Photo software developer Topaz Labs may be more familiar to professional photographers for its plug-ins, but the company also produces a standalone photo-editing application, Topaz Studio, now in its second version. It’s an exaggeration to call Topaz Studio a full workflow solution, but it does let you optimize and add effects to your photos and can serve as a container for some of Topaz’s plug-ins. The complete lack of organization tools means Topaz Studio should at best be an addendum to your main workflow program, rather than the only photo app you use. Thankfully, you can install it as a plug-in to Lightroom, to combine Topaz’s fun photo effects with Lightroom’s workflow chops.
How Much Does Topaz Studio Cost?
You can buy a license directly from Topaz Labs’ website for $99.99. There’s no subscription requirement or option, as was the case for the app’s predecessor. You can get a free copy if you’ve already purchased Topaz effects worth $99 or more. Existing plug-ins range in price from $79 to $99. Oddly, you can’t install the popular GigaPixel AI plug-in Topaz Studio. For comparison, CyberLink PhotoDirector charges the same $99.99 but is also available as a $3.42-per-month subscription with a continual flow of new effects. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom can be had for a $9.99-per-month subscription, but you never stop paying if you want to keep using them.
The Topaz Studio installer not only lets you choose where on your hard drive you want the program located, but also where you want to save its support files and user-created files. They can all be in different locations. At 630MB, the installer isn’t a small download, but that’s not uncommon. As with most other big apps, Topaz Studio requires you to log into an account to use it. If your account doesn’t have a purchase associated with it, you can start a free, 30-day trial just by entering an email address.
The Topaz Studio Interface
Topaz Studio’s interface is far simpler than that of most other pro photo software. It starts you out with a simple four-panel tutorial that shows how to apply key adjustments, use effects (or Looks), and add masks. As with DxO PhotoLab, there’s no importing, nor are there modes for doing things like organizing, adjusting, editing, and outputting, like you find in Lightroom.
Instead, you get six buttons—Open, Export, View, Original, Fit, and 100%—and a slider, but most work is done in the right-side Filters/Looks panel. The View button lets you see before-and-after versions of an image side by side or in a split screen; you can just hold down the mouse button while the cursor is over a photo to see the unedited original, too. On the right is the editing panel. You get Undo and Redo arrows, but there’s no overall reset or history, though the individual tools have reset buttons to clear everything you’ve done with them. Along the bottom are buttons for Crop, Heal, Navigator, and Histogram. The last mention is just a histogram viewer and doesn’t provide editing capabilities.
You don’t get much in the way of customization for the interface, and there isn’t even a Window or View menu. One positive I will mention about the interface is that it adjusts well to high-DPI monitors, like my QHD testing screen—something Adobe software isn’t great at, only offering 100% and 200% views for the interface text and controls. I also like that a simple mouse-wheel spin zooms your photo in and out and doesn’t restrict you to set zoom levels like 50% and 66%, as Lightroom does. One more interface nicety I appreciate is that double-clicking on a slider resets the slider to its default position.
There’s no library panel like you find in ACDSee, Capture One, CyberLink PhotoDirector, DxO PhotoLab, Skylum Luminar—essentially every pro photo app we’ve tested. The complete lack of workflow and organization capability means you’re better off using Topaz Studio as a plug-in for a program like Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, or Skylum Luminar, all of which Topaz supports. Note, however, that when you install Topaz as a Photoshop plug-in, it doesn’t appear in the new Plug-ins panel. Instead, you see the Topaz filters at the bottom of the Filters menu.
Getting Your Photos Into Topaz Studio
Instead of the sort of importing abilities you see in most photo editing software, in Topaz you simply open a photo file from a disk location. Alternatively, you can drag and drop a file onto the editor. More Photoshop-like than Lightroom-like is that you either save your image in Topaz’s proprietary .ts2 project file format or export it as a JPG, PNG, or TIFF. You can print or share to an online photo service like Flickr or SmugMug, as you can in Lightroom Classic.
You can open raw camera files as well as JPGs and TIFFs. Topaz’s initial raw conversion of a shot from my Canon EOS 80D was less vivid than what Lightroom produced (right).
Topaz Studio doesn’t offer any organization tools, either. Forget about creating albums, organizing by faces, metadata, or geography. Nor is there any search function. Organizing is not the software’s mission, and for that, I recommend using Topaz as a plug-in within Lightroom.
