Does it seem like Mask AI development has been abandoned, and is being left to wither and fade? Have Topaz surrendered to Adobe in the intelligent masking arena?
If you land on the main Topaz page and select “All Products” you see Gigapixel, Sharpen, Denoise and Video Enhance. No sign of Mask. Someone unfamiliar with Topaz would not even know that Mask exists.
Then there are updates just from this year so far:
Denoise - Jan, Feb, Mar (New version), April, June, July
Sharpen - Feb, Mar (New version), April, May, June, Aug
Gigapixel - Dec, Jan, Feb, April, May
Mask AI - February.
Then nothing. 6 months, half an “Upgrade Plan” cycle, with no upgrades.
If you dig a bit, you can find the Mask Ai product page, and they are happy to sell you a license. But I thought the new paid upgrade plan was intended to support development with more frequent updates. I upgraded to Mask AI just over a year ago with the understanding that there would be a year of updates. The big development in that past year: Nag Screens about your update plan every time you launch.
I posted a while back about how I’m finding the new Photoshop masking to be much improved to the point I hardly ever (never?) use Mask AI anymore. Which is a shame. Masking is what brought me to Topaz in the first place. Either Topaz coders are locked in a windowless room working on ways to leapfrog Adobe, or they’ve resigned themselves to never being able to catch up.
I’m to have to see a significant feature set improvement before shelling out for another year of (no) updates.
