Luminar Neo is currently available at a special price of 119 Euro ($123). You'll need Luminar Neo, a Lightroom alternative with many AI features, to use the software. Skylum's Upscale AI was released on Thursday, 10 November at 5 pm. On the other hand, Gigapixel AI remains the better choice for people who want the best AI upscaling quality and greatest flexibility possible right now. Those who already use this relatively new Lightroom alternative are getting another practical tool with Upscale AI.

But one great feature of this software is its seamless integation into Luminar Neo. In this (the very first, perhaps) showdown, Skylum's Upscale AI proves unable to outperform the competition. Topaz does definitely a better job in de-banding/de-posterizing compression artefacts though.Īnd yeah, if you zoom in 800% on a still frame, you can probably find some more, but that’s not the point of up-scaling.Verdict: Upscale AI is practical, but not perfect

There are some fringe cases – like trees and foliage for example – where it does a bit of a better job than Superscale, but than – with more tweaking in Resolve, I probably could come dammed close. I was a bit disappointed though, cause I really wanted the Topaz result somehow reflecting the sooomuchloooooonger render times, but actually it barely does. If you really have a need for speed, Lanczos is probably doing the trick in most cases. To be honest, even the difference between Superscale and the normal (Lanczos) scaling in Resolve is way less than I expected. In a nut shell: IMHO – doing it in Topaz is not really worth the wait – your mileage may vary though, depending on your material and expectations. I was pretty much surprised, that at the end, the visual difference is nothing to write home about, but the render times are way different – like in more than 800% different. I up scaled the material to 4K – first in Topaz Video Enhance AI, and than in Resolve with Superscale and an additional node for a bit of sharpening.

The Material I used was an old Trailer (MP4 720p) from the film “In Memoriam” that I shot 15 years ago on a Sony FS100.

Topaz ai upscaling