Adobe Buying Topaz Makes Me Happy

Adobe has agreed to buy Topaz Labs, and that makes me happy. Both sit in my daily workflow. Adobe on one side, Topaz on the other, almost every day.

The "Open In" options in Lightroom already do the job, and I've got no complaint there. What gets to me is the step before it. I have to convert every RAW file to TIFF before I can hand it to the Topaz tools I love. If this deal does what it should, that step disappears.

The part of this deal worth watching is Neurostream. Topaz built it to run their big AI models on your own machine instead of in the cloud. Topaz says a model that used to need a data-center GPU with 30GB of memory now runs on a consumer card with 6GB, same output, only a hair slower. No cloud. No per-use cost. No file leaving your desk.

Adobe has spent years moving everything to the cloud and metering it. Now it's buying the company whose whole pitch was that you don't need the cloud at all. I'd like to believe Adobe honors that idea instead of folding Neurostream into another subscription line. We'll see.

Now buy Luminar too, Adobe. Then I'll be ecstatic.