Support for PS Smart filters workflow

Topaz Photo Ideas
1

Hi. I’m an historical user of Topaz product and so far, I have been very satisfied.
But the new Topaz Photo does not fit well in my workflow:

When applied as a Smart Filter on a Smart Object in Photoshop, any modification to another filter in the same Smart Filter stack causes Topaz Photo to re-execute.
This is normal.

But on re-execution, Autopilot re-runs in Autopilot mode and:

  1. ask me for confirmation or display an error message saying nothing is in the queue
  2. stays in autopilot mode and ignores whatever choices I made

It means that if I chose to sharpen the entire image at 40%, it may decide to sharpen only the subject at 80%. And I have even now way of knowing what my settings were.

This makes Photo AI effectively unusable as a non-destructive Smart Filter: your previous filters such as Sharpen AI, Denoise AI did not have this problem.
Thanks for looking into it.

Expected behavior: reopening the Smart Filter should recall the exact settings I previously saved (as it used to in earlier versions), and recomputation triggered by other stack changes should re-apply those saved settings, not run Autopilot from scratch.

Disabling ‘Automatically apply filters’ in Preferences > Autopilot does not fully solve this in the Smart Filter round-trip scenario.

Environment:

  • Topaz Photo AI: last version
  • Photoshop: 2025 but problem has nothing to do with it
  • macOS: 26.4.1
2

Smart Filters workflow are not supported and can lead to unexpected behavior. I’ve moved this to the Ideas section so others can vote if this is part of their workflow.

image

If efficiency is important, the Photoshop plugin will not be the best option, as it can only process one file at a time (Adobe limitation). A much more efficient workflow would be to use Topaz Photo as a standalone app, which allows:

  • Access to RAW Denoise (better results for RAW files)

  • Batch processing (much faster workflow)

This approach will give both better results and improved efficiency, and would also be a supported workflow.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your quick answer.
Smart filters go back to 2007, nearly 20 years ago. How can they be unsupported in 2026?

Writing the state of the filter once applied is basic and I’m sure Claude Code can implement this in less than a few ours.

So no, I do not want to use the standalone app, I do not want to change a workflow I’ve used for more than a decade using the industry most common tool, i.e. Photoshop.

You are doing such a good job with your plugins. And Photo is a big step. So why spoil it?