Topaz Photo AI v3.1.0

[dakota.wixom]

Hello!

We are excited to announce a major update with Photo AI v3.1.0 releasing today!

This one is juicy – we’ll cover the details below, but if you want to just grab the latest version then I won’t stop you.

You can download this version of Photo AI using the links below:

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v3.1.0
Released July 11th, 2024
Mac: Download
Windows: Download

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Now let’s get into the details. This release of Photo AI includes:

• New Autopilot Suggestions. You can now take full control of Autopilot by opting in to provided suggestions. Autopilot will also now continue to suggest new enhancements to your image.

• Smart Preview Rendering. Ever noticed Photo AI rendering when it didn’t need to, such as when zooming in or when adjusting a slider? No more of that! By intelligently rendering the preview only when required, this version of Photo AI feels snappier than ever before.

• Huge Preview & Masking Optimizations. Optimizations under the hood make rendering, masking, and selection all much faster. You can now mask to your heart’s delight with performance that keeps up with your cursor. It’s so good that you’re going to want to try the Superpixel brush again.

• Major Preserve Text quality improvements. You’re now going to get better text recovery results than before when upscaling – now even rivaling Gigapixel’s Text & Shapes model.

• Major Face Recovery quality improvements. Dramatically improved results for face recovery when combined with other filters such as Adjust Lighting or Balance Color.

We put together a quick video overview as well to help you get the most out of these new features:

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Want to dig in deeper? Here’s a full breakdown of what to look for in this latest release:

Introducing Autopilot suggestions

Autopilot will now suggest commonly used enhancements after analyzing your image, making it faster to access all the AI tools. Our vision is that in future versions of Photo AI, using suggestions will teach the Autopilot how you like to edit your photos.

Our suggestions will improve over time in future releases. For now - we’d love to hear your suggestions on how to further improve Autopilot. We have pre-loaded Autopilot Suggestions with a combination of enhancements and selections based on the most common edits used to export images in Photo AI.

Need to apply Autopilot to a large batch of images by before? No problem. We added this button to support batch processing when multiple images are selected in the filmstrip. It pairs well with the new Autopilot behavior to ensure batch processing is still easy and fast when needed.

Please note that as a part of this change, Autopilot will no longer auto-apply to your loaded images without your permission. Clicking “Apply Suggestions” will still apply the same filters as the previous version of Autopilot - but if you want it to still be auto-magic, then you can enable this by changing your preferences here:

Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Smart Preview Rendering

We are always looking for ways to make the application feel smarter and faster.

The Preview window is the primary screen where you see the rendered image (both before and after) in Photo AI. Particularly frustrating is the switch between the original and processed preview when panning or zooming. If the area is already processed, then no reprocessing should be needed, right?

With Smart Preview Rendering, the preview window is now updated to check if a pan or zoom is viewing an area that is already processed. If it’s processed, then the preview will update without reprocessing so you do not see the original image. If it’s not processed yet, then processing starts.

This means more time editing your beautiful images, and less time waiting.

Check out the difference here:

Before (zooming in twice, renders each time, flashes the original image)

After - beautiful, endless scrolling without interruptions

Wondering how to show the original image now? Well, aside from the view mode options, you can still toggle the original with this button here:

Extra pro tip – use the SPACEBAR hotkey to show the original at any time!

Preview & Masking Optimizations

We have overhauled the way that we render masking and selection in the preview window of Photo AI, and we are incredibly excited about the improvement this makes to the overall experience of the app.

You will now see a dramatically increased the usability and smoothness of brushing on images of all sizes. All enhancements that use selection benefit massively from this change.

Each of the brush modes (Basic, Superpixel, and Object Selection) should feel more enjoyable to use for fine tuning your selections. The Basic and Superpixel brush are most improved with these changes, and we have comparisons below.

Even when not performing masking or selection, you’re still going to notice the application is much faster than ever before.

Take a look at the difference:

Basic brush Before (left) & After (right)

And if you haven’t tried Superpixel before – you’re going to want to try it now!

Superpixel brush Before (left) & After (right)

Preserve Text Quality Improvements

You should now see dramatically improved results in this version of Photo AI when using the Preserve Text filter to recover text from images, especially for upscales.

The output quality should now be as good or better than prior versions of Photo AI, and it should even rival the results that you get from Gigapixel’s Text & Shapes model when upscaling.

See below for an example of the improved results:

3.0.4 (top) vs 3.1.0 (bottom) when preserve text is used with upscale

Face Recovery Quality Improvements

Just like with Preserve Text, we are also excited to share a major quality improvement to outputs with the Face Recovery filter applied, especially for images with other effects such as Adjust Lighting or Balance Color also applied.

You’re going to get far more consistent results, and we’re going to make Face Recovery even better in the future, so please stay tuned!

See below for an example of the improved results:

3.0.4 (top) vs 3.1.0 (bottom) output for face recovery + lighting/color

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More to Come

With your help, Photo AI is getting better every single day behind the scenes. If you’re reading this and you’re not already in our Beta group, you should be! If you have an active Photo AI license, you are welcome to apply for Beta access here.

There’s so much more more coming to Photo AI, and we can’t wait to share with you everything else that we have been working on - including a smarter Autopilot, new AI models, and so much more.

If you can’t tell, we strongly believe in making Photo AI faster and smarter than ever before. This is just the beginning, and we won’t stop here.

We’ve also fixed a number of important issues with this release of Photo AI, as well as the previous patch releases. You can check out the full changelog below.

