Is Topaz Photo AI 3 Worth It?

One thing that you should know about me is that I prefer to do as much photo editing within Lightroom as possible. At times, I'll also send my photos to Photoshop when needed, but the general sentiment is that I prefer keeping it all within the Adobe ecosystem.

That said, there are some tasks for which neither Lightroom nor Photoshop is best-in-class, and that is when I'll use a third-party application. And those tasks usually involve noise reduction and upscaling. I've already shared my thoughts on Lightroom's AI-powered noise reduction (spoiler: it's amazing), but the biggest issue is that it only supports RAW and certain types of DNG files, at least as of the time of drafting this article. So, if you have a particularly noisy JPEG file, you're left with Lightroom's legacy noise reduction tool (spoiler: it's awful) or using a third-party app.

The same goes for upscaling. While Lightroom can upscale a photo using a feature called Super Resolution, you are limited to a 2x increase in width and height. It also has the same RAW/DNG limitation as the aforementioned AI noise reduction.

That's where Topaz Labs comes in. The company recently released Topaz Photo AI 3, an update offering numerous "quality of life" improvements designed to make your app experience more enjoyable and customizable. It also solves my problem of applying high-quality AI-powered noise reduction and upscaling (up to 6x) to any image format I use. The question is whether it is worth it. Well, let's find out!