[quote=“AiDon, post:649, topic:13299”] One thing we all need to understand is that AI products will always give the best possible results according to the training they have had. For general work it will always be as good as you can do yourself and in most cases more balanced.
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Not in my experience, Don. And I think there are many others who would disagree.
I suspect that you are probably right about AI training, but if the amount of training required equates to bigger and bigger programs, and more and more processing power, then eventually it will be a struggle to run them on the average computer that is also running other, none photographic-related, software, leaving only large highly-specialised machines capable of handling them. A scenario, I suggest, that would not be conducive to a wide consumer base and would put the cost of purchase out of reach of most normal mortals
Like me!
The old Adjust gives fare better results in a split second and allows you to work in the smallest detail of the image. It’s a shame that such a superior app is thrown down the drain for something that hardly works.
Why not use the superiority and geniality of the old Adjust app mixed with AI? To speed things up!
This is a valuable product for me for my serious photography hobby. As a software engineer/manager by trade, I gladly will pay the $99/ year which I think is reasonable. Kudos for making hard decisions, hopefully before it is too late. While this price matches the topaz market, I worry this will not be enough to sustain this company and allow them to get product quality up to where it should be and to expand the feature set. I’ve also seen many many updates and I’ve neither seen any perceptible increase in my own configuration stability nor capability - I feel like Topaz is spinning their wheels a bit and getting nowhere recently on this product and that concerns me. I still feel abandoned quite a bit and struggling to regain my topaz workflow and capability after I was switched to this product from legacy tools. It takes many many days and hours of experimentation to find a specific workflow that provides what I want. Years later I’m still looking to regain certain specific topaz effects and workflows I can no longer reproduce. I believe that Topaz does not give reproducibility of workflow much thought - especially with the AI tools that seem to produce a different result with every update. Until this gets figured out, it will remain a great hobby tool which will cause serious hobbiests to continue to struggle.
Very reasonable request. I agree that our development process and release quality should be - and is - the top priority of our company right now.
So you know, internally the DeNoise v2 release brought a mixed bag of emotions. While it was very successful in terms of how well the main new feature worked for people (batch processing), we messed up the upgrade path. We switched to a new installer framework and failed to test the upgrade experience properly. We’re putting in steps to prevent that from happening again, but in the meantime I am sorry that we didn’t make it a smooth experience in the first place.
You also need to get your support back to the position it used to be in where tickets got answered quickly and helpfully.
Again, totally agree. In the past year or so we’ve elevated our support responsiveness to a top-level company priority and have invested in it significantly. While we’ve been able to better, obviously we’re not quite where we want to be yet. I checked for your ticket but couldn’t find it - can you PM it to me? I’ll follow up with our support folks.
“one year subscription for upgrades with retention of ownership”. (PLEASE CONFIRM)
This is basically correct, although we intentionally avoided the term “subscription” because that implies that you lose access to the software if you stop paying.
For us, it was very important that you be able to choose whether and when to upgrade. If you decide to stop upgrading, you should still be able to use the software that you’ve already bought. Even if you lose the download for that specific version, it’ll be available on our website.
I own all of Topaz Products and want to confirm that Plugins and Studio 2 would be covered by the $99 / year “subscription with ownership”
Right now only DeNoise, Sharpen, Mask, and Gigapixel are affected by this change, which means all other products will still receive free upgrades regardless of whether you have the upgrade license. (If we change this in the future, we will give at least another 6 months notice / grace period.)
I would note that I have not seen any provision for either healing brush and image layer
Healing in Studio 2 should be released quite soon.
I wouldn’t be either. Actually, this is why we limited the upgrade policy to just those four products: we have very concrete plans to deliver multiple significant upgrades to each of them even before the grace period ends in August. While we have plans for some of the other products too (like Studio), we didn’t think the number or scope of upgrades we have planned for that one merited a paid upgrade plan.
Hope to prove it to you in the next few months. Hold me to this in August.
Moving forward, we’ll maintain the download for whatever version you own from our Account page. (If you own Gigapixel v4.4 but the latest version is v5, you’ll have the download to v4.4 at least in your Account.)
