New Topaz Gigapixel 8.2 and Photo AI 3.5 released

Topaz announced the new Photo Ai 3.5 (Click here) and the new Gigapixel 8.2 (Click here) updates.

Press text

We’re excited to announce another major update to Photo AI with a new take on our lighting enhancement, a new way to run Super Focus on any machine, crash recovery, and more!

  • We’re announcing a version 2 of Adjust Lighting which is vastly improved to deliver a more natural, vibrant, and reliable results across the board.
  • Now anyone can run Super Focus in the cloud at lightning speed on any device, even if you don’t have a good GPU.
  • And for those who can, Super Focus now runs 40% faster on Apple devices. This combines with our previous speed boosts – it is now faster than ever.
  • If you encounter a crash with Photo AI, your session and work is now saved with crash recovery so you can get back to creating beautiful images.

The Gigapixel v.8.2 update now has batch Cloud Rendering, faster speeds on Mac, improvements to the Redefine model, and more.

  • High creativity Redefine Cloud Rendering result improvements
  • Batch process multiple images at once with Cloud Rendering
  • Redefine is now 2x faster on Mac (latest MacOS 14 or 15 required for use)
  • Upscale images based on their longest side

Panasonic announces complete reorganization of the company

Panasonic issued the full year financial report (PDF available here) and a plan to restructure the company (PDF available here). The financial report contains no info about how the camera business is doing. But there is an important news:

Panasonic announced a major asset restructuring plan, abandoning the unprofitable, hopeless, and weakly competitive TV business, dissolving Panasonic Electric Company and reorganizing it into three independently operated companies according to categories, thereby activating the vitality of this century-old Japanese company. The home appliance sector was organized as the “Smart Life Company”, the air conditioning sector was organized as the “Air Quality Air Conditioning, Food Distribution Company”, and the lighting sector was organized as the “Electrical Engineering Company”.

The ‘Smart Life Company’ includes the camera business, and I think the only good news is that they only want to sell the TV business for now. For now I think the Lumix business is here to stay and the next two camera announcements might help Panasonic to make new strong sales!

Panasonic Japan launches special CP+ page

Panasonic Japan writes:

The theme of the LUMIX booth at CP+2025 is “PLAY with COLOR.”

At this year’s LUMIX booth, in addition to being able to experience the imaging performance that is a hallmark of LUMIX, we will also be offering touch-and-try events and seminars/workshops that will enable users to discover their own ways of enjoying image creation,including a wide range of photo styles and real-time LUTs .

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The curious interesting thing on this page is the “coming soon” seminar which I am 100% certain to be for the new Lumix S1rII 🙂