First Look: Topaz Photo AI
I’ve been a happy user of the Topaz Labs sharpening and denoise plug-ins for a while, as well as an occasional user of their Gigapixel AI tool to upsize images for printing. The one very minor annoyance I with with them is the need to run an image through multiple plug-ins and the associated minor complications in making sure I process them in the preferred order and use the right version of the image.
Turns out I wasn’t the only person to feel this annoyance, because Topaz Labs has fixed it by creating a new, combined tool called Topaz Photo AI. This tool allows you, via a single pass through the plug-in, to de-noise, sharpen and resize an image in one step. This simplifies my workflow a fair bit, and when I’m batch processing a number of images, means I can set it up and leave it to run without needing it to babysit from step to step.
How does it work?
I have tried a few images with it, and I’m happy with the results. If you liked the results you got with the three separate plug-ins, you’ll be happy with these results as well.(If you haven’t tried this tool before, it’s work taking for a free demo and see how you like it).
Here’s one sample image from a recent outing. I thought it would be a fun experiment because it’s really high contrast and could create some challenges for both sharpening and noise reduction. First, the raw, unprocessed image right out of camera (you can click on any image to see it larger)
Here is the same image after my processing of it in Lightroom Classic:
Here is that image after running it through Topaz AI using it’s default settings, and by growing the pixel size by 2x:
It wasn’t a noisy image, but to my eyes, the sharpness imrpovements are clearly visible, especially on the pilings and in the barnacles. If you want to pixel peep a bit, here’s a blow up showing before (on the left) and after (on the right) of some of the cormorants, expanded to 200% in Lightroom:
There’s a tiny touch of haloing around the birds, but.. this is blown up to 200%. At 100%, I couldn’t really see it. the feather edges are better, and I’m seeing very well-controlled noise in the background behind the birds. The sharpness, even with the 2X expansion, is quite sharp overall.
So overall, I’m sold on this new combined plug-in, and I’m going to start using it on all my images. I’ll do more side by side comparisons between it and the old three-plugin suite, but this really looks like a nice and solid enhancement by Topaz, and if you have licensed the other plug-ins, you already have a license for this one.
My suggestion: go try it out.
