So when it comes to photo editing apps, the one that I spend the most time with on this channel is Adobe Lightroom. After all, it's what I use to manage, edit, and share my entire photo library. With that said though, there are a few other apps that I think do a great job at filling in some of the gaps that Lightroom does have. And the one that I think is worth considering the most by far is Photo AI by Topaz Labs. And while Topaz Labs does a great job of releasing regular updates to Photo AI, I generally prefer covering the app when they add significant features and performance improvements that'd benefit you and me the most.
And that's what this video is all about. Topaz Labs recently released Photo AI v3.1 and there are several improvements that are worth highlighting. Now here's the thing, there are some Photo AI features that don't really fit into my editing workflow, but there are others that make the app totally worth the price, especially if you've already licensed it.
and are considering whether to get the app upgrade plan. I'll leave a link below if you wanna check out Photo AI, but for now, let's dive in. All right, so I have this photo here that I'm gonna use to illustrate some of the improvements that were added to Photo AI version 3.1. And I have the app already loaded here.
If you have an older version of Photo AI, you'll see on the top right a button that says updates available. You can click on it. And if you have a valid license, it'll prompt you to download and install it.
And that's kind of how Topaz Labs works. When you purchase the software, you get updates for a year. And then I believe if you want to continue getting updates, you can purchase these annual upgrade plans.
And they're not annual. You buy them and they're good for a year and then you can keep buying them. Point is that. You could go for some time with an older version of Topaz Labs apps like Photo AI. And when a feature or a performance improvement comes out that you're really interested in, then you can add that upgrade plan and then you'll get the latest version.
So that's kind of how it goes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this image and I'm just going to drag it onto Photo AI. Now let's go ahead and I'm going to zoom in to like 200%. And actually what I'll do before that, let's go and we'll zoom to fit.
That's a little bit better here. Now, a few UI enhancements, a few kind of functionality enhancements that I want to bring to your attention. You'll see over here, there's this new section that says, here are a few more ideas for your image. So this is kind of part of the autopilot feature, which analyzes your photo and then makes recommendations on what to do. Now, right now, you'll see that with autopilot, it's recommending two things.
And you'll know that it's recommending them because of this yellow dot right there. and you'll see there's one over here so there's a yellow dot for upscale there's a yellow dot for face recovery so why is that well because uh the original resolution of this image it's a really low res image and when i think of some of the reasons why i would use photo ai over lightroom for example one of them is upscaling so if you have an image that you want to upscale lightroom has a super resolution which will double your width and height of your image but it only works with certain raw and DNG files. Same thing goes with noise reduction.
So Photo AI has outstanding noise reduction. So does Lightroom. I've covered a video on how they compare between the two. But with that said, Lightroom currently only supports certain raw and DNG files.
If you have a JPEG, for example, that's really noisy, you can't... apply the AI noise reduction in Lightroom. You can use Lightroom's legacy noise reduction, which is not good at all. So that's where, when I mentioned gaps in Lightroom, that's where photo AI fits in really nicely. For me, things like noise reduction on non-raw files, upscaling is outstanding.
And there are these other little kind of fringe utilities that sometimes can really be very helpful. And I'm going to show those to you right now. So I can go ahead and I can click on it.
For example, if I just want to upscale or apply face recovery, or if I want autopilot to apply the two things that it recommends, I can just click over here on apply recommendations. I'm going to do that right now. Now you can see that it zoomed in, and here's the first improvement that I want to show you.
When this happens, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to zoom to fit, and I'm going to allow Photo AI to process the image at this kind of full fit resolution. And why is that? Well, if you have been using Photo AI or pretty much any of Topaz Labs apps, you know that when you zoom in, for example, and pan around. The app has to reprocess. It has been a huge pain.
It drove me crazy because I'd have to move and then wait a second or two. And really that time depends on the capabilities of your computer and the image that you're working on. But now, because I zoomed to fit and you can see now there is this check mark here, which means that this image has been processed. So now if I zoom in, you can see if I go to 200%, notice how it's not reprocessing. That check mark is over here.
And it's just, it's really great. It's this kind of new. smart preview technology that they've implemented where if you zoom to fit and you have the entire image visible and the app processes completely, when you zoom in and pan around, you don't have to reprocess until or unless you make a change. You add another filter or you make a change to the image that requires you to reprocess. If you do that, then my recommendation is make the change, zoom to fit, let the app do its processing, and then you can zoom in and pan around.
to see the improvements. Alright, so to me, that is probably one of the biggest improvements, no joke. Like, I absolutely love it.
And again, we can go to zoom to fit and have the image ready to go. Now, of course, you can click on either of these filters that have been applied and change things around. So here, it has high fidelity V2 as the upscaling model.
You can change it to any of the other ones, but I actually like high fidelity V2 for this particular image. I think it works really well. And you can see now that if you click over here, it shows the original resolution and the new resolution.
So now we're at about a 24 megapixel resolution, which is really nice. Now if I zoom in, let's go back to 200%. I'm gonna show you an improvement to an existing filter.
