Topaz Labs last week sent an email to many of us who have owned their products. Here’s the email:
Thanks for being a founding customer.
On September 16, we’re launching Topaz Studio, a subscription collection of all our apps. Studio will include 7 products, over 100 image/video AI models, unlimited cloud image processing, and local processing.
Because you own an active upgrade license to Photo Al, you get access to the new Topaz Photo, new pro-only models, and unlimited cloud rendering for images at no extra cost. On Sept 16:
- Your Photo AI perpetual license remains yours forever.
- With an active upgrade license, you’ll get access to:
- Topaz Photo, including the upcoming Wonder AI model normally for Pro only.
- Unlimited cloud rendering for images (non-batch).
- Grandfathered auto-renewal price as long as your plan is active.
- Founding customers with 2+ auto-renewing upgrade licenses get access to the whole Studio collection.
By keeping your existing upgrade license, you get more features at half the cost for new customers after Sept 16. We’ll also have a special gift for you before the launch - no action required.
The move to subscription
We believe in building AI tools that enhance rather than replace your workflow - AI models that run locally, preserve creative intent, and produce high-res production-grade results.
In service of that, in 2025 we’ve released dozens of new models like Astra, Bloom, Recover, and Starlight. Many of these were technical breakthroughs for image/video enhancement that haven’t been replicated anywhere else.
But each new release came with an asterisk: some customers benefited and others didn’t, depending on the individual product purchased. This didn’t sit right - we’d much rather that more people have access to all our models. Launching Topaz Studio gives more people access to our technology and keeps us focused on driving faster improvements.
We wanted founding customers to receive the best possible outcome from the change. The September 16 release will include some of our strongest new AI models yet. Thank you so much for using our products, and we’ll be back in touch in two weeks with access to your new features.
In effect, Topaz is going subscription (again). This time it seems to be an all-or-virtually-nothing approach on their part.
As many of you may remember I stopped recommending Topaz Sharpen AI and Denoise AI (no longer available for new purchase), and don’t recommend their “replacement” Photo AI, mostly because it isn’t as controllable or ultimately as good as the standalone products were. The Sharpen AI and Denoise AI purchases got that same “perpetual license”. To Topaz Labs credit, I can still download installers for them, however updates to Photoshop over time have exposed issues with them. Ultimately, Adobe will render those two products unusable, so “perpetual,” means “until the operating system or parent software breaks it.”
Photo AI also has another issue these days: it’s effectively AI Raw Conversion, meaning that you’re now fully committed to AI images, even though they started as camera raw captures. Some people will like that, as they don’t have the knowledge or time to do their own raw conversion, but I wonder when the photo contests will start banning such images? (This is the same thing we had to decide in editorial photo use in the 1990’s, which most magazines and newspapers solved by using words “photo by,” “photo illustration by,” and so on. Only the “photo by” were done traditionally with minimal developing manipulation. So now we have “manual conversion” and “AI conversion”.)
In my view, Topaz Labs has transformed itself from a tool maker for photographers into an AI tool creator for designers and Hollywood. That’s fine, but it isn’t me. I might have been a “founding customer” (literally), but I’m likely to become a “former customer."
