I have sent you a private message with the link to the Beta Testing Group.
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Totally agree. If the main features of the V2 were at the same good level as v1.5, I wouldnāt mind, but weāre not here at allā¦ and you can add the saturation issue I just raised when denoising JPEG files ! 
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With those results Iām not sure if I need fancy AIā¦
I have an old tool called Snapheal that achieves similar results, sometimes better :-/
P.S.: I wasnāt able to see the TPAI result as Iām not accepted in the Beta group yet.
Why am I not able to like the first post ?
Also, I renewed my subscription for Gigapixel and Sharpen just before the development halted for months now. I wonāt make this mistake again.
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Correct me if Iām wrong, but you ālikeā the first post by voting.
Donāt know how it looks in a computer, but in my mobile browser you have the vote button to the top left.
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Thanks for your insights everyone. Iāll be referring back to this thread frequently as I try to help prioritize development going forward. Please continue sharing your thoughts.
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Agreed, please stop adding new features until the current ones are perfected.
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Same thing here, my request wasnāt approved yet - either. Maybe they donāt want us as beta testers, as weāre already stirring up enough trouble as it is 
Just kidding, Iām sure thatās not the case.
This is normal. Usually, it takes days (or weeks) for approval. If you want to speed up the process, you can send a private message to Topaz Staff @ida.topazlabs, and she will help you.
I tried the trial version back before Photo AI, liked the results, paid my money and still have the individual programs on my PC. I now also have the new stuff too. Only once have I updated to an unstable version (recent photo Ai face recovery crashes).
Topaz has never forced me to remove the programs that I was happy with. I still have them.
They still work. If I donāt want to be a ābeta testerā, I simply donāt click the update button.
Iām also glad I bought the package back then that included the original 3 programs. I wouldnāt want to miss them. Itās sad that their development was halted, they were good applications with an excellent multi-editing UI and batch support.
The only thing they were missing was some kind of pipeline, so that one could run Gigapixel, DeNoise and Sharpen in one user interface for the same photo. Instead of running it through 3 apps. Thatās what I hoped Photo AI to be - but its focus seems to be the autopilot. And not batch or CLI support.
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Hello @tim.he , how can we best participate in this process? I think it would be good to actively involve the users and their needs and feedback.
Suggestion: What we could do is gradually go through every pain point, e.g. start with the blurry patches issue. Then create an extra thread for that issue in the beta group forum (or even the public forum, since it affects every user). And then let the users describe in detail what the problem is and have them post sample images. With that your people have details on the issues, test data and can go to work and the community is on standby to answer questions, look at results and test new versions. And once a good result (or at least compromise) is reached it would of course be important to create a functional and/or integration test base on your end (preferably CLI based, as that would kill two birds with one stone). So that the feature stays in tact in future versions.
What do you (all) think of such an approach?
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I think thatās a great idea.
The best way to support us is to upload examples -both good and bad- of any interesting results youāre getting. Itāll let us look at unique cases that we might not be able to easily find ourselves!
We really appreciate this collaborative effort.
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Well done on your post, 30 Votes! Good Job!
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We hear you on this! I can absolutely understand the feeling that there are issues to fix that should take priority over very new features. A couple of specifics:
- We are indeed working on the blurry patches issue (progress thread). Weāve explored several alternative solutions that didnāt end up working out, but currently have a more promising direction.
- Weāre also redoing how the right panel filters work, which will improve the batch processing workflow quite significantly. I canāt promise that weāll be able to ship it soon, but after weāre done I hope that youāll agree that we did it right.
Feature development usually happens in parallel; just like you canāt bake a cake faster with more ovens, we canāt fix important issues any faster by putting more people on them. Generally, we find that the best results come from giving a single āownerā a lot of responsibility and space to produce their best work. This means we will often have many important projects going on simultaneously.
More broadly, however, we all really appreciate your patience as we build Photo AI. Despite there being some important outstanding and unresolved issues, I think weāre all together in wanting to build the best possible product in the end. Thanks for caring enough to give such direct but reasonable feedback for the sake of the product.
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Ok, I have access now and looked at the TPAI picture. Itās like TPX wrote with the TPAI result of object removal. āNot even close.ā
It proves my point that it doesnāt make sense to re-invent the wheel for tools already out there doing the job very wellā¦ It just takes the focus away from the core functionality of Photo AIā¦
Also on a side note: If one really wanted to go towards image editing (which object removal is a part of) one would need to think about adopting a concept to persist/load the editing that was done. Like Capture One does with its āvariantsā. So when you open the image, the masks are still in the same place, and so on. But soon that develops into layers, and so on - and soon after you have PS lite / Affinity Photo Liteā¦
I think this thread and its votes make it pretty clear, that we donāt need/want photo editing in Photo AI. We just need the AI photo enhancement to work property (Gigapixel/DeNoise/Sharpen) and get the most realistic (and not artificially looking) picture as an outputā¦
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Thatās just the beginning *g, itās not even been a week since my original post
Hello @eric , thanks for the personal response.
Considering the overwhelming response to this thread, that users donāt really want more fancy features but instead consolidation of the existing ones, would you be willing to freeze/halt the effort in the object removal area for now, as a sign of good faith? So that the focus can solely be on the more pressing (listed) issues here for the time being?
I understand what you say, that it doesnāt necessarily help to have more ovens for one issue. But clearly there are a lot of open issues here and they could be assigned to different āsingle ownersā as you say.
Iām specifically asking because I just read through the beta removal and Remove Tool Beta v2 (formerly āRetouchā) threads, and that feature seems to be in a very early development stage with user feedback that suggests still a lot of work ahead. Suggesting that it will consume a lot of future resources; firstly to get to a state in which to compete with existing solutions, and then to maintain that (as there will always be special cases, where object removal is still not doing what the user expects it to with every new photo). If you ask me this feature is going to become an opened wound.
Plus given the fact, that many of us still donāt understand, why one would want to re-invent that feature into Photo AI, as there are very good and proven programs out there (cheap and even free ones) that do this job flawlessly.
We bought Photo AI for Gigapixel/DeNoise/Sharpen - to get the most realistic look for our photos. Not more. Many (like me) also bought Gigapixel/DeNoise/Sharpen originally with a subscription, without knowing that these 3 products would already be end of lifeā¦ Telling us now, that even Photo AI development will no longer focus on the core areas of enhancement, but development is drifting towards a photo editing app will bare the danger of alienating us even more.
The goal should be, to persuade as many of the voters here to consider renewing their subscription after all IMHO that can only be done if they see that there is actually something happening in the right direction (and fast); and that there are no further dissipations of resources into other areas (developing additional, very time consuming fancy features like the object removal, that most of the subscribers didnāt really ask for).
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After reading Ericās response, I am actually ok with them continuing to develop new features, as long as current, core features (denoise, sharpen, upscale, lighting + colour), are continually improved!
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