Topaz Adjust AI - A FINE Image Editor With Major FLAWS

hi everyone anthony morgante here today we're going to take a look at an application that i haven't done a lot of videos on that app is topaz labs adjust ai [Music] [Music] i did some checking i have only done one video on topaz labs adjust ai and that was over a year ago since then they've updated the app a few times so i thought it was well past time for me to do another video on it now first of all let's talk about what it is well it's an image editor it's really no different in that regard than lightroom luminar on1 capture one it edits images now it does it in its own way just like all those applications edit images a little bit differently from one another and we're going to go over how this application is different it is a non-destructive editor it will edit raw files jpegs tiffs pngs so you load an image in it and you could edit it and you won't be doing any of the edits directly to that file so it is non-destructive now what it's missing is really the determining factor of whether or not you're going to use it first of all it doesn't have a library module or any type of section to it where you could like store your images and call them rate them color label them give them keywords do all that stuff it doesn't have a digital asset manager also for the life of me i cannot find a crop tool in this application so you cannot crop or straighten an image in it either which is to me really odd i think what it the way it's being marketed it's being marketed to a person that maybe isn't very computer savvy and just wants to get in edit an image as quickly as possible save that image and call it a day and for that it does a fine job now by default what it will do when you load in an image this happens to be a raw file from nikon z72 what it will do is it will have a set of presets over here on the right hand side now you could change that behavior and i'll i'll mention how to do that at the end but by default you load one image in it it shows a bunch of presets on the right hand side the idea is that you would pick a preset to get close to what you want then you go to a full set of controls to tweak it to your liking so for example on this image i'm in the featured presets you can see there's a number of different you know sets of presets hdr look stylish soft flex film looks and then my collection are presets that you create so you can create your own preset now i chose this one bright and detailed i could go to dark mood and when you click on these you're totally replacing the previous preset with the preset you just clicked on so you're not stacking a preset here so you could just pick a preset now let's just pick one to get started not that one let's pick this one all right so we have this daylight preset now the idea here now is you can click right here to get the controls or go up here and just click right there and then you have this full set of controls and their controls you may be familiar with in general if you use another app like lightroom or one of those others i mentioned it has at the top this section called auto adjust ai this is i guess the ii ai section of topaz adjust ai um here that preset happened to pick a standard ai and i guess it just does something to the image it examines what's in the image you know typical kind of that buzz you know term ai looks at the image determines what's in it and then we'll adjust accordingly off it you could turn it off completely it still has the adjustments on it it just doesn't have any auto adjustment done to it i'll go to standard you have a strength so if you like standard but it's a little too strong you could dial it down a little bit it's more of a subtle adjustment it's not like a fader control maybe or like an opacity control you can see it's a little more subtle and then it has hdr style now i found on some raw files when i click on hdr style it takes a long time to click in let's see how long it takes on this image i'll click one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four one thousand five one thousand six one thousand seven thousand eight one thousand okay so it took a while so you can see you can go to this h dr style dial that down as well let's just stay with that standard style for this so you have this auto adjust section then you have this brightness section and this is equivalent to what many other applications call tone so you have the typical sliders you know exposure contrast you have highlights shadows white's blacks so you have those adjustments there color adjustments has temperature tint saturation there's no vibrance control there's no drop down so when you are working on a raw file that you so you could access the white balance settings that would be in a camera you know in a camera you'd have incandescent daylight shadow shadow or shade all right so you'd have those adjustments usually in a drop down you can see they're not here you don't have that drop down yeah so that is missing also you may have noticed there's really no access to profiles so if you shoot fuji and you have film simulation modes those are actually profiles right and in an application like lightroom you could access those camera profiles or those film simulation modes in the app you can't do that here there's no profile no accessibility here at all so that is missing as well so just you know that is probably something you would need to know uh has a clarity section it's nice that it has clarity broken down into like micro clarity will just adjust the smaller more finer details or parts of the image low which i guess is between micro and medium and then a medium section and then a high section which does larger swaths of the image then it has detail not to be confused with clarity this is more um you know straight detail control similar to luminar ai uh in that it has small detail medium detail large detail has boost sliders for each then it has an actual sharpened slider it has a reduced artifact so if you're inducing any artifacts in image or if you're working on a jpeg that already has some jpeg artifacts in it hopefully the slider would help you reduce those now what is it missing i don't see any noise reduction in this application and also since topaz labs in my opinion makes the best noise reduction software available de noise ai there's no access to any plugins so you can't go let's say oh i need to reduce noise now and then access topaz labs to noise ai as a plug-in through adjust ai just can't do