Topaz DeNoise AI Review and Demonstration

hello everyone today we're going to be talking about topaz denoise ai where does it work where doesn't it work and is it worth it let's get started [Music] i just want to know this is not a sponsored video and i'm not being reimbursed for this in any way this is software that i purchased and use on a daily basis today we're going to walk through three separate scenarios one we're going to do wildlife two we're going to do landscapes and three i'm going to show you a scenario where it really doesn't work and it's not the fault of the software before we get into it please do me a huge favor hit that subscribe button and like so i can keep bringing you more content like this in our first example we're going to take a look at this duck now this photo is actually pretty sharp as it is and there's not a lot of noise however if we zoom into 100 you can start to see around the eyeball within the eye itself and the color there's a little bit of noise and if i go down here you can see a little bit of noise in the beak in the background now in the past i probably would have left this just like it is but with this new software i always feel like i might as well give it a try and see what it can do also i do recommend that you do not crop your photos at this point what we're going to do when we export this is going to change it to a tiff format the new version of topaz denoise does handle raw files however you have to load those directly into the software not export them from lightroom and the last thing you might want to do before you export if you're going to change your color profile do that now because once we change that over to a tiff format it's going to lose that to export this to topaz denoise we're going to go up to photo edit in topaz denoise ai now we're going to leave this as edit as a copy with lightroom adjustments file format tiff and i like to leave the bit depth at 16 so we're not losing any data okay here we are in the software by default i have auto update preview off you can turn that on the only thing you have to notice every time you click around on this image or scroll these images around it's going to have to re-update so it takes a little bit extra time by default i like to leave this to auto on just as a starting point i usually end up changing the remove noise and enhance sharpness somewhat as i go along for post processing i'm not going to show it on this photo that can be useful on some photos where you have some color noise or the denoise takes it a little bit too far you can recover some of that original detail i'm not going to cover the ai clear and low light in this video there's lots of youtube videos out there that show that much better than i can in this short amount of time so i'm going to go ahead and click on the update button and let's see what the auto settings look like for this photo wow not bad so you can see the noise in the eye it's pretty much gone if i go ahead and click down here on the beak where we could see some of the noise in the beak and some of the noise in the background let's update this again really good so one thing that i do find is it tends to over sharpen i like to do more of my sharpening in lightroom or photoshop itself now i'm not gonna take it down to zero but i'm gonna back this off quite a bit i'm going to take this let's start at 25 and click on update and there we go of course a lot of this is going to be personal preference so go ahead and play with those sliders till you find an image that you like when you're done go ahead and click on apply now this is by far the most time consuming portion of this process it's actually applying the noise reduction and as you can see by the new timer it has about a minute or a minute and a half to go that timer was introduced with the latest update on the software we're not going to watch this whole thing i'm going to go ahead and skip through this and let's take this back into lightroom so here we are back in lightroom as you can see just like before when you're zoomed out you can't see that much of a difference however let's zoom back into 100 percent and now you can really tell look at that eyeball look at the noise in the beak and the background i think it did a really great job all right let's move on to our next example this is a photo of a wall cloud i took while out storm spotting about 10 years ago this is on my very first digital slr a canon eos digital rebel xti let's zoom in to see what kind of noise we have in the cloud itself as you can see quite a bit so i thought this would be a good example to test the software to see how much detail we would lose in the clouds itself let's go ahead and open this in topaz denoise ai so d noise ai does remember the settings from the previous photo that you worked on so in this case i'm going to go ahead and re-click the auto button and update and we're going to see where we start out on this photo so already you can see it removed a ton of the noise let's click on the edge of the cloud for a better example i think that looks pretty good but i'm going to go ahead and reduce this sharpness again i'm going to take it down to about 25 and i'm going to update the noise just a little bit let's try about 15 and let's update and i'm going to go ahead and hit apply so we can go look at this back in lightroom okay back in lightroom now so let's zoom in and see if we can tell the difference i'm going to zoom into the clouds and you can really see the noise reduction on the edge of the clouds now i did lose a little bit of detail as you can see in the fine edges of these clouds back in topaz denoise i could have hit recover detail and that would have brought some of that back and look at the trees as well the sharpening did a great job and there's a lot less noise okay let's move on to our last example for the last photo i want to show you an example of where the software doesn't work and it's not the fault of the software it's the fault of the photo itself now this photo was from the first time i went out to try to capture eagles in flight when i looked at the back of the camera i thought i nailed this but let's zoom in and take a look a little bit closer as you can see i missed the focus and some other settings my iso was too high in this photo and it missed the details especially in the shadows now my first thought was let's run this through the software and see what it can do so why not let's go ahead and do that okay let's leave this on the auto setting and see what the software can do so as you can see on a first pass it tried to sharpen this quite a bit but it really didn't take out a lot of the noise i'm going to actually go ahead and reduce this sharpness and let's crank up the noise reduction and see if this has an impact so here you can see it took out more of the noise but look how much detail we lost especially around the legs and in the face of the bird so what's this tell us the software can't remove noise if the data isn't there in the first place this photo was technically bad we missed the shot we missed the focus we missed the iso settings if the detail is not there in the first place we're not going to be able to pull that back so while we're not going to be able to recover any of the detail in this photo and make it usable we can use it as a learning tool let's look at the post processing sliders down here as mentioned we lost a ton of the detail in the legs and the face with this first slider recover original detail we can use this to pull some of that back in let's go ahead and slide this up to about and we will update the photo this is a lot quicker on the processing time and you can already see how it did pull back some of the details the other thing we can use this for is if we look in the wings on this bird because of the added noise we have a lot of extra colors in the wings that shouldn't be here if we go down to this color noise reduction slider and slide this up and go ahead and click on update it will start to pull some of this color out now i don't do a lot of this in topaz d noise ai i tend to do this more in lightroom and photoshop but it is a tool that's available to you well i hope you enjoyed the video and got some useful information out of it there's a link in the description that'll let you download topaz denoise ai for a free trial for me it only took a couple of noisy photographs to be sold on this product for you give it a try till next time [Music] you

Channel: David Schliepp

Views: 1,757

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Id: YJdI0M9ihxU

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021