Good day,
Would you share your opinions about the best noise reduction software available at the moment?
I have been using Topaz Photo AI for a few years now with rather positive results, but their face correction/recovery surely could be better.
What do you use, and what are your results? I would be willing to explore other options.
My main use is the noise correction for sports photography with ISO range of 4000-6400.
I use Capture One for my post-process.
I like Topaz DeNoise AI, but that was the version before the Photo AI. Not sure if it is still available. I never liked the photo AI version, it looks overdone or artificial. On the Denoise, they have a setting for low light, that is my go to. I typically edit in Capture One then denoise the jpg after in Topaz if needed.
I run all my raws through DXO Pureraw before opening them in Lightroom. Lens corrections and denoising are done when I import. I love it. ISO is more or less irrelevant to me now.
N4865G wrote:
Good day,
Would you share your opinions about the best noise reduction software available at the moment?
I have been using Topaz Photo AI for a few years now with rather positive results, but their face correction/recovery surely could be better.
What do you use, and what are your results? I would be willing to explore other options.
My main use is the noise correction for sports photography with ISO range of 4000-6400.
I use Capture One for my post-process.
Thanks!
Dom
I was going to suggest that you look carefully into the NR features of the Adobe photography tools, which are now extremely sophisticated — especially the new AI Denoise feature, which can be nearly miraculous in some cases.
But I see your use Capture One. If you have ACR or Lightroom, I still urge you to take a look at what they can do.
With the release of AI Denoise, which I use inside the Adobe Camera Raw converter application, I have been able to take a number of old photographs made in very marginal light, photograph as that I had essentially written off, and turn them into usable images.
I have experimented with the others. In reality I have found that in the majority of cases if Adobe NR doesn't take care of it then the image is probably too far gone for the others too. Just too many artifacts. Especially if the goal is to print with any size. Maybe OK for a quick digital look between friends.
I've tried DxO, Lightroom and Topaz. I think I liked Topaz better before Photo AI. I've had a few odd results with Topaz. A couple of night shots got rather speckled. OTOH, iother more general uses, I've liked it. I tend to stick or DxO and Lightroom these days, probably because I'd have other editing going on and am getting more familiar with them, etc.
1bwana1 wrote:
I have experimented with the others. In reality I have found that in the majority of cases if Adobe NR doesn't take care of it then the image is probably too far gone for the others too. Just too many artifacts. Especially if the goal is to print with any size. Maybe OK for a quick digital look between friends.
It is WAY better than “OK for a quick digital look between friends. “ ;-)
The Denoise option built into the current Lightroom is amazeballs, astonishing, fantastic, and mind-boggling. Yes, it's that good. But you don't use Lightroom.
I find Lightroom Classic's denoise/enhance feature entirely fine and helpful most of the time? I also generally set it to 25, so maybe the fact that I'm conservative with it leads to pretty satisfactory results.
A little grain is still a good look and I rarely get that uncanny valley smooth/plastic look from it when dialed back. This is for shots up to ISO 5000 on an A1 at night.
Topaz used to be very strong when it came to noise reduction, but Lightroom has clearly surpassed it by a wide margin. Today, DxO and Lightroom are the technological leaders in this field: sometimes DxO delivers a few percent better results, sometimes Lightroom does. I no longer use Topaz for noise reduction at all, because it has fallen behind in every respect and hasn’t developed nearly as well as its competitors.
The key reason why I now do all my noise reduction exclusively in Lightroom is the workflow: Lightroom works completely non-destructively. I can adjust or undo every change at any time. If I later decide that I want a bit more or a bit less noise reduction – or even want to disable it entirely – Lightroom makes that possible without any limitations.
If I were to denoise my RAW files in an external application beforehand, the result would be baked into a TIFF. That means leaving the RAW level entirely. The file becomes larger, less flexible, and all previous processing steps are permanently embedded. With Lightroom’s internal tools, however, I stay fully on the RAW level – nothing is permanently baked in.
Here’s an example:
You denoise an image in DxO because it happens to perform maybe 5% better on that specific photo. Later, you realize the noise reduction was actually a bit too strong. In Lightroom, I would simply move the slider and fix it. But with a TIFF generated externally, that’s no longer possible because the changes are irreversibly written into the file. The moment you leave the RAW layer, the limitations start piling up.
Or you end up with a TIFF where parts of the processing are already irreversibly embedded – and just 30 minutes later in your editing workflow you realize it was too much. That will never happen to me in Lightroom: I can adjust any parameter at any time, and the final image will be perfectly tuned.
This is why slightly better noise-reduction results are completely irrelevant if they come at the cost of flexibility. A small advantage in the beginning becomes a major disadvantage later.
I am deliberately saying TIFF here, because even though some tools and plugins can output DNG, the file has already been demosaiced – it’s no longer a true RAW file.
This is why I keep everything inside Lightroom. Since its AI noise reduction has become nearly state-of-the-art, there is no reason to leave Lightroom for this task. The disadvantages and limitations of external software are simply too great – not to mention the hassle of managing additional files.
And when editing, I also love using Lightroom’s virtual copies – a brilliant feature for flexible workflows.
thousandths wrote:
I find Lightroom Classic's denoise/enhance feature entirely fine and helpful most of the time? I also generally set it to 25, so maybe the fact that I'm conservative with it leads to pretty satisfactory results.
A little grain is still a good look and I rarely get that uncanny valley smooth/plastic look from it when dialed back. This is for shots up to ISO 5000 on an A1 at night.
I agree, it needs to be dialed down for best results. I generally set it to 35 or so.
thousandths wrote:
I find Lightroom Classic's denoise/enhance feature entirely fine and helpful most of the time? I also generally set it to 25, so maybe the fact that I'm conservative with it leads to pretty satisfactory results.
A little grain is still a good look and I rarely get that uncanny valley smooth/plastic look from it when dialed back. This is for shots up to ISO 5000 on an A1 at night.
I usually don’t use it — most photographs don’t need to have noise reduced — but when I do use it on a challenging photograph, FWIW I tend to use something more like 50%. (On a few really noisy images I have gone as high as 100%.)
But I strongly agree with you.that is is usually neight necessary or and aesthetic improvement to try to completely eliminate all noise from a photograph. A little grain isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it can even give a slightly soft photograph a sort of subjective sharpness, much as film grain did wiht very big enlargements in the old days.
Stefan Official wrote:
The key reason why I now do all my noise reduction exclusively in Lightroom is the workflow: Lightroom works completely non-destructively. I can adjust or undo every change at any time. If I later decide that I want a bit more or a bit less noise reduction – or even want to disable it entirely – Lightroom makes that possible without any limitations..
My workflow — I’m old-school, I guess — is still almost entirely in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), Bridge, and Photoshop. But ACR has the same NR tools that are found in Lightroom, and by importing the converted raw into Photoshop as a smart object, I can also use the ACR NR tools non-destructively. This is reall powerful.
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Finally, given teh capabilities of contemporary cameras and the abilities of current software, I think that sometimes people are going a bit overboard on nitpicking NR tools. For the purposes of argument, let’s say that one tool s 3% better than another in some edge cases — it is almost never going to make a real difference in the end result.
