A few years ago, I discovered Topaz Labs and their video/photo enhancement software. They were running online ads showing split screens on how their software could upscale older video to HD (or beyond). It caught my attention because they used a clip from the original Star Trek TV series.

Since I had so much legacy video from my Digital8 camcorder days, I thought it might be useful for upscaling my old tapes to something that would look better on modern displays. Topaz Labs was pricy, so I took on upscaling gigs on Fiverr to pay for it. I did enough $5 gigs there to be able to afford Topaz Labs for the years I used it.

Here was an example of an old Disneyland VHS I upscaled with it back then:

Then they went subscription.

Since I would often go months without touching any of these tools, it did not make sense for me to pay monthly fees for something I wasn’t using. Now, if these subscriptions services allowed me to just “turn on” a month and use it, then let it lapse, that would probably be cheaper overall. But Adobe, etc. all want you to commit to minimum subscription terms. I found this out the hard way when I chose the higher “monthly” plan for some Adobe tools, not seeing in the fine print that I had just committed myself to six months at that higher rate.

But I digress.

Recently, I saw the news that Adobe is acquiring Topaz Labs. I had already stopped using Dreamweaver years ago when it went subscription for the same reason. I could justify buying a $$$ web development tool because I could just run that “forever”. I only needed to update if some new OS version broke it, or if they added some must-have feature I couldn’t live without. Today, that is no longer an option.

So yeah, I kinda miss Topaz Labs. Their subscription model does not work for a casual user like myself. And from searching online, it looks like many others had similar views.

Since they will be part of Adobe, I guess anyone using those tools is able to justify the subscription (like full time professional users) so they will probably enjoy having this Topaz technology available.

But I won’t be one of them.