My honest take on the other big Adobe, AI and photography stories is all in one playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA4uJY2vI13A

I thought they may have bought Topaz to quietly remove that “Other option”  from the market.

They deserve each other.

As I've heard business pepole say "don't compete with your competitors, buy them out."  One to watch. 🐯

They could make a fourth Lightroom version with Topaz in it to go with the already confusing web, classic, mobile, and the other one that nobody understands.

I own Gigapixel and Topaz de-Noise (which I swear by,  Adobe's own noise reduction has never been anywhere as good as Topaz so I am glad to hear we still get to keep both Giga and De-noise)

Excellent video Glynn. I am also a Topaz user for many years. Interesting times.

I still use older copies of Adjust and Simplify.  I hope to God these continue to work.

I only ever used Sharpen AI and Gigapixel and purchased them outright. I only updated Gigapixel as I use it quite a lot but stopped when Topaz went down the subscription route. My concern is that Adobe will try to stop the old outright purchased Topaz software from working, or let's say you get a new PC and want to install the software you've already purchased on the new machine they'll force you go down the subscription route. If that ever happens I will not be using Topaz anymore.

Glad you covered this and gave us a voice, Glyn. I was using Topaz Photo Ai prior to Adobe's introduction of Lightroom's Denoise, which also beautifully sharpens. I stopped using Topaz because every time I'd use it for an event photo it would turn people in the background into suffering characters from Dante's Inferno. LrC's Denoise solved that. Absolutely none of that garbage with Denoise. I still try Topaz for jpgs but have to do it from PS where the Topaz edit is a maskable layer that I can flood black then white paint only the parts I want, sometimes just eyes. That's such a clumsy workflow.
Topaz started off with a great promise of a one click automatic overall improvement of photos. They gradually screwed that up and changed it to manual work, claiming customers wanted 'control', which was BS because most subscribers chose it for the promised automation. All the change did was put the burden on the user instead of the program and they could claim you were using it wrong. I use it so little now and am always frustrated with the workflow I probably won't even use it as part of PS or LrC. I would rather see Adobe make Denoise available on jpegs as well as RAW, which would entirely negate the need for Topaz Photo Ai. The last billboard I had a photo on was in the early 80's so I have no need for super resolution apps.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Some very good points made Glyn. You are right, the allocation of credits in the basic photography package (250?) is simply ridiculous. Even 1,000 would be a weak offering.

A lot of online trainers are talking more frequently about competing products on the market. It will be interesting to see the outcome of the integration of the Topaz line…whether it actually is a benefit, or whether it’s time to cut the cord.

fantastic news

Great news!

Cheers Glyn 👍

Well thought out and very well said Glyn. I already own Gigapixel, so I don’t know where this is going.

Thank you for this. As a longtime Topaz user, I was (mostly) hopeful of all the things you pointed out. (Not to mention one less thing to be perpetually buying.) However, I had not picked up that Adobe does not (at this point in time) plan to use this with LRC. Well, that sucks! I've had several conversations with some folks at Adobe, and they keep on saying that LR is just as good as, if not better than, LRC. I then start to list all the things I can do in LRC and how it's more beneficial to my workflow, and they nod and walk away. But that is another story.

As far as leaving Topaz as an option for a separate purchase, remember how they also said that CC6 was going to be perpetually maintained — until it wasn't.

Competition is surely healthy and makes for more effort by everybody to make the best thing.   Simply buying competitors is surely a bad thing?

Topaz is great and very useful

Whatever changes will happen depends on which one is more profitable. Never the forget the first law of modern US business: profit.