Topaz Denoise AI, Comparing "Modes" and settings

hey everyone it's scott from wildlife inspired today we're going to talk a little bit about software now this is a a product review that i'm doing on topaz denoise ai it's it's a product i've talked about on my social media accounts i've endorsed the product it's the only product i would say i use almost in every image that i post it's just part of my workflow and in this video what i hope to do is tell you a little bit about how the the software works on a very basic level i'm not going to get real techy on this stuff on a basic level how does the software work and look at the three different modes that it processes and those three modes are called denoise ai ai clear and low light i'm actually going to run a an image through all three do a comparison and talk you through my settings on each of those and then at the end little surprise now if you haven't subscribed to the channel already please do so now very important that we get the subscriptions and if you like the video or you like the content on the channel thumbs up and notifications will alert you anytime a new video or posting goes up so make sure you hit that as well so hopefully you enjoyed the product review let's get right into it [Music] [Applause] [Music] so for a while on my social media accounts i've been talking about topaz denoise and and why i really really enjoy the product now i will tell you i am not a software junkie i don't process everything through multiple pieces of software bring it in from lightroom or camera raw to photoshop i'll make some edits and i don't really incorporate a lot of sharpening or de-noise programs but when i got onto topaz about a year ago i've added it to just about every photo i take and there's a couple reasons for that i'm going to break down topaz and all the details of it but the reason is it's just simple it integrates into photoshop or lightroom very quickly very seamlessly and with just a couple tweaks i'm able to remove noise and at the same time often give the the image a little bit of sharpening a little sharpening that i think it needs now if you're good in camera you don't need a lot of sharpening anyway so the other products that are out there for sharpening i tend to use as recovery tools i've got a unique image that i really really love and maybe there's just a little flaw in there and maybe i think software can fix it but for the most time if i get it right in camera and i just have a lot of low light in this case i've got i'm going to show you an image that we're going to work with today and i'm going to show you the four the three different processes in the latest version of d noise ai this is as of uh january 2021 and i'll show you side by side so i'm going to show you what they all do i'm going to walk you through my sliders hopefully about 20 minutes so bear with me as i go through each one but i think you'll find it helpful and if you're on the fence about purchasing the product it may help you if you've purchased the product and you have some questions maybe it answers some questions as well so i'm a bird photographer so what i've got up on the screen is a common yellow throat and i took this um early morning soft overcast light there's a lot of advantages i'm not going to get into all the advantages of you know soft overcast light but there are a lot of advantages for me with songbird so it's one of my favorite lights to shoot in but at times if it's not quite strong enough i'm going to shoot at a slower shutter speed and i'm going to get some noise so in this image the iso is up around 2000. now i'm shooting a d850 a nikon d850 not a great low light sensor amazing camera not the best low light sensor in the world so at 2000 iso you're going to see noise so let me just zoom in here i'm going to show you um what the noise in this image looks like as we zoom in so you can see it it's it's certainly there the image itself be because you know in part it's lower light we're going to lack a little bit of the details in here of the feathers so it's a it's a nice image but everything in camera is pretty good it's not awful made a couple tweaks in lightroom but nothing major here so now what we're going to do is i'm going to kick it over and i'll show you how it integrates into into topaz how photoshop and topaz will work very seamlessly together and i'm going to go through each of those four steps and show you the differences in them so i've got a layer here i'm going to duplicate this layer right off the bat and then each layer is going to get renamed so this background will be the original untouched file and then for this we're going to kick it over under the filter menu down to topaz labs and you can see i've got a couple of their products loaded but i'm going to go to denoise ai now it's going to load up so it's going to take a minute while it loads into the into the system and then instantly what you're going to see is 4 preview windows now i've chosen for preview windows it's got a couple of different views so if you look up here at the view menu single view let me get rid of this okay single view split view side by side in comparison and obviously that pretty easy to walk through the the original and and then what enhancements you've made in the split view and then the comparison and the reason i like to do this is sometimes i want to play and see which one works better now my my actual uh camera here i will have to move from from side to side sometimes so you may see me moving this back and forth uh but you're gonna see the original is always gonna be in the top left that's unchanged that's what you brought into denoise top right is d-noise ai that's the original processor i'll walk through the advantages of that first and then we're going to get into ai clear and the differences between those two and then what is low light what