Topaz Photo

Topaz Photo (formerly marketed as "Topaz Photo AI") is desktop software for fixing and enlarging photos: removing noise, sharpening detail, recovering faces, and upscaling images. It's made by Topaz Labs, a company that has been building AI-powered photo and video enhancement software for more than twenty years, headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

In September 2026, Adobe completed its acquisition of Topaz Labs. Adobe has said Topaz will continue to exist as a standalone brand, and that Topaz's apps — including Topaz Photo — will keep being sold as standalone products, with the same support customers get now. Topaz Labs' CEO, Eric Yang, is staying on to lead the team. What's not yet clear is whether pricing or licensing will change over the longer term now that Adobe owns the company — this review reflects what's publicly confirmed as of the acquisition closing.

Topaz Photo is built for a narrower job than an all-purpose editor like Fotor or Canva: fixing and enlarging photos you already have, not building social posts or marketing graphics from templates.

Two examples of how these tools get used together, rather than one at a time in isolation:

Topaz uses AI to rebuild detail that's missing or damaged. Its models look at the image and estimate what that detail probably looked like. That's why it can improve blurry or low-resolution photos — but it also means the result isn't always a perfect copy of the original. There's no prompt and nothing being generated from scratch; it's restoration, working from a real photo, not creation.

Topaz Labs sells these as two separate products, and it's a common point of confusion.

Topaz Photo is the broader enhancement tool: noise removal, sharpening, color correction, face recovery, and general photo fixing, with upscaling included. Topaz Gigapixel is the specialist for upscaling specifically — it uses additional, dedicated upscaling models not included in Photo, aimed at bigger enlargements and specialized source material (low-resolution images, AI-generated art, CG textures, archived photos).

In practice: if your main need is general photo fixing with some upscaling along the way, Topaz Photo covers it. If your main need is specialized upscaling, Gigapixel gives you more dedicated models and controls. Topaz Labs' own guidance is that the two work well together, which is part of why they're bundled in the Topaz Studio plan.

Topaz Labs also sells Topaz Video, a separate product for enhancing video instead of still photos: upscaling, denoising, frame interpolation for slow motion, stabilization, motion deblur, and SDR-to-HDR conversion. It runs as a standalone app or as a plugin for After Effects and DaVinci Resolve — the video equivalent of Topaz Photo's Photoshop/Lightroom plugin.

They're built for different types of media: Photo works on still images, while Video is designed for video files. Bought separately, Topaz Photo is $199/yr and Topaz Video is $299/yr (both under Topaz's "Annual, best price" billing). Buying both together is cheaper through the Topaz Studio bundle at $399/yr, which also includes Gigapixel and the rest of the Topaz lineup.

Topaz Video is aimed at restoration and enhancement, not full video editing. It's useful when the footage itself is the problem — low resolution, noise, camera shake, motion blur, or a need for smoother slow motion. It won't replace an editor like DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, and heavily damaged footage can still come out with artifacts or invented detail, the same trade-off Topaz Photo makes with still images.

Topaz Photo isn't a replacement for Photoshop or Lightroom — it's a specialist add-on. Photoshop and Lightroom handle broad editing, compositing, cataloging, and organizing a photo library. Topaz Photo handles a narrower job: AI-driven noise removal, sharpening, upscaling, and detail recovery. It adds these specialist tools to a broader Photoshop or Lightroom workflow.

The plugin option is built around this: run Topaz Photo's enhancement inside Photoshop or Lightroom Classic as one step in a larger edit, rather than switching to a separate app and back. Most photographers who use Topaz Photo are still using Photoshop or Lightroom for everything else.

Topaz Photo's AI processing is resource-intensive, so the computer running it matters more than with a typical editing app.

Prices can change — check Topaz's live pricing page for current figures, particularly given the recent Adobe acquisition. Check current pricing →

Both do AI-assisted photo work, but they're built for different jobs and different users.

Topaz Labs (the company overall, covering Photo, Video, and Gigapixel) has a 3.7/5 TrustScore on Trustpilot, based on 56,534 reviews at the time we checked. This is company-wide rather than specific to Topaz Photo alone — Topaz Photo's own dedicated Trustpilot page wasn't accessible at the time of writing, so treat this as a broader signal rather than a product-specific score. On G2, Topaz Photo AI has too few reviews (2, at the time we checked) to draw a meaningful conclusion from.

We checked Topaz Labs' own product and system-requirements documentation, pricing pages, Adobe's public statements on the acquisition, third-party coverage of the perpetual-license change, and user feedback on Trustpilot and G2 when preparing this review. Topaz Photo's own product-specific Trustpilot page wasn't accessible at the time of writing, so the Trustpilot figure here reflects Topaz Labs as a company rather than this product alone — we've flagged that clearly above. We update this page as Topaz Photo's ownership, pricing, or features change, particularly given the recent Adobe acquisition.

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