topaz Photo AI, at least not all of it, and in that case you do have some cheaper options. For example if you are looking for outstanding noise reduction and raw conversion, DxO PureRAW 4 is an absolutely fantastic option that will cost you considerably less than Topaz Photo AI. If you are only looking to upscale good quality images, Gigapixel 8 is just as good as Topaz Photo AI despite costing half as much money.
Yet neither of these applications can upscale, denoise and sharpen. Not only does Topaz Photo AI do it all, but it can also do all, all at the same time on a single image. And the result of these compound enhancements means that Topaz Photo AI can produce results that no other sort of specialized enhancement application can match. Therefore if you are looking for everything that Topaz Photo AI offers you really are looking for Topaz Photo AI.
Now at this point I would like to point out that I am indeed an affiliate for Topaz Labs. I am also an affiliate for Adobe, DxO, On1, ACDC, and quite a few more. Therefore you might consider me sort of impartial through saturation. However if you would rather not take my word for any of this and would like to try Topaz Photo AI for yourself you can and there is a link to your free trial in the description below. If you would like to know more about Topaz Photo AI, Gigapixel 8 or any other photo editing application think about stopping by my website at silentpeakphoto.com My name's Richard from Silent Pig and thank you very much for dropping by.