does that mean and how is it different i i will say i'm not a tech junkie so i'm not going to explain this in terms that are super technical what i do is try to apply with every tutorial that i do what is the real world what do i see when i edit what do i see when i'm out in the field how do things actually work and what's my personal experience with that so let's start with denoise so you can see as i click each window the blue will highlight the window that i'm on and you'll see it slide up here in the top right now there's a check box here for auto update preview i don't keep that checked and here's why when you check that every time you're going to see it's generating a preview that's time every time i move this even if i bump it it's going to auto generate a new preview every time i move it so what i like to do is keep that unchecked and that way i'm not slowing down that processing time in my workflow now when i move it there's no auto update so i'll put it where in the image i want to preview and then i'll just hit update when i hit update it will lock in whatever settings i chose so in this case i just locked in remove noise at 15 enhanced sharpness at 15 no recovery in detail and no color noise reduction let me walk through these sliders and what they do remove noise is pretty standard this is going to take out noise in the image topaz is going to look through it try to determine the route the the proper amount of noise reduction and then remove that noise based off of the slider so the more noise reduction you want the further that slider is going to go here's the other thing you need to look through the image sometimes because there may be parts that you're looking at that look pretty clean and over here there's some noise and to remove that you're going to increase the slider until it's gone globally in the background so all of that noise has gone in the background generally my settings for this are in the middle 40 to 60 somewhere in that range very rarely do i jack it all the way up to the right enhance sharpness normally this is somewhere around 25 to 50 so somewhere in this range and again i can update and preview and see what i like and then visually i'll be able to determine what looks good when i use recovery detail and i do this is generally between 20 and 30. sometimes i'll go a little bit more recover detail think of this as bringing back some of the original image so even some of those flaws some of that noise some of those uh imperfections that might have been in the original but mostly some of that noise is going to come back so i don't want a flat glossy look in the final piece so i do bring back some of that original detail and very important here with color noise reduction i did a video on this um with another group where i tested color noise reduction at 20 40 60 and 80. when i got above 40 it's unusable for the examples i did so be modest with this when topaz artificial intelligence runs through this process what it's going to do is attempt to sharpen and apply noise reduction at the same time it's going to try to determine the subject determine the background and do both in that process it is artificial intelligence it's remapping pixels when you do that there can be artifacts now most of those artifacts are invisible to the eye but they're there and they on in the underlying information and if you zoom in real close you start to see them the biggest thing that you're probably going to notice is the introduction of color that wasn't in the original as it sharpens it will often take for example a white area that's next to a blue area or some off-color area and it starts to pull those colors together i notice it mostly in whites that get an introduction of cyan in blue color noise reduction will attempt to minimize that but if you go too strong the colors start to bleed over so for example the yellow in this yellow throat may start to actually bleed over into the blacks and into the bill and maybe even spill over into the edge of the of the background so i like to keep this somewhere between 10 and 20. so for this example i'm going to go right in the middle of that and just say 15. it's pretty standard that i just slide it over till about 15 and leave it there i find that's about the best setting i don't generally go over 20. so in these sliders the recovery detail generally between 20 and 40 color noise reduction generally between 10 and 20 because i'm not precise with it i'll just slide it over till i see 30 and i slide it over until i get into the teens and i'm done remove noise i will start to play around with a little bit as i generate the preview so i've got settings that i think are going to work indeed denoising ai what i want you to notice here is the update processing time so when i click update watch how long this takes now if you've got other applications running you've got a larger file a slower computer that's all going to change but that that update time when you're using denoise is going to be a little bit longer compared to the next mode which we're going to look at which is ai clear now i'm going to apply this and also notice the time that it takes to apply so here we go and when i apply this it's taking those settings and it's putting them into the current layer that i was working on you can see it's chugging you can even see the frame rate of the video probably slowing down because it's chugging and it's almost painful when you're making a video to watch it work that's slow it's a lot of memory being used there okay now my frame rate's probably back on my video because it's through the process now if i take this background layer and i'm just going to zoom in you can see it did a really nice job it distinguishes the subject from the background and i'm on the on the new topaz layer and i'm going to go ahead and re just rename this denoise ai there we go