No I have not used Photo AI at all ,that is because I have a brain, I don't have to use or buy Photo AI to know how it works. I only have to watch a video of someone who uses it. And at 5:12 minutes, it shows you can refine the mask with a slider but you cannot adjust the mask by painting it in. So in his review and example, you will never be able to get this image right with Photo AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq4Gcm-Bo0Q

In Topaz Noise and Sharpening tools, you have the ability to paint over mistakes the software makes which makes these software product superior Photo AI.

I think Photo AI is not a good deal and is not a good product.


Right now Both Noise and Sharpen are $79 bucks each. Gigapixel is $99 That is $260... Photo AI is $200 bucks, you are getting gigapixel thrown in (which I personally don't use much).

So you are paying $60 more to get gigapixel thrown in but you are losing one of the most important features, the ability to fix the mask when Photo AI gets it wrong. I would never buy this software because of this limitation. (over individual Noise/sharpen products) I would not buy Gigapixel and $99 just to get this crippled software for "free".

I like topaz and as I said before I have all their products since the beginning.

Topaz has been sitting back on their laurels because their software is the best. But now On1 includes this in their Raw editor for $79 dollars with coupon code 99 normally. And they are doing a good job (not quite as good as their individual products but better than Photo AI.

I think Topaz needs to start thinking about the future and bring back Studio 2 with upgrades and AI with their current software to compete. If they don't I think they are gonna die. IMHO

Customers paid $800 to $1000 dollars for that program which is expensive even with inflation now. The software works, Adobe just decided they won't let you use software you paid for.

Now they adopt the attitude, "You will own nothing and be happy about it." It is not about the price it is about how a big corp thinks they can do whatever they want and you will do what they say and be happy.

Sorry, I don't support companies like that. And if that does not piss you off, then we are lost as a country and are willing to take anything the elite and government give us.

So I know this going to sound arrogant but I disagree with the memory links. They are not real world. I say get more memory if you can on a PC, for photograhers 24 to 32gb of ram.

If you look at my image below, You see I have 3 programs running. Firefox with multiple tabs open. One1 and Luminar Neo, this is not unusual because if you use Neo as a plug in to On1, they are running at the same time.

I have 16gb of ram which I say is minimal (if you don't want slow downs or having to wait for your photo editor to update the screen) for a Photographer that uses a program and another program as a plugin, say Topaz Denoise.

Looking at my system. Top right. I have 8gb of video ram. But it states 16gb because it uses 8 gig of virtual ram which is the 8gb of system ram (my total memory for my laptop)

On Task manager, I have 13.4 gb of ram in use and 2.4 gb available.
But if you look at committed, I am using 21gb of the 33gb of virtual ram. Virtual means page file. If you look at the disk activity on the resource monitor there is a lot of activity because the OS is taking memory from ram and sending it to the hard drive which is the page file also named swap file. This is where you see slow downs. This happens a lot more when your system is approaching the limit of physical ram. You start paging ram to the disk, you are going to have to wait.

So if you want instantaneous response on your application such as a photo editor and fast screen update when you run a filter like Gaussian blur. I recommend 24gb of ram or 32.

I recommend 32 or 16 because Dual data rate ram (DDR) requires same size sticks of ram to get performance boost of both ram sticks reading and writing at the same time.

If you have 16gb of ram, you may run into slow downs when editing photos if your computer is writing ram information to the hard drives swap file.

32gb will have less activity using the swap file. Another think you can do is close all your browsers and any other programs when editing so you use the swap file less and things speed up. As you can see, firefox is taking up a lot of ram in the resource monitor. I have not upgraded to 32gb of ram because I am cheap and the slowdowns have not become a nuance but I am almost there. Luminar Neo when run as a plug in is starting to get pretty slow because my ram is used up.

(Download)

I am not wrong . If you have a manual focus camera/lens you get a lot less keepers if shooting moving object using wide open aperture. If you buy more expensive gear that does AF, your keeper rate goes up. If you get a mirrorless like the A1 R5 Z9 your keeper rate goes up and you have more better pictures.

If you deny this you lie to yourself. It is true that better gear will not make you a better photographer, but it can produce better results just like in the case I just mentioned above.

New technology is coming out that will us AI to analyze and make better white balance decisions in automatic mode. If you buy that new tech you will have less white balance issues in say a concert where the lights change from second to second.

This is a good lessen in photography. Full moon is front lighting, You use front lighting on faces of old people to hide wrinkles. Crescent moon is side lighting, lots of texture and contrast. Remember this when you use side lighting or front lighting with flash or natural light and position your subject or lighting accordingly.

Well it is crippled compared to the individual products. I mean it works great for some people but it is all auto pilot. You cannot go in and fix the automatic masking which you can do on the individual products and denoise has different algorithms in 4 different panes so you can compare to see which one is best or which setting are best visually same with sharpen those features make Topaz better than the competitors, Including Topaz photo AI.

I never seen jumpiness. What I did see in early DVD was mpg compression in the shadows looked like big blocks. It seemed they overcompressed in those days.It eventually got better. I then bought an HD DVD player for my xbox. It turned out to be the betamax of digital disk format.

Yep, I am the bad guy

Anything to continue to marginalize people, or should I say fellow photographers.

Did grumpybear ever get back to us on what he decided to choose. I would never have need for this. I have to put the number plate numbers on my files, so I have to touch each file. Yuck, none of this stuff works in batch mode for me.

But it would be good to know if any of the freeware stuff worked.

Oh I remember. I remember the price for record label CDs? I only owned about 20. Then came napster, you remember napster? I built a huge library of music from it. I had a video laser disk before dvd, do you remember those.?

Good to know.

From what I can see, Dell does not produce an AMD laptop, for this reason alone I would never buy one. To many other options. Lenovo, Asus, HP, Acer, Microsoft.

I have several. They are great laptops. I only get the higher end ones though. I heard the $250 black friday special are not as realiable. I know some people who hate HP laptops. But I have been lucky and have not had an issue. I am on one right now. a 17.3" 3 drives, 2nvme, 1 ssd. I7-9750H RTX2070 5tb drive space. Color accurate 144hz display, 2019 I think.

Sorry, I thought D5 was the last model they made, but you are correct. The D6 is the last.

They had a list of fixes. They actually fixed an issue I reported to them about the search. It was a minor issue but it is in the list. I have to say that is pretty quick work. It makes me like On1 all the more.