Topaz Photo AI vs Gigapixel 2026: Which Image Enhancer Is Worth $199?

Topaz Labs dominates AI image enhancement. Their tools sit on nearly every serious photographer's hard drive, and for good reason — nothing else matches the output quality. But the company now sells two products that confuse almost everyone: Topaz Photo AI and Topaz Gigapixel AI.

Photo AI costs $199. Gigapixel costs $99. Both upscale images. Both use AI models. Both come from the same company. So what exactly are you paying an extra $100 for?

We ran both tools through identical test sets — low-light wedding photos, cropped wildlife shots, vintage scans, and smartphone images blown up to print sizes. After processing over 200 images across both platforms, the answer became clear. Here's the full breakdown.

What Are Topaz Photo AI and Gigapixel AI?

Topaz Photo AI is the company's flagship product — an all-in-one image enhancement application. It combines upscaling, noise reduction, sharpening, and face recovery into a single workspace. The standout feature is Autopilot, which scans each image and automatically determines which enhancements to apply and at what strength. Under the hood, Photo AI draws from over 100 specialized AI models trained on different image types, lighting conditions, and noise profiles. It runs locally on your hardware with GPU acceleration and supports batch processing of entire folders.

Topaz Gigapixel AI is a dedicated image upscaler. It does one job: enlarge images while generating realistic detail that didn't exist in the original. You can push images up to 6x their original resolution, and the results are genuinely remarkable — fine textures, sharp edges, and convincing detail that traditional upscaling methods can't produce. Gigapixel also includes face recovery for portrait upscaling. The interface is deliberately simple: load an image, choose your enlargement factor, pick an AI model, and export.

The Core Difference

Photo AI is a Swiss Army knife. Gigapixel is a scalpel.

Topaz Photo AI handles the entire image enhancement pipeline. Drop in a noisy, soft, underexposed photo and Autopilot will denoise it, sharpen the details, recover any faces, and upscale it to your target resolution — all in one pass. You control each module individually or let the AI make the calls. For photographers processing large shoots, this workflow saves hours compared to running images through separate tools.

Gigapixel AI strips everything away except upscaling. And that focus has advantages. The interface loads faster, the learning curve is nearly zero, and the upscaling-specific controls give you finer-grained adjustments. If your images are already clean and well-exposed and you just need them bigger, Gigapixel gets you there with less friction.

Here's the key detail most reviews miss: Photo AI includes Gigapixel's upscaling engine. The upscaling module inside Photo AI uses the same core AI models. So the $100 price gap isn't about better upscaling — it's about everything else Photo AI bundles in.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Feature	Topaz Photo AI	Gigapixel AI
AI Upscaling	Up to 6x	Up to 6x
Noise Reduction	Advanced (multiple AI models)	Not included
Sharpening	Motion blur + lens blur fix	Not included
Face Recovery	Advanced face enhancement	Basic face recovery
Autopilot Mode	Full auto-detection	Not included
AI Models	100+ specialized models	Multiple upscaling models
Batch Processing	Full folder processing	Full folder processing
GPU Acceleration	NVIDIA, AMD, Apple Silicon	NVIDIA, AMD, Apple Silicon
RAW File Support	All major formats	All major formats
Plugin Integration	Lightroom + Photoshop	Lightroom + Photoshop
Price	$199 one-time	$99 one-time

Upscaling Quality Head-to-Head

We tested identical images through both tools at 2x and 4x upscaling. The results were instructive — and not what most people expect.

Clean source images: When starting with a well-exposed, noise-free photo, both tools produced nearly identical upscaling results. This makes sense — they share the same underlying upscaling technology. At 2x, both generated sharp, artifact-free enlargements with convincing fine detail. At 4x, both maintained structural integrity with only minor softness in the most demanding areas.

Noisy or soft source images: This is where Photo AI pulls ahead decisively. When we fed it a high-ISO night photo, Autopilot detected the noise, applied denoising first, then sharpened and upscaled. The result was clean and detailed. Gigapixel, working with the same noisy source, faithfully upscaled the noise along with the image — because removing noise isn't its job. The upscaling itself was technically excellent, but the final output was unusable without preprocessing.

Portraits: Both tools include face recovery, but Photo AI's implementation is more sophisticated. It detected faces automatically, applied targeted enhancement, and produced natural-looking results even on heavily cropped shots. Gigapixel's face recovery works well but requires manual toggling and offers fewer adjustment options.

Vintage scans and old photos: Photo AI excelled here. Old prints typically need denoising (film grain and scanner artifacts), sharpening (faded detail), and upscaling (low original resolution). Photo AI handled all three in one pass. With Gigapixel alone, we could only address the resolution — the grain and softness remained.

Workflow and Usability

Photo AI's Autopilot is the killer feature. Drag a folder of 500 wedding photos into Photo AI, and it analyzes every image individually. A well-exposed outdoor portrait gets light sharpening. A dimly lit reception shot gets heavy denoising plus face recovery. A group shot from across the room gets upscaled and sharpened. You don't touch a single slider unless you want to override the AI's decisions.

This matters for professional photographers processing hundreds or thousands of images. The time savings are real — we processed a 300-image wedding set in Photo AI with Autopilot in about 40 minutes. Doing equivalent work manually across separate tools would take half a day.

Gigapixel's simplicity is its own advantage. The interface presents exactly what you need: input image, output size, AI model selection, and export settings. There's no cognitive overhead. For someone who just needs to enlarge product photos or upscale artwork, Gigapixel feels lighter and more direct. It also launches faster and uses less VRAM since it's running fewer models.

Both tools integrate as plugins for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, which means you can send images directly from your editing workflow. Both support drag-and-drop batch processing. And both run entirely locally — your photos never leave your machine.

Pricing Comparison

Detail	Topaz Photo AI	Gigapixel AI
Purchase Price	$199	$99
Payment Model	One-time purchase	One-time purchase
Free Updates	1 year included	1 year included
Upgrade Pricing	~$99/year for continued updates	~$49/year for continued updates
Free Trial	Yes — unlimited previews	Yes — unlimited previews
Money-Back Guarantee	30-day refund	30-day refund

The value calculation is straightforward. If you only need upscaling, Gigapixel at $99 is the clear choice — you're getting the same upscaling engine for half the price. But if you also need noise reduction and sharpening, buying those as separate Topaz products (DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI) would cost more than the $100 difference. Photo AI consolidates everything into one purchase, which makes it the better deal for anyone who needs more than one enhancement type.

Both tools offer free trials with unlimited previews (watermarked exports), so you can test on your own images before buying. The 30-day money-back guarantee removes any remaining risk.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Who Should Choose Which?

Final Verdict

Frequently Asked Questions