it to me that's a that's kind of a something that is a major flaw there should be some type of noise reduction in here they should at least put some of the noise ai technology inside of adjust ai so that you could reduce noise in an image all right then it has split toning this is typical split toning you give the highlights a specific u and the shadows a different u if you'd like and then you could add grain and then you have an overall opacity adjustment so if you've done your adjustments or if maybe the preset you have chosen is a bit too strong you could go down to this opacity adjustment and just dial it back so you could see how you dial it back now along the top you have some different previews um right now we're looking at the edited image if i want to see the original i could click right here and there's the original and there's our edited image you also could do a split screen by clicking here and you'll get this line in the middle and you can take this line and drag it left and right and then next to that you just have this dual and you click on that and you just get the image side by side and this isn't a line you could drag so it's just side by side so you have those different types of before afters you also could zoom in and out with this slider here uh fit it to 100 of the screen or zoom into 100 and fit to screen one little note if you're using um a mac that has a magic mouse like i am if you accidentally just drag your finger on the magic mouse you're gonna zoom in and zoom out like uncontrollably and it will drive you insane uh so there's no way to turn that off either so that you have to be very careful you don't accidentally just drag your finger on your mouse because you'll continually be zooming in and out so that really drives me mad now before i save it and show you the file types you could save it to and stuff let me just show you very quickly i mentioned that when you first load an image see i just dragged my finger on anyway when you first load an image into it you are presented with those presets you could change that behavior if you go to preferences uh preferences on a mac are under topaz adjust ai i believe with the windows computer they're under edit you could correct me in the comments below if i'm wrong on that we'll go to preferences and uh you could see that allowed anonymous data collection i always have that off i don't like that on i don't want anyone knowing what i do and show presets at startup see right here so you could have that off if you'd like also you could go to your presets folder by clicking here and then you have uh presets uh here so you have your different the featured presets i was just talking about are here so you could access presets so if you create your own they would be here as well they'd be under my collection so they'd be here and if you want to maybe you have two different computers you have this on you created them on one computer and you just want to bring them over to the other computer you would access them here copy them to something so you could bring them over to the other computer and and paste them on into this folder on that computer or maybe share them with a friend or something like that so that's how you get rid of the presets at the beginning now once you're done i mentioned it's non-destructive so it didn't write these edits to the original raw file we need to save it all right let's do that all right now let's go to uh save as all right so when we go to save as we could save it actually i think of four different file types although it looks like a lot more uh first of all it has a dng so you could save it as a raw file png you could save it as a png two different types of tiff files they're really the same thing it's going to be the same file it's just the suffixes either dot tif or dot tiff and two different jpegs again the same exact file dot jpeg or dot jpg all right so kind of silly if yes me so we'll save it as a dot jpg and this is the file name now you can come in here and change the file name if you'd like or do you want to save it it's going to my desktop you could change that as well we'll save it there all the quality this is typical like jpeg you know um low quality to maximum quality or high quality also like if i chose tiff you'd have different adjustments here the compression the bit depth and so on but we're going with jpeg um color profile uh you have a lot to choose from here i'm going to go with the srgb what is it missing there's nothing here to resize the image so you only could save it at the full length and width resolution so if you wanted to post this on instagram where instagram recommends a long edge of 1080 1080 pixels you won't be able to resize it here so you just can't do that it's just to me that's weird all right but anyway who am i to judge i'm going to save it and let's see how long it takes to save because some applications take a real long time to save images it took okay i guess let's minimize it for a minute there's our saved image again it's going to be the full length and width resolution there's no way around that so there are in my opinion uh some shortcomings here there's no crop tool no way to straighten an image um of course there's no library module or the equivalent of a library module um you can't when you export the image resize it uh to me that's another major shortcoming so to me these are things that it's missing that like means that i would never use it now what about you is it still something you would use would it fit your needs or are these major shortcomings um in my and i'm calling them shortcomings because i believe them to be shortcomings but maybe to you they're not and you would use it they'll let us know in the comments below so that's it that's topaz labs adjust ai this is version 1.0.6 thank you everyone who watches my videos i really do appreciate it i'll talk to you guys soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 2,874

Keywords: travel, photography, post processing, editing, training, tutorial, Mac photo editor, best Mac photo editor, Mac and PC photo editor, photo editor, photo editing, Lightroom alternative, Photoshop alternative, Lightroom replacement, Topaz Studio, Topaz Adjust AI, Topaz Labs, photo editing software, photo editing for beginners, photo editing for pros, Adjust AI, artificial intelligence, AI photo editors, Topaz AI, Topaz Clarity, Topaz Detail, morganti, anthony morganti

Id: 900eYiZzYYc

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021