Topaz Labs pushed a minor patch update to their popular Topaz Photo AI photo editing software over the weekend, officially bringing the latest version number up to v3.5.2 from v3.5.1.
In a blog post, the Topaz Labs team explains how this update improves Super Focus in the Cloud and the Raw Denoise grid artifact that was occurring when users would attempt to edit such images on Apple Silicon-equipped Macs.
The full change log for Topa Photo AI version 3.5.2 can be found below:
- Add buy credit button to Super Focus when user has no credits
- Add image upload and download progress to cloud processing
- Handle focus boost locally before uploading image to cloud processing
- Significant improvement for Raw Denoise grid artifact on Apple Silicon devices
In terms of Super Focus in the Cloud, the team says they’ve focused (no pun intended) on trying to make this feature more user-friendly. Anyone who doesn’t have cloud credits available to them to use with this feature can now use the Buy Credits button within the Super Focus user interface so that photo editing can continue uninterrupted.
Super Focus in the Cloud, being a cloud-based editing feature, also requires that images be uploaded and re-downloaded for processing. This process is now more transparent in that upload and download progress indicators are provided for the end user, ensuring that they’re always aware of the state of their edits.
The Topaz Labs team has also reduced the file size of uploads to Super Focus in the Cloud by handling Focus Boost locally on the user’s machine before uploading. This means that uploads will happen faster than before.
The grid-like artifact issue that Topaz Labs mentioned above has impacted me while trying to photograph rocket launches against a dark background or sky, where noise is likely to be more prominent. Upon attempting to de-noise a RAW file, large green grid-like boxes have appeared in those images.
While this update doesn’t completely eliminate the artifacts, it does reduce their prominence by more than 50%, which is a massive gain in improvement. The screenshot above is after the fix, but before this, those boxes were a lot more visible and more distracting (almost to the point of ruining the image). With this fix, I feel I can still recover my image by using a healing brush in another editing program.
If you’re not already using Topaz Photo AI, then it is a piece of software that I would recommend for almost any photographer – professional or amateur. It allows you to use the power of artificial intelligence to recover sometimes unusable images by removing unwanted noise, fixing focus and camera shake, and enhancing resolution.
You can purchase a copy of Topaz Photo AI from the Topaz Labs website for $199, which sometimes goes on sale if you’re patient enough to wait for it. It’s available for both macOS and Windows.