Topaz Studio Zoom Percentage Product Request and Noise Reduction bug

I’ve noticed that the zoom percentage steps in Topaz Studio do not allow me to specify exact steps of 200%, 300%, 400% etc. There is a shortcut to 100% zoom, then the next interval is 125%, 156.2%, 195.3%, 244.1% etc. The zoom slider’s resolution allows for smaller varying steps, but the slider’s resolution is not fine enough to set something like 300%, rather I can get 299.8% and that’s it.

It is vital that the zoom intervals are in whole steps so that the preview isn’t interpolated and thus would cause difficulty with judging sharpness. Steps of 200%, 300% etc should only use nearest neighbour enlargement to preserve the original pixels’ values for the optimal preview effect.

At the moment, the preview is extremely blurry at zoom percentages over 100%, in addition to that, a faint mazing/cross-hatching pattern is visible across the entire preview. That may perhaps be linked to the interpolation used for resampling the image for display.

These are pernicious issues which affect all Studio users regardless of what they intend to use the program for and need to be addressed ASAP. I’m surprised that no one else is finding this to be incredibly annoying yet. I am attaching an illustration to demonstrate the issues. The attached JPEG shows them side by side: original TIFF image zoomed in to 300%, same file just imported and saved out of Studio with zero adjustments, and also the preview window of Studio.

Also, there is a bug in Studio which is that it applies noise reduction to imported images even when no adjustment is applied and the original image is saved out.

The procedure to investigate this bug is as such.

  1. Import a new image into Studio. Note that the “Save” button is greyed out since no adjustments are applied yet.
  2. Apply any adjustment by clicking on anything in the Adjusments dropdown menu.
  3. Delete that adjustment, so now nothing is being done to the image. However, the “Save” button is now no longer greyed out.
  4. Save the image.

Now when comparing the saved unedited image from Studio, you will notice that noise reduction was applied even though no adjustments were made (left vs middle crop). I have tried this with several different images and they all exhibit exactly the same issue, even after uninstalling and reinstalling Topaz Studio. I am currently on V1.13.1.

*Duplicate information in another thread due to mod requesting that I repost this under “Product Feature Requests” category.