I have a license for PureRAW 6 and am a current subscriber to Topaz Photo.
I got my Topaz renewal email recently and said… hmm… do I still really need this:? Especially at this price? More on that below.
Pure Raw is now the first app I send all my photos for processing, after being imported into Lightroom. No one yet does noise reduction better than DxO.
I only use Topaz Photo for a minority of my images, after DxO, and generally they’re images of wildlife subjects, especially birds, that could use a little sharpening. In some cases, I slightly missed focus as with a bird in flight, and Topaz Photo saves it beyond what DxO can do.
The two apps actually work quite well together as long as you let PureRAW do all the noise reduction first and turn noise reduction off in TP, and as long as you drop the sharpening settings down from the defaults and confine it just to the subject(s) you can choose in TP.
TP is hit-or-miss when it comes to sharpening human faces. Sometimes it does a great job, and sometimes it misses with comical results, turning a subject into a near-gargoyle. There are comical videos of this on YouTube. But it’s improving steadily, even at human faces. Most importantly, the focus can only be a little off. If the face is blurry, there’s no way you’re going to get good results sharpening it to restore the person’s facial features with any approach now available.
But you’d only need both DxO PureRAW and Topaz Photo if enough of your images benefit from a little extra sharpening and like how it does it, to justify the price.
I have TP at a grandfathered-longtime-customer renewal price that is not available to new customers. I would not be a new customer of TP at its current price. I’m also very concerned because Adobe is buying out Topaz Labs. I know from experience that that generally does not go well for the bought-out apps. Topaz is saying, oh, don’t worry, Adobe’s promised us everything will be fine. Yeah. Well that’s what is always said in this situation, and then all too often, a few months after the merger, the bought-out firm employees saying that are unemployed, and the customer base is screwed.
I will add that AI models such as Nano Banana Pro are rapidly gaining in ability to do what both PureRAW and Topaz Photo do, and then some, sometimes giving a finished image in one pass. They’re cheaper on a per-image basis unless you process many thousands of images annually. The problem for me with switching entirely to a Nano-Banana type approach is they have a much slower and kludgier workflow, making them impractical on a time, not money, basis even for hobbyists. That may get fixed. We’ll see. NB-type models also have to be sharply reined in with a very detailed prompt on what you want it to do, and don’t try to use it on blurry faces, so it doesn’t get creative inventing new facial details.