Topaz Photo AI – First Look

Topaz Labs is well regarded for its leading-edge artificial intelligence photo editing software. Their latest offering, Topaz Photo AI, combines the features of three Topaz products, for noise reduction, image sharpening, and resolution enhancement, in one package. The slogan “Simplest Photo Editor Ever” tries to describe the highly automated image analysis and enhancements that this editor offers.

Of course, I had to take a closer look. The download and installation were as uneventful as one expects.

Unfortunately, the disappointments came early. I tried to use Topaz Photo AI as I do my other tools – dragging an image to it for processing.

See the little circle with a slash through it in the illustration? Well, TzP, allow me to call it that, does not play like other programs. Dragging a file to it does nothing.

So I opened TzP by double clicking the icon. That worked, of course. I tried to size the window down so I could drag from one open app to the other. It would not resize down. Topaz seems to have set the minimum window size high enough so it won’t work for me. What’s more, it kept my hidden taskbar inaccessible via moving the pointer to the bottom of the screen. Gosh, don’t they have any professionals at Topaz Labs?

The taskbar pops up when the Windows key is pressed along with the start window, so this is just a small annoyance. Clicking the Photo Gallery icon on the taskbar brought it up so I could drag a photo to TzP. It opened fine that way.

Of course, the first thing I like to do is show what an app looks like on the screen. I pressed the key combo to capture the open window and pasted it into Paint. Oops, another bug. What I got was this:

The blank screen says that it is “Loading image” although it had done so just fine already. That screen capture problem occurred over and over again. Gosh, don’t they have any professionals at Topaz Labs?

The advertising says:

“Desktop standalone” – “Plug-in or external editor” – Well, let’s try calling it from PaintShop Pro.

Topaz Photo AI showed up in the drop-down menu just fine, see the yellow pointer in the illustration. Please don’t ask why I have those old Topaz products there – that may be a topic on another day. Oh, no problem with doing a screen capture of PSP.

TzP opened just fine that way. Allowed the photo to be edited and returned the resulting image to PSP just fine. Gosh, is there a nook at Topaz Labs where all the professionals are hiding?

Topaz Photo AI takes a look at an image, decides what the image needs done, and applies the adjustments. These include reducing any noise – and it does a fine job, sharpening the image – more on this later, and looking for faces to enhance. TzP loves faces. It spends all kinds of time looking for them, then enhancing them.

Bringing up the options for “Sharpen” immediately makes it clear that this is not the full feature set of Topaz Sharpen AI.

It provides just two options, “Lens Blur” and “Motion Blur”, and a single “Strength” slider.

I will jump ahead and show you three cropped images of the girl in the photo above. The initial version as edited in PSP, that version edited with TzP, and that same initial version enhanced with Topaz Sharpen AI. This is a difficult image for sure. Plenty of motion blur. The girl moved quite a bit during the 1/40 second of this photo.

The initial image is quite unusable. The middle image above shows what Topaz Photo AI did with it. The motion blur is not really eliminated, but the eyes, nose and mouth look realistic. The third of the images above shows what Topaz Sharpen AI did with this photo. It aggressively reduced the motion blur. See the edges of the face. The eye on the left shows some unpleasant artifacts. That is also the case for the hair and to a lesser extend the nose and mouth.

Looking at the three images makes it clear that the TzP used “foreign” eyes in its result.

My first impression is that Topaz Photo AI is a project in progress. It does not replace the separate tools Topaz Labs offers but shows an interesting direction and some good ideas. It does not seem to be intended as a full post-processing editor. The lack of the elsewhere standard tools for adjusting exposure and other parameters puts in into the specialty category.

I will keep my other tools for now.

.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck