BackdoorArts
Senior Member
I've said it here before but I wanted to once again mention how good Topaz Denoise AI is.
Yesterday, as I was sitting down to some Corned Beef and Cabbage, I looked out the kitchen window and saw a Red Fox coming over the rock wall in the backyard. I jumped up, grabbed the D500 with 500mm pf sitting there all set up for birds in flight and stepped outside. It was dusk and I knew the camera was set for too fast a shutter speed so I just spun it down a couple clicks, opened the aperture a click, and started firing. I have a max ISO set to 4000 on the D500, so at 1/800s f6.3 this is what I got...
A 100% crop reveals tack sharp focus (yay, Nikon!!) and some significant noise...
In the past the first thing I'd do in Lightroom would be to adjust the brightness and deal with the noise as best I could. When I purchased Topaz Denoise AI my workflow didn't change much, so the first thing I'd do is to brighten this up a bit greatly amplifying the noise across the photo in the process. Denoise AI would still deal with it in a more than acceptable way, so I had no reason to change. But this morning that changed.
Topaz recommends that you apply Denoise AI before doing any other adjustments to the file, so when I saw the way this looked in Lightroom I said, "What the heck?!", and just opened it in Photoshop without applying any adjustments other than the camera profile and lens corrections. (Note: You can apply Denoise AI in Lightroom and have it create a new TIFF or other file type which you then can apply Develop settings to before opening in Photoshop, I just prefer to do it this way as it creates one less file.)
Once in Photoshop I replicated the background layer and opened it in Denoise AI (I normally just make background Layer 0 and apply Denoise to the bottom layer but with extreme noise I like to preserve the original - Denoise and other Topaz AI filters are applied to the current active layer, so it's good to replicate first). Once in I zoomed into 100% at the face so I could get most of the head to see what detail I was preserving and also some of the noisy areas. The first thing I do is to preview the noise reduction to make sure it's sufficient, then ramp up the Sharpness slider to bring back details. In general this is fairly straight forward, but what I found in this case is that some of the less detailed areas both in the face and background got some weird pixelizations even as the rest of the image looked superb. I played with the sliders until I could make sure that the background had no weirdness introduced and then made note of strange areas elsewhere to fix in Ps (in this case it was a small area of the nose which I fixed by masking back in the untouched original as needed). This was the result...
As you can see it did a smashing job!
From here I replicate that layer and then apply the Camera Raw Filter. I should note here that I've yet to find any real difference applying Camera Raw to an open image in Photoshop and the same Raw file in Lightroom. All the light information in each pixel is preserved, so it's just like applying it to a Raw file as you open it in Photoshop ... except now all the noise is gone!!
I used Camera Raw to do all the same basic lighting adjustments I would have in Lightroom only now it was applied as a new layer after Denoise. It looked great. I then used Topaz Adjust AI (which has become indispensable to me for getting really clear, sharp images) to give me this...
Now it was all about finishing the image. The first step was to better isolate the Fox so I applied a blur technique I think I've finally got perfected to the background (if anyone is interested I'll post something separate). I was happy with that so for me all that was left was one more trip through Camera Raw as a Smart Filter (so I can go back and tweek).
After saving to Lightroom, I applied the crop I wanted and I was done. I'll send that Lightroom modified version back into Photoshop for resizing and watermarking, which I did to give you the final result.
I have a huge catalog of unfinished images that were abandoned because of noise, but since getting Denoise AI I've been slowly going back and discovering that I can now finish them into something I can be proud of.
I'm happy to answer any specific questions.
Yesterday, as I was sitting down to some Corned Beef and Cabbage, I looked out the kitchen window and saw a Red Fox coming over the rock wall in the backyard. I jumped up, grabbed the D500 with 500mm pf sitting there all set up for birds in flight and stepped outside. It was dusk and I knew the camera was set for too fast a shutter speed so I just spun it down a couple clicks, opened the aperture a click, and started firing. I have a max ISO set to 4000 on the D500, so at 1/800s f6.3 this is what I got...
A 100% crop reveals tack sharp focus (yay, Nikon!!) and some significant noise...
In the past the first thing I'd do in Lightroom would be to adjust the brightness and deal with the noise as best I could. When I purchased Topaz Denoise AI my workflow didn't change much, so the first thing I'd do is to brighten this up a bit greatly amplifying the noise across the photo in the process. Denoise AI would still deal with it in a more than acceptable way, so I had no reason to change. But this morning that changed.
Topaz recommends that you apply Denoise AI before doing any other adjustments to the file, so when I saw the way this looked in Lightroom I said, "What the heck?!", and just opened it in Photoshop without applying any adjustments other than the camera profile and lens corrections. (Note: You can apply Denoise AI in Lightroom and have it create a new TIFF or other file type which you then can apply Develop settings to before opening in Photoshop, I just prefer to do it this way as it creates one less file.)
Once in Photoshop I replicated the background layer and opened it in Denoise AI (I normally just make background Layer 0 and apply Denoise to the bottom layer but with extreme noise I like to preserve the original - Denoise and other Topaz AI filters are applied to the current active layer, so it's good to replicate first). Once in I zoomed into 100% at the face so I could get most of the head to see what detail I was preserving and also some of the noisy areas. The first thing I do is to preview the noise reduction to make sure it's sufficient, then ramp up the Sharpness slider to bring back details. In general this is fairly straight forward, but what I found in this case is that some of the less detailed areas both in the face and background got some weird pixelizations even as the rest of the image looked superb. I played with the sliders until I could make sure that the background had no weirdness introduced and then made note of strange areas elsewhere to fix in Ps (in this case it was a small area of the nose which I fixed by masking back in the untouched original as needed). This was the result...
As you can see it did a smashing job!
From here I replicate that layer and then apply the Camera Raw Filter. I should note here that I've yet to find any real difference applying Camera Raw to an open image in Photoshop and the same Raw file in Lightroom. All the light information in each pixel is preserved, so it's just like applying it to a Raw file as you open it in Photoshop ... except now all the noise is gone!!
I used Camera Raw to do all the same basic lighting adjustments I would have in Lightroom only now it was applied as a new layer after Denoise. It looked great. I then used Topaz Adjust AI (which has become indispensable to me for getting really clear, sharp images) to give me this...
Now it was all about finishing the image. The first step was to better isolate the Fox so I applied a blur technique I think I've finally got perfected to the background (if anyone is interested I'll post something separate). I was happy with that so for me all that was left was one more trip through Camera Raw as a Smart Filter (so I can go back and tweek).
After saving to Lightroom, I applied the crop I wanted and I was done. I'll send that Lightroom modified version back into Photoshop for resizing and watermarking, which I did to give you the final result.
I have a huge catalog of unfinished images that were abandoned because of noise, but since getting Denoise AI I've been slowly going back and discovering that I can now finish them into something I can be proud of.
I'm happy to answer any specific questions.