Cheers,

Dakota Wixom
Product Manager
Topaz Labs

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Changelog

• Added continuously updating enhancement suggestions to bottom of right panel
• Face Recovery filter only uses a single tab
• Rewrite of how the image and mask are rendered, for significantly improved performance
• Various minor color and other UI tweaks
• Added “Apply Autopilot” button to filmstrip when multiple images are open
• Swapped position of select all and add image buttons in filmstrip
• “Enable Remove” button on Mac now only shows up once per app version rather than once per session
• Zooming in no longer briefly flashes the original image, as well as panning within the most recently processed area
• Improved the quality of several models, like the Text Recovery filter
• Fixed app sometimes opening too high up on Windows such that the toolbar is inaccessible
• Added preview capture button to side by side view
• Autopilot no longer auto applies filters by default (you can re-enable this behavior in preferences)
• Automatic Lensfun Update

Known Issues

Our team is taking a look at fixing these items below in a future patch release:

• Feathering causes slight misalignment in the brush
• Preview processing after the selection is changed causes brush outline to not appear
• If face detection is off in preferences, adding face recovery through suggestions does not work

[prostokrsvchk]

I used to think that my pc was not powerful enough and the brush was not working well) actually the update is very good, of course, I will have to test how the application works, but the volume is impressive. if everything works perfectly, it is exactly what most users would like to see - not such a frequent update, but how high quality it is.
thank you, Topaz team!

[Bob_Blaylock]

  Right away, I see a pretty big issue with the user interface.

  Basically, everything that Photo AI 3.1.0 is putting on my screen, it appears to be putting about 22 pixels too low.

The title bar is showing for the application that is behind Photo AI, where the title bar for Photo AI itself should be.  The bottom of Photo AI’s window is hiding behind the menu bar.

  Mouse movements and clicks register 22 pixels higher higher on elements in Photo AI’s window, than where those elements are actually shown.  If I click where the Minimize, Normal/Maximize, and Close icons are shown on the title bar for the other application, they register on the corresponding icons for Photo AI.

  There appear to be other issues, as well; but I’ll figure them out later.  Most prominently, it seems that where previous versions were automatically applied certain defaults that I had set in the preferences, this version looks like it intends to make me take extra actions to apply those defaults.  They now show as suggestions in the lower corner, requiring me to click to apply them.

  I’m feeling a bit sour, right now, because Topaz made me pay $99 to renew my license in order to use this new version, and it appears that you’ve screwed it up.  When you’re at the point of an update being so major that people who were using previous updates now have to pay again to use the latest don’t you think you really ought to make sure it works, first?

[david.123]

Nice release overall. Just one minor niggle (for now): please talk to the Video AI GUI team, or the Gigapixel GUI team, and ask them to share the window-state code, so that when I maximize the window, then minimize and restore it, it returns to a maximized state, not this (with 2 or 3 pixels of space above it - not able to capture that in the snip):

Thanks!

[plugsnpixels]

Updated in place no problem (2020 M1 MacBook Pro, Sequoia latest beta).

The only little thing I’ve noticed so far is when the preview is ready, there is a black gap between the preview panes that disappears when the navigation is changed. External monitor attached via Belkin dock but not on.

Great improvement of an old blurry (shot-while-driving-to-Vegas) photo:

[b0008.de]

images now looks super blury, sharpnes is now hard to estimate, the image is not shown pixel by pixel anymore it just looks looks like a big mess, nearly unusable now.
other hand the performance is increddible now.

[penny.webb]

Did you fix the Capture One tiff not dng issues yet?

[davidfiedler]

Is there any way to insure that RAW Denoise is run on my RAW photos that I am specifically importing into Photo AI so they will get the benefit of RAW Denoise? Right now, apparently there’s a mysterious decision happening within Photo AI as to whether RAW Denoise will be applied, and if not, I cannot apply it manually no matter what.

[Fotomaker]

I love the last line in bullet 3 of your up top release Cliff Notes, Dakota! Andy Borowitz always ends with a kicker last line too. Let’s see if you convince me to get a Superpixel Brush tattoo…

[dakota.wixom]

Hey Bob - thanks for the notes. Don’t worry, you can still have Autopilot auto-apply your defaults. Take a look at the post above where we show the preferences switch. This should allow you to exactly that if you prefer.

I haven’t seen the 22 pixel issue before though, we will see if we can reproduce this and fix it on our end, thanks for sharing!

[dakota.wixom]

Haha thanks David - we’ll see if we can bring that change over to the single-frame world.

[dakota.wixom]

Thanks Prosto - we’re glad that you’re excited about this update because we sure are. Stay tuned for more - and I mean a lot more coming soon

[dakota.wixom]

Hey b0008 - you can still use the spacebar to show the original image, is that what you’re looking for?

This update shouldn’t have any impact on the sharpness of your image, except for positive ones with text and faces. Can you provide any more details here on the results you’re getting?

[dakota.wixom]

Hello Penny, sorry - unfortunately the C1 DNG export is not fixed with this update.

[dakota.wixom]

Thanks plugs! We’re aware of this issue, and are working to nail it down

Nice results on the breakfast upscale, delicious.

[dakota.wixom]

I’m honored for the comparison Fotomaker

Many thanks to you and to Plugs and David for your contributions in the Beta group.

What would a Superpixel tattoo look like, I wonder?

[b0008.de]

no i dont mean the comparsion, i already found out tath i now have to press space to view the old image i can life with that. i made a example:

the image is clearly blured and not shown pixel by pixel anymore.

[Fotomaker]

Clearly, the tat would have to freewheelingly ‘snake’ up my arm. Borowitz is great. Thx for the new release.

[bernd.klett]

That is really annoying and disappointing. We have been raising that issue now for quite some time. But there are other solutions on the market…

[lemans99]

Side by side preview doesnt work on 13th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i5-13500 , Win11