topaz photo ai3 is here and with it comes a few substantial updates as I've done in the past I wanted to put out a video covering the new features and just an overall honest review of the software I'm Austin James Jackson and I'm excited you guys are here today to talk about topaz photo ai3 and all the new features that come with the program and ultimately I'm I'm going to let you decide if it's worth the upgrade or not I know many of you watching this video may already have a previous topaz subscription that is due for renewal you might be wondering if it's worth the upgrade While others of you might be here checking out topaz for the first time regardless let's not waste any more time let's get into my honest and unfiltered review of topaz photo AI 3 first things first let's talk about the new interface you can see how things look quite a bit different in here they've really simplified I mean it was already pretty simple before but it's even simpler now you've got a few options down below here to switch between what view you want um for your image preview I always like and I never find another reason to go off of this with the slider that shows on the left is the before and on the right is after that's always good we're going to talk about this image in just a second here um you also have the option to crop over here and then when you load this in it'll automatically load the things that it thinks you need this image it loaded D noise but if you need to add enhancements you can also click here and you have all sorts of options we're going to be covering all of these in this video today let's go ahead and start with the D noise which it added here here now I like to always zoom in so you can just do command plus or Control Plus on a PC that'll Zoom you into the image now you can get a little bit better feel of the noise reduction keep in mind every time you move it has to re-update your preview I am running on a pretty loaded MacBook Pro computer if you are running on an older computer I really recommend moving it as little as possible because it does have to reload every single time which can take a little bit longer so this is looking pretty good you can see on the left is before and on the right is after this is just one of my workshop clients here shot this at ISO 12,800 and it was really dark out but you can see it's done a great job removing the noise there I really like what it's done um if I wanted to adjust the D noise I could click here and then I could adjust the settings here again these are the settings that were applied when I loaded it in I didn't select anything it automatically chose these settings but if you were finding that something needed to be adjusted you could do it here Additionally you have the option to click selection right now it's selecting all but if you just wanted to denoise either the subject or the background or any of these options you could do that here you also have a brush if you wanted to mask any of that in or out personally I would rather just mask in or out in a third party software like Photoshop um because I think the masking tools aren't quite as good in here as they are and something say like Photoshop or on one or anything like that but you do have the option which is nice to do the SEL ction here otherwise I mostly just mess around in the controls choosing exactly what I want this image already looks pretty good but if you want to play around with it you could adjust these settings um to bring back some original detail do a little bit of De blurring or to adjust the strength of the noise and for d noising right now they have three AI models normal strong and extreme this image is selected strong which I think did a great job so that's the D noise here so that image we just looked at was loaded in from Lightroom as a tiff now technically I believe topaz will tell you that if you load in a raw file like a dng or whatever your camera's raw file is you know arw for Sony CR2 for Canon I don't exactly know what Nikon is maybe nef whatever your raw file is you load that in and it's supposed to give you a little better results however I do a little bit of both if I can I load it in there as the raw file but a lot of times you know if I let's say I shoot a night photo it's really really dark I want to do some process to it before I do the D noising so for that reason I might do the D noising later and it still generally works pretty good but let's take a look at a raw file here um this is a arw straight out of my Sony camera no edits have been applied now this photo you load it in and it believes it needs a sharpen which is correct you'll notice when I zoom in I think the tripod moved a little bit because you'll see it's blurry it should be a lot sharper than this now the problem that you have when you load in sharpen um it sharpens the subject only so you need to adjust that if you're loading in here and you're like why isn't anything getting sharpened it's selecting what it thinks is the subject this is great if you need to sharpen something like a portrait where you have a defined subject but in a landscape generally if some of the imag is blurry we probably want to sharpen the whole thing so we need to go into selection here and select all that'll allow us to sharpen the whole image then I can go back to controls and I can adjust the settings it thinks that standard is the right AI model to choose let's zoom in and see how it's done you can see it's sharpened a little bit it