all right now let's look at the difference this is with the noise reduction and that's without so super job very obvious what it did in the background let's look at these feathers specifically right here where i had the most detail there's the original and here comes the denoise notice we didn't lose any definition which is common with noise reduction programs normally they will soften an image we didn't lose definition there look around the eye so look around that eye ring right here watch what happens that's with watch it actually tighten up the pixels and sharpen boom all right so that is denoise what i'm going to do now is make another duplicate layer and i'm going to compare that layer that denoise layer to this new layer so let's again go to filter and denoise it takes a little bit of time to open up a little bit quicker this time because the software's probably already got something in there now let's go to ai clear now ai clear actually is the one i use the most and you're going to see why in my workflow i edit a lot and i post regularly so i edit a lot of images i'm not somebody who just does a fine art piece and edits it for a couple hours prints it and sells it at a high price i'm more of a social media presence and i like to get images out every day so i'm constantly editing pictures from my social media content because of that the images don't have to be perfect they have to be nice they have to be good they have to be to my standard but they don't have to be perfect and i don't have time to you know slide sliders back and forth and keep playing around so when i do ai clear you're going to notice the big difference is i've got still got the same recover detail and noise reduction but the sliders have been removed in lieu of low medium high so by default medium and low sharpness now remember that processing time when i clicked update only took a few seconds for denoise ai let's see how long it takes with ai clear just to render the image okay done you if you remember back a couple seconds here instantaneously and if i go to denoise now i can also render a preview here so let's see and now i could compare them so i've locked in the lower left has locked in ai clear and let's go to the top right and look at denoise i'm going to hit update remember that ai clear was seconds here we go already longer not too bad but you could see a difference in speed about three times as long and if i'm looking at the two you know almost apples to apples what i notice here is i've got a little bit more sharpening ai clear will attempt to separate the subject from the background and it does the most application of sharpening to the subject and the most uh noise reduction to the background so it does it's the biggest extremes in those two it's not extreme but it's more extreme than the others the other thing we'll notice in here and it's going to be a little bit hard to tell so i'm going to zoom this in and i'm going to run the update again and i'm going to run the update down here so now again i'm apples for apples look right in here and i think you can see it and write down in here ai clear while faster and often from a distance looks better it also tends to be the one that will introduce the cyans so if you look around this eye ring and right down here along these white feathers there's some cyans in there so that's one of the things that happens you notice the color noise reduction was the same on both ai clear was faster a little bit more sharpening but a little bit more artifacts in the background so i'm going to now go down to ai clear remember when we ran that denoise it was like painfully chugging through watch this it's running through those changes still going just about done and done now i would say you know ballpark that was twice as fast i don't know 100 if it was exactly twice as fast but i'm guessing it was about at least twice as fast so let's look now let me get rid of that all right let's look now at the original compared to denoise ai i'm gonna i'm sorry ai clear so this is ai clear this is the original noise reduction looks great let me go in a little tighter since we're on video noise relax reduction looks great and then again here's those little teeny artifacts they're very hard to see and you would not see these when zoomed out i'm zoomed in 600 percent so you don't see these from a distance but let me show you that color change here's ai clear and then here's denoise notice that the denoise did not add those blues nearly as much denoise ai clear so is there a difference yes i i like ai clear but i'm very cautious about those blues and cyans that get introduced and then for the last one what i'm going to do is we're going to duplicate this layer and we've explored now denoise ai and ai clear i'm going to duplicate the layer okay and i'm going to go to the filter menu again load in denoise should be pretty quick it's not going to take first time you open it up it takes a little bit longer it's now in the system so it's going to be a little quicker let me go ahead and just do an update using the same rough settings as i had last time so let's say about 20 or 30 yeah get to 30 15. medium low that's about where i was last time i'm going to update that so it's going to generate the preview here we go real quick now let's go over to low light and see what the difference is in low light when i go over to low light you're going to notice again i've lost the low medium high and i'm back on sliders i'm going to take this remove noise up and enhance sharpness up and we're going to compare it and i could even run the denoise here but i've got those layers that i built in before these were the the rough estimated settings again not exactly it's not you don't have to be precise with this but is if you're in the ballpark it's fine now watch when i apply it low light the difference is and again the