With Topaz' 25% seasonal discount and $25 "Holiday Cash" in my Topaz account, today I upgraded to Photo AI v2.14 for the princely sum of just $49.
I've been playing around with it this afternoon - mainly to test the noise reduction capabilities - and have to say I'm not wholly impressed. There are issues. The most obvious one (to me, at least) is a colour management "disconnect" that mostly affects image previews, but also has a knock-on effect when working with and exporting from DNG files.
Raw files, when loaded directly into Photo AI 2, don't display with the same colours as in Lightroom 6. Neither do TIFF files, unless I change the default "Preferences - General - Enable sRGB Preview Fallback" option to "Enabled", such that the application displays the image in sRGB colourspace if it can't convert to the computer's display profile. Worse still, raw files exported from Topaz Photo AI will use the "Adobe Standard" profile, with no option to switch back to the camera's "Embedded" profile. Furthermore, raw files exported from Photo AI as TIFF, when loaded into LR6, are just ruined in terms of colour accuracy... so bad, I can't even figure out what profile it could possibly have used :o
Since a colour-managed and colour-accurate workflow is important (occasionally vital) to me, this alone is a deal-breaker - but in my short day of testing I've come across some other issues too....
- By default, "Preferences - Export - Use Adobe DNG SDK for export" is enabled, but in this configuration - on my setup, at least - Photo AI export to ".dng" fails with an error message. I have to disable that option to get dng export to work. The thing is, the point of that option is to ensure dng files are properly compliant with Adobe products, so by disabling it there are potential quality issues.
- My PC is a pretty standard gaming laptop of 2 - 3 years old, with an Nvidia RTX-2060 GPU. In normal configuration, it's a hybrid setup where applications can use either the integrated Intel or dedicated Nvidia card as required or configured (this is how most laptops with dedicated GPUs work). I've noticed in Photo AI that at times, at certain (low-level) noise reduction settings and on certain files, I'll see a tiling effect where square sections of the image have a different level (zero?) of noise reduction compared to the rest. If I reconfigure the PC to use only the dedicated Nvidia GPU (which requires a reboot), this doesn't appear to happen. I'm not sure if this is just in preview or whether it extends to the exported images as I haven't yet tried that, but even if it's just previews, it's a problem, as it prevents proper review of noise reduction effects before export.
- With very noisy high ISO files, it just doesn't do a great job with colour noise reduction, and I find it's better to remove the colour noise in LR6 first, then export to Photo AI as a TIFF... but of course, that prevents the raw NR algorithm in Photo AI from being available. The remaining models are OK, but nothing special IMHO, and at anything other than the lowest strengths, they really give a soapy-smooth effect to images. At lower settings, where a tiny amount of digital grain becomes visible again and images start to look more realistic, the difference between Photo AI and LR6 isn't all that great... LR6 is good enough.
I've run into numerous other problems, but none that I've yet been able to "nail down" to particular reasons. Looking in the Topaz community forum, I see the colour management issues have been discussed numerous times, and I see reports of other problems that hint at similarities to those I've found. I don't really have the appetite to get involved in that community in order to get the software working, but it seems to me that's how Topaz is driving down the bug list :o
Lest I sound completely negative, Photo AI does seem to do a reasonably good job of noise reduction with medium-noise-level files... but frankly, so do other non-AI raw conversion tools if you know how to use them effectively.
I haven't yet tested the sharpening and upscaling capabilities, but I'm not sure I want to put any more time into this... From less than one day of testing, there are too many issues to ignore, and I suspect there's more lurking. For all its imperfections (they are many) and often-unpredictable results, the standalone DeNoise AI app is more versatile (in my view) and suffers from fewer bugs / quirks. I'll be sticking with that (and standalone Sharpen and Gigapixel AI), and exercising the no-quibble 30-day refund option for Photo AI. Even then, I'll continue to use non-AI tools for 99% of my post-processing...
[YMMV - it's possible you may love what Photo AI 2 can do... the above are just my personal findings and opinions based on a day's testing ;)]
