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FlyingFourFun
FlyingFourFun
Legend
June 29, 2026
Question

Adobe Buys Topaz Labs - Good news..!?

  • June 29, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 32 views

I just saw Adobe is buying Topaz Labs;  What do we think of this?

 

Adobe to Acquire Topaz Labs

 

SAN JOSE, Calif. —June 25, 2026 — Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) — the global technology leader that unleashes creativity, productivity and customer experiences through innovative tools and platforms — today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Topaz Labs, an AI company specializing in industry-leading video and image enhancement models.

Adobe empowers everyone from first-time creators to creative professionals and enterprises with groundbreaking AI tools and technology across every stage of the creative process. Adobe's creative AI portfolio brings together industry-leading AI models in Adobe Firefly the all-in-one creative AI studio, and Adobe Creative Cloud applications including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere and more, delivering creative professionals pixel-level control and precision tooling.

As AI rapidly reshapes video and image creation, creatives are increasingly working across hybrid workflows that combine traditionally captured footage with AI-generated content, and they are expected to deliver high-quality results across a growing range of formats, devices and production methods. Topaz Labs provides a broad array of advanced AI models for video and image enhancement that analyze and improve existing visual content by sharpening detail, removing noise, restoring footage and increasing resolution, making them essential for any workflow that combines real-world capture with AI-generated imagery.

Topaz Labs develops professional quality AI video and image enhancement models and tools that are trusted by creative professionals such as Asteria Film Co, award-winning filmmaker Robert Stone and enterprises to deliver exceptional fidelity and high-quality results across professional filmmaking, documentary restoration, social content creation, photography and archival workflows. The company has developed proprietary AI models to support professional video use cases such as upscaling, sharpening, stabilization, frame interpolation, noise removal, footage restoration and more.

“Adobe Firefly, Firefly Services and Creative Cloud offer the industry’s best creative tooling and top AI models for creators and brands, and we’re excited to build on the strong demand for these products with Topaz Labs,” said David Wadhwani, President, Creativity & Productivity Business, Adobe. “Creators are creating more content by mixing captured and generated images and video, and with Topaz Labs we will give every creator the quality and control to easily produce that content at higher quality and resolution.”

“Building technology to make images and videos look their absolute best has been our life’s work for more than twenty years,” said Eric Yang, CEO of Topaz Labs. “We’ve always believed that technology should serve human creativity rather than replace it — and so has Adobe. Together, we believe we can dramatically expand what’s possible for filmmakers and creators everywhere.”

With Topaz Labs, Adobe will expand its video and image model offerings with state-of-the-art AI enhancement models in Adobe Firefly, Firefly Services and Creative Cloud apps, giving creators, designers, video professionals, photographers and enterprises the tools to achieve exceptional quality across every format and workflow. With millions of customers, Topaz Labs and its Emmy Award-winning AI technology will be integrated across Adobe's creative AI portfolio, giving creatives the ability to enhance footage, restore and remaster archival content, and blend AI-generated and traditionally captured content into seamless final productions. Topaz Labs will also bring its proprietary Neurostream technology that enables large, complex AI models to run locally on consumer devices, democratizing advanced image and video models previously limited to high-end systems or cloud-only usage and positioning Adobe to tap into the growing opportunity for efficient, on-device AI video.

After the transaction closes, Topaz Labs customers of all sizes can expect continued support and investment in future innovation and Topaz Labs products will remain available as standalone offerings through the company’s website. Upon close, Topaz Labs CEO Eric Yang will continue to lead the Topaz Labs team.

      2 replies

      R Neil Haugen
      R Neil Haugen
      Legend
      June 30, 2026

      Like other things,  in practice after it appears, this will be more useful to some than to others.

       

      As one of the earliest private beta testers for the Color Mode, they have a ton of changes they are working on all over the app.  The new masking setup and all the color management changes of the last three years were apparently necessary in order to get it ready for the Color Mode working process. That other things are also getting massive rebuilds or replacements was mentioned in passing, but I’ve no clue what else is coming. We only specifically dealt with Color Mode, though right off the bat we were pushed to use the new masking with it.

       

      I’ve thoroughly used and appreciated the new transitions/effects from the company of that stuff they bought out and added to Premiere. And yea, some of the LLM stuff like sorting/searching your project by query is simply a joy to use … well, mostly, as we learn how to phrase a query …  😁

      Everyone's mileage always varies ...
      FlyingFourFun
      FlyingFourFunAuthor
      Legend
      June 30, 2026

      I am confident that the new color methodology will work fully in the not distant future…  I’m a light user of color tools; which is why I was excited that the AI could be helpful to a point, and then hand it off - or just quick and good enough for personal projects :-)

      I think the direction is correct that Adobe is moving - It is not lost on me that supporting ‘legacy’ at the same time is very difficult.  I’m not unhappy with Adobe, as a matter of fact I’ve been working with Beta versions for about 6 months straight now, with little trouble.  If there is an issue, and overnight build seems to in a decent amount of time correct it.  It might be wrong to use Beta this way, but production version is always there as a backstop, so it feels less crazy than it sounds.

       

        R Neil Haugen
        R Neil Haugen
        Legend
        June 30, 2026

        Well, my first thought is that getting some of Topaz in Pr would be very useful. We have that for stills for certain things in our shop, but I’ve not used it on any of my video work. There are some things there I’d really love to  use but haven’t been willing to dump the cash for it.

         

        So … we’ll see how it works out. In general, I’ve been very pleased with the addition of the effects company they bought out last year ...

        Everyone's mileage always varies ...
        FlyingFourFun
        FlyingFourFunAuthor
        Legend
        June 30, 2026

        I have a Topaz account also, so hopefully they combine the accounts/fees and we save some money when they do that,

        I don't know if it's a good idea to have a plug in for Topaz effects and run it from within PP/AE.  It seems the data transfer Adobe uses for plugins is really slow.  I use a good deal of BFX effects, which have things like Upscaling built in, and other ML/AI tools, and they tend to process pretty slow within premier, as they seem to be robbed of CPU time and PCI/MEM access time/performance, but maybe a guess - comparing a test from a few stand-alone versions of the same plugin.

        I am hoping they do something ‘impressive’ with it, but at the same time we are already still waiting on generative fill/remove from Adobe, and the Roto tools are good, but still not exceptional.  So much work still left to do for Adobe, getting into bed with topaz seemed not needed.

        With that said, I have been playing with the Beta and using the AI Assistant, and it has potential…  but it has some limits right now that puzzle me (like using lum color on an adjustment layer is not possible, but it will apply it to a clip and copy to other clips for you).  I did enjoy asking it things like “how is my color grade, what advice do you have” and “I think it needs more contrast” and seeing what it does - but then learning it doesn't have access to scopes, so it renders the frame, and scans it…

         

        Back to Topaz,  I don't (currently) see the point.  Especially since Topaz can take a huge amount of time to process, and not sure if I want to run it while trying to edit.  I tend to do that on different machines. 

        Maybe someone has some ideas of what benefits can be extracted from this acquisition, but I am personally stumped at the moment.

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