I have used Photo AI for a while now. I also know the previous products Gigapixel/DeNoise/Sharpen AI, which were very good but sadly development was halted.
Lately the focus in development seems to lie on new features, mostly image editing:
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Coloring
- Lightning
- Social Media
- Soon even basic Object Removal
Many users feel that this is going in the wrong direction.
There are many unresolved issues:
- Blurry patches
- UI not built for many images (Gigapixel had more advanced multi-editing features)
- Apply settings to all not really usable
- Unusable batch processing
- Too basic CLI (no options, only Autopilot)
- Crashes
- Shadows in face recovery in every other release
- People’s skin having a too plastic look
- Autopilot values often unusable, so that one has to re-adjust every single image
- Duplicate saving bug
- Inability to save/load presets
- Insufficient quality control (e.g. same functionality broken over several different releases over and over again)
and so on.
Fixing these issues and further advancing the core features (upscale, DeNoise, Sharpen) is where the focus needs to be.
And not on new photo editing features, that are already covered in numerous other products (Adobe PS/LR, CaptureOne, Luminar, Lama Cleaner, and so on).
Building a jack of all trades device is not a good idea, Upscale, DeNoise and Sharpening will suffer greatly from that (they already do).
Many forum users have already stated, that they will not renew their subscription, the way it goes now. I would think that saving the users you already have (and that have experience with the product and give feedback) should be the highest priority.
IF ANYONE FEELS THE SAME WAY, PLEASE VOTE BY CLICKING ON THE TOP LEFT VOTE COUNTER.
P.S. If I was in charge of the product (which obviously I am not), I would immediately halt all new features and re-plan future iterations with the focus of fixing the existing problems and enhancing core functionality only. E.g. a few weeks just focused on blurry patches, a few weeks on batch processing and so on. I would gather feedback from the users/beta testers on each issue (with a seperate thread) to get things right. And also develop extensive integration/functional tests for all core features, so that they “stay ok” in every future release to come. And only, after that is complete and working properly (for the majority of the user), I would permit new features in planning of next iterations.