The latest version of Topaz Photo AI, 1.3.8, is currently on sale at a $40 discount through this coming Friday, June 16. I’ve long relied on Topaz apps for bringing my nearly 50 years of film-based and early digital photos up to modern standards of usability – removing noise and grain, recovering detail while enlarging, and sharpening.
Let’s take a quick look at some practical uses for Topaz’s flagship product, Photo AI.
As an amateur genealogist researching history for my family, I often come across images from over a century ago, whether online in lo-res form or tiny prints scanned from old photo albums. Either way, these images need some sort of restoration.
This particular example is of a bank manager with whom one of my ancestral relatives had some business dealings in 1906. I found a small scan of the original 4×5 negative of this man online, and of course it was hard to see any details. No problem, Photo AI was able to enlarge a crop of the image to 4X while restoring details of the man’s face as if it were taken just today – especially when adding colorization in Photoshop!
Even modern photos found online are most likely to be in lo-res format to allow for quick downloading. I have my own photo of a hawk on the main page of the Plugs ‘n Pixels website, reduced in size from the original. Photo AI was able to work its restoration magic, again at 4X:
Another situation where upscaling and restoration is needed is with images created with the new “stable diffusion” AI technology, which usually limits the results to a max of about 869px per side. I recently experimented with this using the free DiffusionBee app for Mac, creating some scenics using text-to-image prompts. Photo AI once again performed 4X enlargement while adding back smoothness and detail missing in the original:
Think about how your own photos and digital renderings can be enhanced with Topaz AI technology! Move fast to grab this current special before it ends on Friday.