Topaz Photo AI v1.3.2

[william.peters-3790]

Hey Leo, I don’t do photography stuff for a living, just an occasional hobby. I do work in IT though. I’ve got to say I’ve been very very impressed with their consistent update schedule. I’ve run into a couple bugs/issues that I’ve notice that have been fixed in short order. I can’t say I read the forums so there may be significant issues I am unaware of.

Anyway, in my opinion new technology and software development in this day and age basically insists on streaming your development to your customers as soon as reasonably possible. Could you imagine a 6 month release schedule on this? The AI tech they are using could completely change before then.

Hope your issues get fixed!

[westcom]

Everything should look good, and unfortunately Topaz is not doing the job at the moment. I need to upload bad photo to CutOut, download enhanced photo from CutOut from there and enlarge in Topaz - with enlarging - it’s not bad, but it’s not good either

1 - You posted your pictures without Photo AI screenshot, and that’s put your comparison immediately in a question .

2 - You posted a girl picture, to get more attention, or maybe you just talking about personal photos.

3 - In that way, you show to people, on this forum, its ok to send personal photos, to some unknown company’s website, where that company can freely use them to train their AI, and might sell them to other companies around the world, without your knowledge, and who knows where your personal photos ended up. You probably know that, ones you uploaded your photos, they are not completely yours anymore.

4 - Some time ego, on this forum, was heated discussion, when Topaz team implemented an Option in Settings, to share photos, with turn ON or OFF switch, and honestly asked users, who is willing to participate in sharing some images, to use that option to help Topaz team to train their AI, and speed up PAI development process.

5 - Topaz is well Respected company on the market, with proven record in developing good quality product, removed it on the next weekly’s updates. This is only best of the best companies can do. So fast reacted on some customers disapproval.

6 - Now, lets talk Business. You and I received gifts, $200 USD each, and been asked to spend them wisely on any Photo software of our choice.

7 - You chose website processing, and my choice is Topaz PAI.

8 - Website 1st option: Subscription Plan (their Best Value) - $69.00 USD a month for 1,200 images.
At the end of March, your cost is $69.00 USD x 3 = $207.00 USD, and if you need to process more images, you have to stay on subscription, and your extra cost will be $69.00 USD, $69.00 USD, $69.00 USD …… every single month.

9 - At the end of the March, I finished paying my 3 monthly instalments, and my Total cost is $199.00 USD, and after that, if I want to process more images, my extra cost will be FREE USD, FREE USD, FREE USD……every single month.

10 - Take a guess. Who wisely spent gift money?

11 - Website has other option called “Pay as you go”, and it’s better if you don’l like to be controlled how many images you can develop in a month.

12 - Lets say you have 100.000 images, and many pro photographers have them as much, in their photo libraries.

To process 10,000 images, they charge $1,399.00 USD

To process 100.000 images, your cost will be $1,399.00 USD x 10 = $13,990.00 USD

CutOut.Pro price: $13,990.00 USD vs. Topaz Labs price: $199.00 USD plus updates, if I needed.

No comments.

13 - Most of my Photo library contains photos with people, and I use mostly Gigapixel part of PAI, Recover Faces & Enhance Resolution with Upscale Module, and Program produced most satisfying result of any available photo-editing software on the World’s market today, period.

14 - “Processed by PAI” image, you posted on the forum is 137 kb. Are you playing jokes with people on this forum. What is the Real reason you had, for making your post?

[mtruman42]

I’m also experiencing the crop function not working in 1.3.2. It worked fine for me in the previous version. Running MacOS Ventura 13.2.1 and Lightroom Classic 12.3 (latest release). I open the image in PAI from LrC (Photo->Edit WIth->Topaz Photo AI), select the crop tool, draw the crop box and press Accept. Crop is not maintained. Press Edit Crop and crop box is still shown. Original uncropped image is returned to LR.

I know that cropping was/is in Beta, so I understand if there are bugs. Would just like to know if it’s supposed to work now.

[yngve.sunnanbo]

If I crop a RAW file (.CR3) in Lightroom and then export it together with a .XMP file , PAI will faulty use the full photo and not the croped version.

Another issue is if I crop in PAI, then the autopilot setting “Enhance Small Images” will not work . If I set the Upscale Factor manually it works.

[leonardo.lacchini]

I purchased PhotoAI on September 16th. I was already using Denoise and Gygapixel at work and for home I thought PhotoAI might be a good product. Version 1.0 was completely unusable, not only was it buggy but the output was different than expected. It’s true that a new version is released every week but after more than 20 releases there are also artifacts, color shifting problems, export problems. Just read the posts of this community that comments on new releases every week. Fixed bugs that come back in later versions, algorithm changes from one version to another and back again. Meanwhile Denoise and Gygapixel work great, when I use them I know exactly what the output image will look like. To date, 7 months have passed since my purchase and you are still experimenting on the algorithms to apply, the software is not stable and you add new features instead of producing a definitive 1.0 version. The software still looks like a beta. Support will expire on September 16th and what should I pay for? The least that Topaz should do is to postpone the end of support by at least 6 months for those who bought it as soon as it came out.