hasn't done a great job in my opinion usually when I find the images blurry because of you know it's out of focus or something like that I usually find lens blur to work the best let's increase these sliders just a little bit you can see now we really start to get to work so now it's starting to look a little bit better it's just up to you to decide how much obviously right now I think it might be a little bit overcooked so you could drop the sliders just a little bit and you can really play with it to dial it in that's the one thing I think that's really nice is it's super easy to dial in the settings you could try a couple of the other models as well just to see how they work that one doesn't look too bad either um and the nice thing is you know if this image had a little bit of noise too I could go in add another enhancement add a d noise on top of that additionally if I wanted to do something you know like upscale I could do that as well all in the same place you can see how all of the adjustments work with each other um and you can adjust them one at a time Additionally you could save a preset if you were like batch editing or something like that um but I think that is pretty much covers how to use the sharpening it works pretty well in my opinion especially um the the autopilot works pretty good on sharpen but you will need to go in there and make some adjustments from time to time like you could see on this particular image now I generally don't take a lot of portraits but let's look at a JPEG portrait just to show you guys kind of what it can do with the preserved faces here I've got a photo I downloaded this it's just a stock photo I didn't take it um and the original photo I think was like four or 5,000 pixels wide so it was plenty big enough and I actually downsized it to 1,000 pixels so what I'm trying to simulate here is you know you have low resolution photos a lot of people tell me they've used topaz to upscale photos from their grandparents photo album or anything like that this would give you a pretty good idea of kind of what the software can do when it comes to that again this is a 1,00 pixel wide by whatever the long Dimension or the tall Dimension is um and so you can see when I zoom in here you can see the before is on the left this is the image that was given to Topaz you can see it's pretty pixelated so topaz has selected face recovery it's found four faces in the image that's great and it's also done a little bit of an upscale it's trying to do like a 4X upscale which is good because that will give us a little bit more resolution so it's doing a face recovery and an upscale and let's see how it did you can see it's done pretty good now this guy especially just it kind of gives his face a little AI look to it not crazy about it but I'll show you the original photo before I downsized it and his face already kind of looks fake um I guess so I'll show you what that looks like but you can see that it it's done pretty well especially on this child right here the software has done such a nice job with what little it's been given I'm amazed at how much it can really recover those faces so this is the original image here before I downsized it you can see this is about what their faces are looking like so you can see that the difference is not too far like I said his face doesn't look too great over here but I think the kids especially you can see it's done a really nice job upsizing this thing now again this photo that you're seeing up top is not what I put into the software I put in this right here and it upsized it to that I just wanted to show you the original photo to show you kind of what these faces actually did look like so The Preserve faces has done a really nice job again not something that I personally use but I did want to show it to you because you may be looking into this software to do a little bit of face recovery so it does work pretty well now let's talk about another feature that I don't think is all that useful but I wanted to cover it so you could see it that is the balance color feature there's a few features I'm going to show you now that I feel like have been added to more or less just say that they're there like it's just another perk of having the software but I don't think they're all that useful a lot of them may work good but I think there's just better ways to do it one of those is this balance color here essentially what this one does is it's supposed to fix the white balance on an image so on this image I intentionally skewed the image too far blue um and then I ran this balance color at automatic settings you can see it brings the image back and it kind of fixes the blue in the foreground it looks all right I mean it's done a pretty good job however you can totally do this yourself this might be helpful for those of you that really struggle to nail the white balance throw it in here see what the software thinks uh sometimes it works good sometimes it doesn't of course you can make some adjustments as well if you want to maybe adjust the opacity or adjust the temperature more than what the software is thinking but that is the balance color now one of the enhancements that I just haven't found a place where I think it's really going to be useful is the adjust lighting option you select it and it's supposed to adjust the lighting in your image to make it more compelling I guess um I selected it I did the automatic setting for strength of 25 you can see this is what it's done I