Adobe completed its acquisition of Topaz Labs on 23 September, bringing the maker of Gigapixel, Topaz Photo and Topaz Video in-house at the company behind Premiere and Photoshop. The deal was first announced in June. It is worth a Malaysian editor’s attention because Adobe and Topaz sit at opposite ends of the same workflow, the edit and the cleanup, and now one owns the other.
If you have not used Topaz, it is software people use when a shot is soft, a clip is too low in resolution, or old footage needs cleaning up. Topaz’s enhancement technology earned a Technology and Engineering Emmy in 2025. Gigapixel enlarges stills without turning them to mush, Topaz Photo sharpens and denoises, and Topaz Video restores and upscales clips while holding detail steady from frame to frame. It is the kind of tool people keep because it reconstructs detail a straight export will not add.
The real prize, as we see it, is the engine underneath. Topaz’s Neurostream technology lets these heavy AI models run on your own machine or on Topaz’s cloud. Adobe says Topaz’s technology is already available in Firefly and Photoshop, and that it will reach even more of its existing workflows. Topaz’s chief executive, Eric Yang, joins Adobe’s digital video and audio team. The Topaz brand, apps and models stay available on their own, and Adobe did not put a price on the deal in its announcement.
That on-device-or-cloud detail is worth getting right, because it is easy to flatten into “runs locally” and stop there. For an editor working on a laptop rather than an expensive dedicated workstation, the difference matters: on-device means you are not sending every upscale to the cloud, while the cloud option is there for a job too heavy for your machine. That flexibility counts for more when the hardware budget is tight.
Then there is the bill. Topaz sells its apps by subscription, and anyone using the standalone Topaz apps pays for them separately, on top of whatever Creative Cloud already costs. The personal annual plans run from US$149 a year for Gigapixel to US$399 for the full Topaz Studio bundle, which is roughly RM610 to RM1,630 a year at Bank Negara Malaysia’s 23 September rate of about RM4.08 to the US dollar. For a creator here who runs both, that is a second subscription sitting beside Adobe’s, aimed at the same work.
Adobe’s announcements did not disclose any immediate pricing changes. The standalone Topaz apps are still on sale on their own, and Adobe says its technology is already in Firefly and Photoshop with more of its workflows to follow, though it has not put a date on the rest. There is no sign yet that the standalone subscriptions are going away. What the deal could quietly erode over time is the reason to buy the plugin separately at all. If the upscaling and restoration you paid Topaz for starts arriving inside the apps you already rent, the separate subscription gets harder to justify.
Whether that helps or hurts depends on fine print Adobe has not shared. If those tools arrive inside Creative Cloud with no new fee, usage charge or credit system, it is money back in a creator’s pocket. If they arrive as a paid add-on, it is not. Either way, it is worse news for anyone who valued Topaz as an independent alternative to Adobe rather than a feature of it.
To our eye it points the same way as other moves this month. Adobe just made Premiere’s base app free on Android, and in the same stretch we looked at what AI editing actually costs a studio here through DaVinci Resolve and pay-per-use tools like Eddie. Our sense is that enhancement is becoming a checkbox inside the big suites rather than something you shop for on its own, though one acquisition does not settle that on its own.
For now, a Malaysian editor’s move is simple. Keep the Topaz subscription only if you open it most months, watch Firefly and Photoshop for the folded-in versions, and settle the question at renewal. Nothing forces the decision before then.
Images courtesy of Onur Binay and Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash. Pricing chart by ProductNation.