processing times a little longer here with low light so you're going to see it's going to start chugging when i apply it and bring it over into photoshop i'll show you all three layers okay now that last uh i took away the processing time i cropped it out because it was just painfully slow it took uh over a full minute to process and render that image and bring it in again relative to ai clear much much much longer and it's actually seems like it's even longer than denoise ai when i use low light i didn't think it would be and i'll show you the difference with low light low light tends to apply noise reduction very globally so when you think about i said ai clear separates the background from the subject the most and attempts to sharpen the subject the more relative to the other two low light does the opposite it is the least separation of subject in background it just removes the noise almost universally so that's kind of the difference with the three now let me rename this one real quick just so we know which layers we're working on and we'll call this low light now let's go back to the very beginning and we'll run through all three and i'll show you the comparison of those of the low light to the other two this is low light zoomed in 200 percent there's the noise noise is gone now watch the subject as i go to ai clear so noise in the background is going to be pretty similar to the two but watch when i go to ai clear here it comes there notice it sharpened so go back to low light this is low light that's ai sharp or ai clear so you can see low light did not make an attempt to sharpen nearly as much it also did not introduce the artifacts that happened with that sharpening so no real artifacts here smooth applique smooth application of noise reduction so if you're just looking to globally remove noise without the sharpening low light is the best option if you're looking for the fastest option just to make quick decision separate subject from background apply the most sharpening looks great from a distance if you if you're sharing on social media or instagram these small imperfections aren't going to be obvious ai clear if you're looking to have the flexibility to adjust sharpening and noise reduction separately on sliders it's going to take a little bit longer and you may have to keep tweaking it denoise ai is the way to go so i use different ones for different applications i think you see those three differences now and again i'm just going to scroll through them one last time before i close down the video and then mention a couple other things about topaz so here's the background there's low light ai clear and then aid noise or denoise ai now when do apply this in the workflow i generally apply it pretty early so in my workflow i'll make some tweaks in lightroom or camera raw i'll bring it over to photoshop and it's at that point that i run it i do not run it off the raw files i've not had success with running it off the raw files and i actually thought you know when it first launched that was the way to go they i thought i had read run the raw files it was it was bad so i i do not run the raw files through there i run them through here i find it's just quick and easy it integrates really well i don't have to go out to a third party and bring it back in and do all that i don't have to convert the files it's just everything happens here and then from here i can continue my workflow little tweaks little edits a little dodging and burning all that other stuff that i do in an image and i'm actually going to pause the video now i'm going to finish this image it's not going to be a whole lot but i'm going to finish this image just to show you a finished product to make it pretty so let me pause this and i'll tweak it a little bit and i'll come right back all right i made a couple tweaks you're looking at the original image and in case you're curious about editing techniques or you know how to how to kind of how my workflow works or all that um check out my patreon site it's patreon.com backslash wildlife inspired but i actually uh do these videos every month where i'll i'll teach a new technique in photoshop i also do the behind the scenes work where i take you out in the field with me but um here's what i ended up with with all my tweaks here and this is what i teach i just kind of how to add a little life how to add a little pop to the image maybe remove a couple little distractions so there was the before and there's the after so again using that topaz the one i actually settled on was the aid noise for this um easily kind of a toss-up between ai clear and denoise on this but i went with d noise again the workflow is more important and speed is more important and clear will certainly save you some time but a pretty image of this common yellow throat and i hope you enjoyed the video hope you enjoyed the content in the links down below i'm to put a link to the topaz product to their website feel free to check it out there's also going to be a co a coupon code now that is good 2021. we'll see how long it lasts you can always give it a try but if you use the link in code together it should take it off of any sale or promotion they're having so it's just an extra discount on top of everything else they do as an affiliate of theirs it's something that they allow me to hand out so hope you take advantage of it hope you have a look at the topaz product especially d noise ai their sweets great but i'm telling you i don't recommend things i don't believe in and this is a product i really do believe in so thanks for tuning in to another episode and as always have a great day

Channel: Wildlife Inspired w/ Scott Keys

Views: 21,329

Keywords: photography, wildlife, topaz, topaz labs, topaz denoise, denoise AI, product review, processing, editing

Id: igE66uF7lbo

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020