mean it's brought up the Shadows yes but I can't tell what it's done other than just bring up the exposure so this maybe would help with like if you're restoring some old photos but if you're a photographer like me then you already have another editing software I don't see what this does that I couldn't easily do in another editing software so for that reason the adjust lighting is just not one of my favorite features so even if your photos aren't horribly noisy or blurry I think there's still a lot of room for this software to be really helpful for you um we've got sharp in here which is something I think that looks pretty good on almost any photo you can see this photo here is a telephoto shot that I got of some trees in Joshua Tree it's in Focus but I'm shooting at 600 millimeters so I'm shooting super far away um and I guess the lens I mean it's relatively sharp but because we're shooting through so much atmosphere the trees are not super super sharp so this software Works nice just kind of recover and bring back some of that sharpness you can see it's done a really really nice job through there if you were finding that there was maybe a little bit of noise as well like I'm seeing in this tree it's pretty easy to click add enhancements click on D noise um and it'll choose the automatic settings that it think is going to be best I'm guessing that yeah you can see now that's looking a lot better we're actually removing the noise that we were adding via sharpening so the sharpen and noise is just a pretty nice thing to throw on almost any photo that you take regardless this is just one example I'll show you guys one more and another one here you can see this photo is again it's just using my telephoto lens for some reason it's just not as sharp as it could be we'll zoom in one more time you can just see the leaves are just lacking a little bit so we hit that sharpen now if you're finding that it's adding a little bit of noise again you can go in and adjust here you could do the minor D noise or I find it better to again just open up D noise right in here um and let that load out and then you can see it's done a very nice job um additionally it's super nice to be able to go in and just hit upscale or preserve text if you have an image with text in it I'm not going to be talking about preserve text today but that is another feature but the upscale especially is nice for my images that are coming off my camera they're plenty big for printing but if you did have an maybe an older camera or a smartphone or something like that you can easily hit add enhancements and just hit upscale which is going to allow you to upscale your image to whatever size print you want to make now the last feature that we're going to talk about or rather not talk about I guess is the generative uh remove which essentially is like a spot heel using AI really similar to what Photoshop has um I'm not even going to click on it the problem that I have with it is it is so incredibly slow now now am I using the absolute best computer no but I am using like a $44,000 16in MacBook Pro from I think it was it's less than two years old it's about a year to a year and a half old um it's like fully loaded I do all my video editing all that kind of stuff on here never have any problem when every time I open up this generative remove uh it works so slowly it just takes forever to do anything um and I've I've sat here and waited and waited and waited and I've used it a few times and I honestly just find that like a spot healing brush is going to be so much better than this particular tool so for that reason I don't use the generative remove that they have here in topaz photo AI but I did want to mention that was an option so hopefully I gave you enough information that you can decide if you want to pick this up or not if you're interested in my opinion I'll quickly give it to you I think this software is great it has some nice upgrades over the previous versions of photo AI the models for sharpen and doo are lot better um sharpen denoise and upskill in my opinion are the three that most photographers especially landscape photographers are going to be using most of the time if you are upscaling photos um with faces in them like old restoring old film scans and things like that I think the software works great now if you already have the software maybe you're up for a renewal is it worth it the choice is up to you there's a few nice features in here but you do have to decide if it's worth it for you software is $200 I know that's not chump change when it comes to software um and that's a lot of money compared to some of the other denoisers on the market I do personally think that topaz is the best one on the market today but they do have a lot of competition of course with dxo with uh Lightroom got D noise now Lightroom doesn't have a really good AI sharpener yet so I think that topaz still stands out in that aspect and I think the D noising is slightly better here in topaz photo AI than it is in Lightroom just my opinion so the is yours whether you want to get it or not really hope this was helpful for you if you guys have any questions that you'd like me to answer leave them down below in the comments be more than happy to get back to you help you make a more informed purchase decision otherwise thank you guys so much for being here make sure to subscribe if you do want to become better at photography um this is a channel for you thank you guys so much for watching