I never took it that way. Yes, I was upset about Adobe because I was a LR user, but I didn’t have PS at all when I signed up during the first week it was offered and it worked fine.
First you apologize profusely. Second, you state what the reasons were, Third, you promise that everything will be great now. Fourth, you post that you want to hear feedback. Fifth, when the negative feedback rolls in you plead for patience. Six, your mods start castigating the owners for being upset and being jerks. Lastly, the company breaks their new promises because there’s no way that they can keep them.
I was going to consider my options. When I went to bed last night I had pretty much decided on a wait and see for now. NOT NOW!!! When the company sees their customers as a problem I’m done. I’ll be sending my receipts and asking for a refund!! AiDon YOU caused my change in attitude with your crappy thoughtless post!!! What a way to run a company!! No wonder so many people think crony capitalism is rampant.
Aidon is not a Topaz employee, so any decisions you make about going forward should be based on the software and not on his post. I am only a user but frequent this forum on a daily basis. Aidon is a moderator on the forum and has done an excellent job helping to keep it running smoothly and providing helpful answers whenever he can.
I have been following all the users responses and he is correct, there are a lot of misconceptions about what was stated about Topaz’s new policy. Nobody is happy with the change but if it’s necessary, it’s still a better deal than most software providers offer. Your initial “wait and see” response was much better if the products you own currently work for you. The CEO in a newer message indicates that there will be additional updates coming prior to the August change. At that point, you can decide if you want to upgrade to a new version or just continue with the software as owned.
I think the users are expressing a volume response much greater than other typical posts. In 3 days time since this was announced and up to the point of my writing, this thread is 640 posts long with nearing 20 thousand views. This far and away eclipses other posts/threads that I’m seeing (I may be wrong; I’m fairly new to posts on the forum). It also speaks volumes of the problem at hand.
Learning that a response is coming from a moderator (non-employee) chiming in with their opinion and the distinct lack of response from Topaz itself can only infuriate those following this thread or learning of this new development. Using a position of power as moderator to shame posters expressing their frustration from a perceived position of power within the software company is disingenuous at best. It is gas on the growing fire.
It also speaks volumes when a response to the situation is not addressed by the original poster. Where is Topaz? Additionally, trying to assuage everyone’s fears when not a part of the company really only acts to further everyone’s opinion (right or wrong) in the responses.
Thanks for your explanation of Aidon’s response but take a step back and look at this from the user’s perspective. His response, taken by 20 thousand viewers, will be seen by a portion of them as gaslighting. Maybe the Moderator has specific help but the tone of the post was not that.
I don’t think so he was just trying to set things straight, because there is a lot of false information on the forum and he was absolutely not personal!
I did corrected him by uploading an email with Gigapixel saying that you would receive updates for life when you bought it at the time and he responded very nice to it en even liked my post.
Let’s all stay a bit relaxed and don’t get over excited! If you don’t want to update just don’t. I also think the upgrade price is a bit high for only 4 plugins. And the new policy sucks, but sometimes change is needed to save a business from going under.
And then your left with nothing! I have seen this happen many times!
Well, I guess everyone has an opinion. I have mine. I don’t feel the OPs 13 posts address the bulk of what everyone is expressing. I see answers to questions that specifically dance around or away from the problem.
Putting a happy spin on things doesn’t necessarily do it for all of those 20K viewers.
I realize I’m not taking the announcement well and have factored that into my response. With that said, I guess I’ll bow out of the conversation. We are required to simply accept the condition. Got it.
He doesn’t have to! @Aidon is a user just like you and me! But tries to moderate the forum in a sensible way. And if you don’t want to except the new policy, have seen a pay back offer too from the CEO!
My last post on this topic:
Go read a few hundred of the posts. No. The underlying issues are not addressed. Yes. I understand the OP doesn’t have to answer to anything. I also understand he doesn’t have to answer each post. Look at the volume and look at the tone from a bulk of the responses on this thread. It doesn’t take a great deal of math or analysis to see something is wrong.
