I decided to look into the new 'Photo AI' software, and I saw that I could get it for a pretty good price since I already own DeNoise and Sharpen. So I took the plunge and have been playing with it a little. The main advantage of Photo AI is that it's an "all in one" program, where you can start with noise removal and then add sharpening right away if you so desire. It is very quick at subject recognition, allowing you to limit the sharpening to the subject only. You can also quickly fix the subject mask if the AI guesses incorrectly. On images where I previously used DeNoise only, I can see some noticeable improvement with Photo AI where I did some sharpening as well. I could probably get the same results by running both DeNoise and Sharpen separately on the same image, but it's an awful lot faster to use Photo AI. The Photo AI program is also strongly tailored to portrait photographers, with face recognition and automatic enhancement algorithms. I haven't played with that yet, since I'm not much of a portrait shooter. The preview and final processing is definitely quicker with Photo AI than with Sharpen, and about the same speed as DeNoise. Photo AI also offers a resolution enhancement option (upscaling), which is perhaps a fast version of their Gigapixel program. I tried it on one image and it did seem to work fairly well. But can't say if it's any better than Gigapixel, which I haven't tried (although I did get it for free when I added Photo AI). I use Lightroom, and the Topaz programs plug in nicely to that. However, Photo AI does warn you that you will get better results if you send it raw files directly, instead of tifs from Lightroom. Probably the same is true for the other programs. But I do like the workflow through Lightroom, so I'll probably stick with that.
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