DxO has totally re-wrote the software. I only just started looking at Topaz Photo. It's ok, but I am not really liking the way it works in terms of one step followed by another all in one program. I would rather do for instance denoice, save that, then do sharpness. If I later decided to change the denoice, I should be able to re-process the original (copy) save it and apply the sharpness adjustments to the new denoiced image. I have NO idea if Topaz can or can not do that and I also have no idea if DXO can do it but since DXO has many apps it stands a better chance. I have not even an hour of experience with Topaz as I have just got back into Photography after being too ill to do much of anything. As a wildlife photographer I was expecting to get a lot of use out of gigapixel but I will also now look at Topaz Wonder. I don;t know PS and no longer have it available after Adobe screwed me over with the price hike and al the extra charges that my bank had to get involved in. Apparently they were fraudulent even though the payee was Adobe.
You can do as I do. Edit your single layer image as a "Smart Object in Photoshop". Call Topaz from within Photoshop. Each save and new call results in a new Photoshop layer. You can then save the Photoshop layers back to Lightroom which preserves the layers or flatten the image into a single layer and save.
I never figured out how to use PS and when Adobe jerked me around on the Photographers plan I dropped it. I only tried denoise a bit in the last week or so and did notice that LRc was doing a fairly good job.
Do you have the Topaz Studio Pro or regular. There is a huge price difference, all I pay is $136 for Photo and Gigapixel as a founding member.
I have the Personal Topaz Studio. Last November I paid $147 including tax.
Pretty much removed PureRaw the next day after Adobe Denoise AI came out. For my purposes I recently added a step. Just to add a little sprinkle to the cake I got ON1 NoNoise. Not for the NR but the Tack Sharp feature. It turned out both the NR and Tack Sharp are a nice compliment. I work the file in LrC as far as I can take which includes NR and Sharpening. If I think the file will benefit I send it to NoNoise which does not have to work that hard. One thing I like is it comes back as TIFF (like Topaz) and I still have a fully edited original RAW. After export I often delete the TIFF and colour code the RAW file so I know it went to a 3rd party.
I just got an email from Topaz and it had a demo of Wonder 3. I agree, I don't need Gigapixel either. My onlne research tells me DXO denoise might be better in some cases and Topaz in others
Wow, I just tried LrC Denoise on both a 6400 ISO and 12800 ISO. Now I feel confident that I can set my max auto ISO to 6400 and manual to 51,200. It does take a long time at the default settings, is this normal for a MacBook Pro M5?
It depends what you mean by "a long time" (and also how big the image files are in MegaPixels). My MBP M2 Max will denoise 45mp images in about 18 seconds (which will be reduced if an when Adobe/Apple get their act together with the Apple Neural Engine).
I just bought this MBP and due to some 5 figure unexpected expenses this MBP will need to be it for at least 2 years, probably 3. AT 84, this may be my last. The saving grace is it is actually fairly rare that I will encounter conditions that need ISO greater than 400, but now it is nice to know I can rescue images as high as 6400 and more.
I will time the next one I do, but that 18 secs feels right.
That is impressive and looks to be all I need. I see you are a fellow Canadian, I am between Sudbury and the Soo, what area are you in?
Want to trade premiers?
I had to try.Nope
