Nice! This is something I’ve been looking forward to. Now if red-eye reduction can get added, that would be an awesome combo for quickly working through old scans of photos with flash.
1 Like
!
Happy to hear! The development team has seen the red eye Idea on the forum, make sure your vote is on it - and I can bring it up in my next meeting with them too.
Great! I don’t see a way to vote on it though…I added a comment though in support of the idea. Is that the same as voting? 
There is a Blue button at top that says “Vote”. Tap it to add your vote.
It will be interesting to see how this performs. I have quite a few slides that need to be scanned which have survived a house fire and have tiny particles of soot. These are not visible at typical screen resolutions but are distressing when zoomed in. Of course, I will also experiment with cleaning options as well, but the prospect of having something that could remove it if cleaning fails is very appealing. It will be months before I can get to it though (have just moved and still settling in).
Is anyone else seeing halos around objects upon export? I’m using the new 4.0 release and in previewing the images look great, but upon export (I’ve tried both TIFF and PNG) every single shot has a sort of halo around the object sharpened. What’s confusing is that the sharpening selection was only on the eagle, not on the space around it, so I don’t know where this effect is coming from.
2 Likes
While updating to Version 4.0, I received an error message that an error had occurred and that the update would roll back without any changes (or words to that effect). When I opened PAI, it shows that 4.0.0 is installed. However, the Dust & Scratch Module shows that it is a Beta. Is this normal or should I uninstall and reinstall?
Dust & Scratch is still Beta, so that title is correct.
The sharpening halos have always been a typical part of the Topaz products since the very beginning. Seems like they could have resolved that by now if they thought it was a problem to fix versus a feature to cherish.
1 Like
Thanks @andymagee-52287.
Now you’ve intrigued me to check! I didn’t think there were halos in the “classic” programs, like Adjust. I remember the mktg collateral even touting that as a virtue back then. I will revisit to find out. I was new to photography then & may not have been as discerning.
Dust & Scratch: Maybe it’s not for some of my (over 110 years old) pictures? I know, an extremely bad, blurry photo, and it’s not an easy task for AI. I would have liked it if it had removed some of the bright spots (at least most of them) – it did so on the bottom of the man’s coat, but most of them remained there. It improved the faces somewhat, there’s not much one can do about it overall (certainly not worth any special tools, extreme effort, and time). But still…
1 Like
I have exactly the same experience with birds gliding in the blue sky – a very bright outline that spoils the result in a very unnatural way. And I don’t know what to do about it.
M2 Mac Mini. Working on an example of the world’s cutest kid (me, early '60s!), TPAI crashed when I added this photo to a previous session with a different photo, and closed that other photo:
Here are the results of a new session in progress. You can see the adjustments I used to date at right. Dust & scratches were mostly removed and Face recovery looks good.
I am shown using the (mostly useless) Balance Color, which basically makes any photo yellow:
Without Adjust color. Adjust lighting is marginally useful:
Now let’s go back into Dust & scratches to finish the job manually:
Nope, nothing happened at all. (BTW, during this process the user wonders whether something is happening or if you have to press “Done” to begin the removal. It was the former, but with no indicator):
I pop into Photoshop and get the job done in seconds with the Healing brush, while also addressing color and exposure (caveat: I am not a portrait retoucher. I ended up with JD Vance eyes…):
Where is Levels in TPAI? Still not there… It alone would be more useful than the Color and Lighting adjustments, which seem very ineffective for some reason, despite the Exposure/Highlight/Shadow options.
Here is the other photo I was working on prior, a pic of my great-grandfather as a kid. Except for needing minor eye retouching, the results are quite good:
Another quick example, me as a teen in the mid-'70s with an Argus half-frame 35mm camera (which seemed to run a scratch right down the middle of each image… Here is TPAI doing its Auto-pilot routine and almost removing the scratch:
You’ll notice this image cries out for Levels work, but the best we have is Adjust lighting… It kind of gets you there but it’s a bit of work as well as waiting for processing of the existing Enhancements stack:
Starting fresh, here is the Levels report in PS where the cure is obvious and the results much better:
And the Healing brush effectively handled the scratch with a 2-click Shift method:
It’s such a strange experience, Topaz handles high-level face recovery, upscaling and denoising much better than PS, but stumbles over the common basics found in every imaging app in the world.
2 Likes
Win 11. Ps 2025. PAI 4.0.0 Ps Plugin.
Process:
-
Spent 15 mins. in Ps correcting color damage, straightening, content aware fill on sun spots.
-
Spent 15 secs. in Ps > Neural Filter > Photo Restore - to slide the Enhance Photo, Improve Face, Remove scratches slider. Ok’d back to Ps layer stack.
-
Purposely left some very faint scratches on image while in Ps Photo Restore filter.
-
Sent that Ps pre-processed image to PAI 4.0.0 Ps plugin.
-
PAI Steps: Ran Dust & Scratch filter in PAI - it took 4 minutes updating. It removed the final, negligible, tiny scratches I’d left from the Ps processing. I didn’t need to use the PAI remove tool.
-
Next in PAI, ran Sharpen (refocus), Restore Faces (head & neck on), Recover Text (it auto-selected the name of the cereal on the box) - amounted to an add’l 4-5 minutes.
-
Exported back to Ps layer stack.
-
Back in Ps, added a hint of Brightness and some soft Contrast - < 50 secs.
-
Total 30 mins. - Dust & Scratches (15 secs. in Ps - 4 mins. in PAI)
Labelled snips below - order tracks to steps above:
Is this from the nav preview in the screenshot?!
I just made a snip of the workspaces (Ps & PAI) with the processed image in it.
It’s not the actual image… normally I’d save to .tif when working on my stuff.
B/c just playing I think I just saved as .jpg.
I thought for a minute I posted the larger full frame but didn’t! Well done!
The cereal box text looks better from the preview source than from the original scan…
You’ve posted it previously but that wasn’t full frame & I snipped! 
I didn’t mfr it from the head (though I sure wish I had the skill to do so!!!). The idea of that makes me think of the movie Young Frankenstein and the doctor sneaking into the lab to retrieve a brain that was stored there to use in his monster. I had to use PAI Text Recover on the cereal box. I was honestly surprised it auto-selected (which it did) b/c the text is a funky font and partially obscured by hands.
