Topaz, Dx0, Whatever . . . ??

Topaz are well worth the money.... but dont push them to hard or they'll look false.

I use Topaz Denoise most, and leave it to make up its own mind. Only now and again does it need tweaking down slightly.

I use Topaz Denoise on high ISO shots where the noise is intrusive and I use Topaz Photo for increasing the resolution on images taken on a phone where I want to print at a reasonable size. I don't tend to use Topaz for sharpening, I much prefer Adobe Camera Raw.

Once again I have to root for Faststone Image Viewer. I often use the sharpener after everything else has been done to give it the tiniest tweak. E.g. Unsharp mask "radius" 0.3 - 0.4, "amount" 14 - 16. Play with it around those values and be prepared to be pleased. Even Topaz can't do what Faststone manages. And it will beat it hands down on CA correction. To get the sharpener quickly without mousing around, use Ctrl+u.

I think you may find that the Topaz AI standalone programs. Have recently stopped being updated, In favour of the new Topaz photo AI package.

You're right, they have. On the Topaz site, some are saying that using the standalone programs allows a more refined control. I'm still new to Topaz but am finding all of them to be very slow. And I mean very, very slow. This being so, I would hesitate to use any of them to 'bulk' change a load of images in one go. Could be wrong of course, (not unknown), so would be interested in other's experiences.

At the moment I'm wondering whether to take advantage of their 30 day trial period and ask for a refund.

The stand alone is still receiving updates (you get then free for the first year and £99 thereafter !!). If you don't have lots of RAM and a very fast processor it will indeed take ages to process an image - that's why there is a big red END PROCESS button. They are currently trying to get everyone to upgrade to Photo AI (2) and to include their video AI in the same package. I have no use for video. You do still get all the stand alone modules, which do indeed give a far more refined degree of control. They push the basic 'auto pilot' concept, however, which analyses your image and decides which process(es) to apply. It will therefore (perhaps) decide to simply de-noise, or sharpen, or increase the resolution, for example. Generally, it is better to stick to a tried and tested workflow and use the individual modules, calling them up as you want them. There is quite a lot of control over what they do but, as I pointed out above, sometimes it can't do something very well and you would be better falling back to a more 'primitive' program to complete the job. It does a great many things very well indeed but it certainly isn't the universal panacea they make it out to be.

Simply excellent comment, davidwozhere. Spot on, could not agree more.

Yep faststone for me as well used it for years.