[louis.matty]

after updating the Topaz Photo AI, the crop function is not working. I crop the photo and apply, but when saved, the crop is not applied.
Also, I refine subject and after making some adjustments, the refinement is reverted back to original.

[westcom]

In the future I imagine upscaling technology will be a lot better than it is today, and you’d want to keep your originals rather than the “archaic” upscaling algorithms from 2023.

I completely agree with you steven.walace., and truly appreciate your advice, but with some reservations.

This block of text I wrote, in my Sept. 22 post, last year on this forum.

I believe soon will come time, when any person, can drop thousands of pictures, old and new, inside a Program, that can automatically apply Individual settings, to every picture in a batch, and produce result to the level, that only best in the world Photo Editors can achieve, in a time of my coffee break. Until then…let’s go together Photo AI.

I have four reasons to process my photos as soon as I can.

First reason - I wanted to fulfill my long standing promise to my family, to finish developing our family photos, for displaying on 4K TV, and select best of the best photos for print on my Canon Pro-300 printer, as tangible back up. This is one of the reasons, I am in a long process of developing my pictures right now.

Second reason - I have 37,000 family photos, and even if I reject probably around 2,000 photos, it’s still lot of photos to process.

Third reason - As we all know, family photos is a treasure, and I am trying to save every single
photo, using the best photo editing programs, my knowledge, skills and some talent, and that required tremendous amount of time and efforts, to achieve desirable, very pleasing to human eye result.

Forth Reason - When I use my new favourite Focal’s Bathys wireless headphones, while Deep Purple playing my favourite song “Child in Time”, through the great voice of Ian Gillan, sometimes I hear ticking time sound, louder and louder, and louder, reminding me when I first time hear that song. Yes, it was very long time ego.

[bdekker (Bas Dekker)]

I very much agree. If a respected company fails to bring a good product to market within a reasonable time, they should stop. My advice is therefore: stop photo ai, back to denoise, sharpen and gigapixel.

[anton.steehouwer]

When cropping heavely PhotoAI crashes time and time again when uploading to Lightroom Classic

[AiDon]

You are saying as a plugin, which application are you using to call and the crop doesn’t work? Then also, what format are you passing when you call Photo AI?

[AiDon]

What option are you using to call Photo AI? Edit in or the plugin?

[Harald.De.Luca]

Well, like all the others. That is Lightroom classic last version.

[AiDon]

I gather plug-in, is that right? What happens if you use Edit in and send a TIFF?

[Harald.De.Luca]

Well, I always go through it because in the edit/extra section, I always have weird things because I use very often DNG files from my Galaxy S7.

[shalabh.saxena]

Hello.

I don’t know if this is a specific condition with my system but all the Topaz Apps are fine when being downloaded except Photo AI. I have a 5G connection with more than 100 MBps speed but when there is an update for Photo AI the download speed is roughly around 20KB/s, which, I’m sure you would agree, is obnoxious.

Since the Photo AI updates are frequent, It’s a real pain to try to download with such speed as mentioned above. Am I missing something?

[kari.ingman]

PC, calling plugin, Lightroom
With plugin it creates the crop area, but when I press the Apply button the crop disappears!

If I open Photo AI and retrieve the image then crop works!

[AiDon]

Are you using a VPN?

[westcom]

Thank you iMacmatician to confirm that for me. I came to the same conclusion, when last year, one of the program I am using, received Upscale AI add-on, with the same multiplication factors 2, 4, 6.

Maybe even numbers produce the best result, but it’s just mathematical algorithms, and not suppose to be so limited. Another Program, I am using for many years, using “analog” non AI method, can upscale / downscale for any size you like, but without Enhanced quality that Topaz offered.

After our requests, Topaz team was kind enough, to include other than standard upscale sizes, and I asked them, if possible, to include that option in Settings.

I include screenshot in my post, and just in case if you now, which resizing method , in your opinion, produce the best result.

[iMacmatician]

Topaz has separate model files for each scale factor, for example in my models folder I have files named gmp-v1-fp16-192x192-2x-mlc.tz and gmp-v1-fp16-192x192-4x-mlc.tz, for example.

I don’t know the details of the model creation and training process, but perhaps each model is limited to a single scale factor? (IIRC Stable Diffusion, at least the last time I checked, was designed for 512 × 512 output.) If so, then presumably Topaz could create 3x (for example) models but it’s not worth the extra effort when 2x and 4x are sufficient in most cases.

Unfortunately I don’t know anything about the different resizing methods. Sometimes I take images that were obviously (or not-so-obviously) upscaled and downscale them back to their original sizes, or at least my best estimate of their original sizes. In those cases, bilinear seemed to work well (I use Affinity Photo, so the only options are Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Bicubic, Lanczos 3 separable, and Lanczos 3 non-separable).

[JesusSheep]