The original Wonder model turned everything into watercolour. Skin looked airbrushed, fabric lost its weave, and faces — especially small ones in group shots — came out waxy. I ran a batch of family photos from the early 2000s through it last year and the results were unusable. Everyone looked like they'd been smoothed in Photoshop by someone who'd just discovered the blur tool. I stopped using it.

Wonder 2 is different. Topaz finally acknowledged what users had been complaining about: the over-processing. The new model dials back the artificial sharpening and actually preserves texture. Hair looks like hair. Skin has pores. Fabric keeps its weave instead of melting into some vague suggestion of cloth.

I tried the same batch again. The difference is significant. Not perfect — I'm not sure any upscaler handles compression artefacts from early digital cameras gracefully — but the faces are recognisably human now. That waxy sheen is gone.

The catch: it's cloud-only. Topaz says the computational demands are too heavy for local processing, which is probably true, but it means you're uploading your images to their servers. For personal photos, I don't love that. For client work, some people won't accept it at all. I understand the technical reasoning — these models are enormous and running them locally would require hardware most photographers don't have — but it still feels like a step backward in terms of control.

There's also the subscription question. Topaz moved to a subscription model last year, which rubbed a lot of long-time users the wrong way. I'm not going to relitigate that argument here. The software works or it doesn't. For me, Wonder 2 works well enough that I've started using Topaz again after months of avoiding it.

What I actually wanted from an upscaler was always simple: make the image bigger without making it worse. Don't add detail that wasn't there. Don't smooth things that should be rough. Don't sharpen edges until they ring. Just scale it up and preserve what exists. Wonder 2 gets closer to that than anything else I've tried. It's not magic — you can't turn a 200x300 thumbnail into a printable image — but for moderate upscaling of decent source material, it does the job without leaving obvious fingerprints.

The Fidelity update that shipped alongside Wonder 2 includes a bunch of other models too. Recover 3 for softer results, some video stuff I haven't tested. But Wonder 2 is the one that matters to me. It's the reason I'm writing this instead of just ignoring another Topaz release.

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