Thanks for your insights everyone. I’ll 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 wasn’t approved yet - either. Maybe they don’t want us as beta testers, as we’re already stirring up enough trouble as it is 
Just kidding, I’m sure that’s 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 don’t want to be a “beta tester”, I simply don’t click the update button.
I’m also glad I bought the package back then that included the original 3 programs. I wouldn’t want to miss them. It’s 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. That’s 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 that’s a great idea.
The best way to support us is to upload examples -both good and bad- of any interesting results you’re getting. It’ll 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). We’ve explored several alternative solutions that didn’t end up working out, but currently have a more promising direction.
- We’re also redoing how the right panel filters work, which will improve the batch processing workflow quite significantly. I can’t promise that we’ll be able to ship it soon, but after we’re done I hope that you’ll agree that we did it right.
Feature development usually happens in parallel; just like you can’t bake a cake faster with more ovens, we can’t fix important issues any faster by putting more people on them. Generally, we find that the best results come from giving a single “owner” 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 we’re 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. It’s like TPX wrote with the TPAI result of object removal. “Not even close.”
It proves my point that it doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel for tools already out there doing the job very well… It just takes the focus away from the core functionality of Photo AI…
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 “variants”. 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 Lite…
I think this thread and its votes make it pretty clear, that we don’t 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 output…
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That’s just the beginning *g, it’s 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 don’t 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 doesn’t 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 “single owners” as you say.
I’m specifically asking because I just read through the beta removal and Remove Tool Beta v2 (formerly “Retouch”) 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 don’t 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 life… 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 didn’t really ask for).
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After reading Eric’s 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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This is exactly how I see it.
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Yes, 33 votes is not too shabby - but you’d need a counter-vote to really see how users think.
Plus you would not get the opinion of those that just use the software and don’t post here (after all there are 800 downloads alone for the 2.0.2 here in the respective thread which makes 30+ votes less impressive).
Myself, I’m quite undecided/ambivalent here .
Of course I’d like the original main features of the software be stable/bug free and with the best possible quality - but I don’t have anything against new features,either. And especially object removal is a thing where AI could really help IMO.
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I just don’t like re-invented wheels, that’s all… I see it as a waste of resources.
But everyone has to decide for themselves.
I’ve done all that I can, trying to focus the problems and needs of the user’s I’ve interacted with so far into this thread/vote. We will see, what comes of it. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
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33 votes x $100 annual subscription = 1 programmer’s week of work / year.
Me I’m not really against getting new functions and other types of improvements, but when every new version - for some reason - seem to bring new references to version 1.3.x or 1.5.x as being much better in their corresponding forum threads, and I keep on reading complaints about regressions or old errors not getting fixed it’s not really that far off to see that something ain’t right with regards to the priorities made by the devs.
And I’m sorry, but the returning comment about “nothing is really forcing you to update…”
I paid for a years of updates, not for a year of regressions and new fancy stuff that only half work.
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