Adobe released a great new update today with a handful of new features. One of the main highlight features is a new AI Denoise feature! This is one of the flagship features of Topaz Labs Photo AI. So Naturally I went to dig through my photo library to do a quick test of the AI capabilities.
I did a quick search of my photo library based on ISO and came up with this photo of a stormy sunset that I probably accidentally photographed with an astronomical ISO of 200,000. Needless to say it has a TON of ISO noise in it and a great candidate for a basic denoise test, there is a lot of dynamic areas of this image to analyze and see how well the denoising works.
Above is my 200,000 ISO test image with light processing but no denoise applied.
Topaz AI Denoise
I first loaded the image up into Topaz denoise and I captured a screenshot of the 4 main denoise modes that I like best:
I chose to go with “clear” as my best option because with this much noise “severe noise” and even “standard” had a bunch of smudgy artifacts. Below is the denoise result from topaz with clear setting.
Lightroom AI Denoise
And Now for the moment of truth, I edited the image in the new lightroom denoise AI with a slider at 80%
For good measure I tested the image using the now “manual” denoise slider in lightroom.
Lightroom Manual Noise Reduction
Verdict
After this test it appears Lightroom’s new AI denoise still smooths out the photo as most denoise tools do, but suffers from less smudgy artifacts and appears to be a decent advance in noise reduction editing. It currently takes around 5 minutes to denoise a photo which is much longer than topaz takes but it may just be worth the extra time for this result.