You see over here the text, it kind of looks weird as part of the upscaling. Now if I press and hold the space bar, which is how you can toggle the original and the processed image, so I'm gonna press space bar here, this is. the unprocessed version of the image. And so here, obviously the text is really bad.
With the processed version, it's not bad, but they made improvements to the text recovery filter. So watch, if I click on add enhancements, you'll see there's this preserve text filter. And I have a video, I'll share it at the end, where when Topaz Labs first released this feature, I covered it. So if you wanna go a little bit deeper into it, again, I'll leave a link to that at the end of this video.
But. What I'm gonna do is click on Preserve Text. And now what I need to do is use a brush.
So I'm gonna make a big brush over here. And I need to basically paint on the text that I want Photo AI to analyze and preserve. So this sign here is what I want.
And then I'm going to press and hold on the space bar and then pan up here. And I'm also going to preserve this ice cream. Even though it's not bad, I just wanna see what it does. So I'm...
just making my selection here and we're good to go now let's go ahead i'm gonna zoom to fit again and i'm gonna click on controls this tab right here you can see now that it is preserving the text also i zoom to fit again because by zooming to fit once it finishes the processing like i mentioned i can now zoom in and not have to wait for it to reprocess so let's go ahead here um let's go back to 200 and let's pan over to the sign. So this sign now has the preserve text feature enabled. I'm gonna go ahead and turn it off so we can see what it was like before.
And so you can see how, especially in the word crossing, you see how it's kind of broken up? It's still kind of legible, but with the preserve text feature, it just looks a little sharper. Let's zoom out to 100% here, and I'm gonna pan up to this ICE crime sign here, the name of the food truck.
Let's turn off preserve text. And then let's turn it back on. And you see how it just gets a little bit sharper. And it's where I think preserved text is really great because it doesn't just work on like the super illegible stuff over here.
It can actually work to enhance larger text that has legibility to it already. Now, there are some things about photo AI that I mentioned in the intro that I won't hand off to as part of my photo editing workflow. There are just some things that I wanna do in Lightroom and I don't wanna do anywhere else. Still, If you are maybe not using Lightroom or you want to see how it works, you can see over here, if I go to Add Enhancements, specifically, there's Adjust Light and Balance Color. I showed this in a previous video when Topaz Labs released Photo AI version 3.0, but I'll show this to you here as well really quickly, just if you want to see it.
So let's go ahead, let's zoom to fit. I'm gonna click on Add Enhancement, and then I'm gonna select Balance Color. And so you can see it does a decent job of kind of, I don't know that there was a color cast, but if we toggle it off, you can see maybe there is a little bit of a blue cast, but here with this balance color filter, it does kind of make it a bit more neutral, maybe even a bit warmer.
And I can go ahead and split this so you can see the original image and the processed version here. I can also go ahead and add enhancements and adjust lighting. And so I think what Photo AI is trying to do is recover some more. tonal range.
It does look a bit brighter, especially in the shadows. And so if this is kind of your taste, then sure, you can certainly use it. But for me, I prefer doing all color and tone adjustments in Lightroom.
It's just kind of how it is for me, even if it's a JPEG file. I'll use Photo AI for things like noise reduction, if I need to preserve text for whatever reason. And also here, I didn't kind of bring this up, but one of Photo AI's best features, especially if you are working with portraits, is the face recovery tool.
So let's go ahead here, zoom to 200%, and you can see the improvements here. It really is fantastic. Now, I can click over here, and I can disable it just so you can see what it looks like without face recovery.
And so this is what you have here, and then by enabling it, I think you'll agree that it does a really nice job. And of course, if you are done with this image, let's just go ahead, let's Zoom to fit one more time so we can see the original versus the fully processed version. And when you're happy with this, you can go ahead and click on export image here. And you can choose these settings here in terms of the file where you want to save it, as well as the format. You can change it from JPEG to any of these other formats.
I'll just stick with JPEG here. I'll keep it on the original folder, which is my desktop, and I'm going to click on save. Now, when I go to my desktop, you can see there are the two versions over here.
This is the original version. And then this is the image that was basically just processed using Photo AI version 3.1. Now, again, I still stand by the fact that Lightroom is insanely powerful.
It has a ton of fantastic tools that photographers can use. But I also fully acknowledge that it does have some gaps. Maybe you're the kind of photographer who needs to upscale beyond 2x.
You want to upscale by 6x. Or you want to apply noise reduction. Excellent noise reduction, mind you, to file formats other than RAW and certain DNG. In those situations, Photo AI is an excellent app to consider.
Also, it does have some really nifty filters that are just not available in Lightroom. Things like the preserved text and the face recovery. Those are really, really powerful.
So if you want to learn more about Photo AI, I've got a link in the description below. Please do check it out. I do think it is worth your money.
And if you want to kind of learn even more, you wanna see other functionality with Photo AI, I've got these videos right here. As always, if you found this video helpful, a thumbs up would be appreciated. And don't forget to click on that subscribe button and bell icon to get notified of all future videos. Thanks a lot, everyone.