Ongoing product value and paid upgrades

It will not be long before Luminar 4 has its support withdrawn, and then you will be ‘shepherded’ towards BUYING Luminar AI!!!

Photoshop 2021 has a most impressive Sky Replacement filter - and is far more adjustable than that in Luminar 4.

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I found Photoshop Elements 2021 which does sky replacement. It costs £20 more than Luminar 4 but might be worth it for other features. Whatever I buy in the end, though, I still won’t be spending money on Topaz products.

I can understand why Topz has stopped giving free upgrades for life because I always wondered how they managed to make a profit once people had bought the original software. What I’m sad about is that the company seems to have forgotten people who just edit photos for fun - surely I’m not the only customer who doesn’t make a living from photography. If Topaz introduced a new product that did sky replacement along with other features like flood, frost, snow and rain etc I’d probably buy it.

PS I deleted my original reply because it didn’t display the quote correctly

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Luminar AI will automatically do reflections as well. I use Luminar 4 with mixed results for sky replacement, despite having a huge library of my own skies. Fortunately I have wonderful unhindered views of the sky from my house. It’s not just a case of plonking in any old sky: you really have to select one that looks convincing with regard to angle of light, softness, focus etc.

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You have to do that kind of selection if you’re replacing skies the old fashioned way. :slight_smile: As I’ve got arthritis, anything which can put in a new, suitable sky with one click is preferable to erasing old skies with Remask which I find difficult to use when my co-ordination is bad.

You are right, it should be a one-click operation, but I often find I need to try a number of different skies before I find one that truly convinces me!

I get an error that my current license does not include this update. And it appears i have to pay again for this update, not to mention the fact there appears to be no trial to see what i would be paying for. This was not what the agreement was when i first purchased the product. On the contrary the agreement was that i would receive updates continually as the software evolved. I feel very hurt and angry.

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I think we should have at least 7 days of trial for actual customers with expired upgrading license to know if the new update worth it according to our usages. Knowing the GPU image quality issue I think I will wait until this is fixed to purchase the 1 year upgrade pack.

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Same here. I checked my original order and it says “Expiry: Never”. I don’t see myself investing another 100 dollars for a new round of updates that eventually stop again. Shame because it is such a nice product.

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I would have to agree. This is a “bait and switch” scenario. The original license was in perpetuity and we have now come to the end of perpetuity. What else can we no longer believe from TOPAZ Labs. “Expiry: Never” seemed to be pretty simple but it magically disappears at the convenience of the seller. Any concepts of Trust and Good Will have been taken off the table by TOPAZ Labs.

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I agree. I"m sorry, I’ve bought a ton of your programs with the promise that upgrades were free. Now you want to charge me again. What do you take us for?

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I read this some time ago, it was posted by Eric Yang, CEO of Topaz on February 14:

“Hi - I really understand where you’re coming from on this one. If I bought someone’s products and the #1 selling point was that I believed I’d get free upgrades for life, I’d be frustrated too and would write a similar post.

If this applies to you or someone else reading, please contact us , send us your receipts, and tell us you want to deactivate and receive a refund on your purchases. Our payment processors usually restrict this process to a certain time period, but we can consider Paypal-ing you your purchase price if it’s beyond our return policy.”

I posted a reference to this before (without the actual quote) but my post was deleted by a moderator.

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Now you have posted a reference, not just hearsay …

A little power is a dangerous thing…for some. It would seem, as moderator, you would be familiar with this policy and would not have deleted the original message out of ignorance of the policy.

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Hi, Well my licence for the year ran out on 31st August and now Topaz release an upgrade for Denoise less than 2 months later and expect me to pay another year. No not for me as like others have said when I bought Topaz many years ago it was with FREE upgrades for life and changing the name of the product is IMO underhanded. Thanks and goodbye Topaz. Russ.

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I"m pretty pissed about this. They told me that they sent a letter. Who cares!!! That wasn’t the deal when I purchased this. I’ll be contacting the BBB.

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Please don’t post multiple copies of the same post in different topics - once is enough.

Hi Eric and greetings to all.

I have been trialing Topaz denoise, gigapixel, sharpen and Jpeg to raw products. As a long term DxO photolab user I found the upgrade to photolab 4 (from 2) to be reasonable value for money and in my opinion the new deepprime noise reduction is at least the equal of denoise. I found little benefit in gigapixel and jpeg to raw. Sharpen is giving me some benefit and as such is the only Topaz product I currently consider as a potential purchase.

Today I started doing the sums and checking out the T’s & c’s. The best deal I could find for sharpen was $67.89, quite a lot for a single function that I have only infrequent use for. Now when looking at your upgrades policy it looks like you would basically like me to buy the product every year or two at a bit of a discount. Yes, lots other companies do the same, DxO included, but their upgrade discount is considerably better than Topaz.

I’m going to struggle to justify the cost(s) and will probably end up leaving it for now. Honestly I fee that $50 is about the top end for me with upgrades being about half of that.

Obviously If I wanted/needed all four of these the utility bundle would be the way for me to go. But for the reasons given that doesn’t work for me and I would also be very apprehensive of the potential upgrade costs.

Best regards

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For those of you debating a purchase, right now is a good time to buy or upgrade a Topaz product:
A double-discount on Gigapixel and also the Utility Bundle is available through 11/6.

This appears to be the end of the year’s grace for some of my Topaz products.

When I first purchased Topaz products, it was with your promise to never have to pay for updates and upgrades again. I know you sent out a message a year ago that you are no longer going to honor that promise. Although I understand your need for money, I am not able to “rent” the products yearly, and so will continue to work with what I have but will also be switching to Luminar’s new AI product, which doesn’t have a ‘rental’ clause. (At least yet…)

I have really loved Topaz but wish that you had made the new policy to be for new customers and kept your promise to your old customers.

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I understand what you are saying about Topaz, but Luminar is not different from Topaz. The next upgrade from Luminar you have to pay for, only updates in the current version are free. So it’s basically the same thing.