Tools for Adjusting Photos
Nearly everything you do in Topaz is accomplished by adding a filter or a Look. Even basic adjustments like exposure, contrast, and color saturation are considered filters in the app. All adjustments have an opacity slider and a choice of blend modes, à la Photoshop. I prefer Lightroom’s policy of hiding this stuff from you, letting you focus on getting the adjustments set the way that makes the image look good, rather than making you spin your wheels about layers and blending modes. I expect most photographers feel this way, while designers are happier to juggle dozens of layers.
There’s no auto-correct button, but using the program’s AI Clear filter approximates one. This tool sharpened up a test shot that didn’t look great on initial raw import, though it didn’t fix the lighting. It also automatically removes noise, doing a fine job of this on another test photo. There’s also an Auto White Balance option, but not one for exposure and contrast. You can save any adjustment you make as a preset for use on other photos.
One interesting tool to play with is Precision Contrast. This has sliders for micro, low, medium, and high contrast. It also lets you change the lighting with Shadow, Midtone, and Highlight sliders. Microcontrast actually affects the apparent sharpness of a photo and can yield appealing results.
Even more precise and detailed is the Precision Detail filter. This lets you adjust small, medium, and large detail or boost any of those three.
There are no lens profile corrections such as you find in many pro photo editors, nor are there any geometry corrections, for things like correcting barrel or pincushion distortion. Also in the missing adjustment department is chromatic aberration correction.
Topaz does have HSL color tuning, but you don’t get the nifty color wheels other apps have added of late. Nor is there an eyedropper to select a color from your photo for changing.
The Crop tool is perfectly adequate, letting you choose from common preset aspect ratios and rotate the canvas. It doesn’t offer auto-leveling, however.
Creative and Stylistic Tools
These two categories of tools outnumber the standard set of adjustments by more than two-to-one, which makes sense, as artistic effects account for the program’s primary strength. Some of the effects in the Creative section of tools include Bloom, Blur, Color Overlay, Film Grain, Text, and Vignette. The easy-to-use Text tool offers many fonts, colors, and sizes, and even lets you rotate and move text easily.
The Stylistic group of filters goes much farther in altering your image, as their names indicate—Abstraction, AI Remix, Impression, and Smudge among others. These are sometimes hard to differentiate between the Looks discussed in the next section, especially because some of them apply artistic style transfers, as some of the Looks do as well.
Topaz Looks and Local Edits
Looks are where Topaz comes into its own: These preset effect number in the hundreds, but not to worry, you can sort them by categories such as Abstract, Grungy, and Vintage. You can also favorite those you want to reuse or search them by name. You can adjust the strength of Looks, but that as far as altering them goes: CyberLink PhotoDirector’s AI Style Transfer feature offers more control.
The Healing Brush doesn’t let you select a source area, but it did a good job as a spot remover. It also lets you remove objects if you have a consistent background.
When it came to selecting and masking, I had a heck of a time finding the relevant Topaz tool, which is just a small circle icon up at the top of the tool panel, away from the rest of the adjustment controls. Once I figured that out, it worked well, making it easy to select a subject by drawing on it. The brush is edge-aware, which makes for accurate selection, and you can adjust the selection. You can also select using a circular or radial gradient or based on color or luminance. There’s no erase option to tweak areas you may have selected outside your subject, though.
Performance, Help, Output and Sharing
Since you only have one photo open in the app at a time, performance is perfectly acceptable. A thin blue line marches across the top of the image to show you an edit’s progress. Some operations, such as noise reduction at the high setting, took several seconds to complete on my 3.4 GHz Core i7 PC with GeForce 1650 graphics.
There’s a Help menu in the program with lots of links, but the so-called User Guide only discusses using the software as a plug-in in Photoshop and other third-party programs. I couldn’t find any info on how to install the extra plug-ins referenced in the menus. There are a few helpful pages on the product site, but a more organized help system would be better.
Semi-Precious Photo Editing
Topaz Studio includes some tools that make your photos look more accurate, but the real fun is in using its creative effects, which seem endless. Aside from the masking tool, the interface is simple to figure out, but it’s not at all customizable. You mustn’t think of Topaz Studio as a photo workflow tool, since it lacks any import, export, organize, or search features. If you’re the type who likes to see what all kinds of effects will look like when applied to your photos, Topaz Studio is for you: It may even turn your drab image into a gem.
For other software that offers lots of effects along with full workflow functionality, look to Exposure and Luminar; for AI art-style-transfer capability, check out PhotoDirector, which also includes excellent workflow features. Meanwhile for the fullest workflow, optimization, and editing tools around, head for our Editors’ Choice photo-editing winners, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop.
