TOPAZ SHARPEN AI or TOPAZ DENOISE AI: If You Could Only Choose One...Which Would It Be?

if you could only pick one sharpen ai or topaz de noise ai which one would you pick and are there ever times where you need to use them both i'm going to answer all those questions on today's tutorial stay tuned hello everyone and welcome to the joy of editing with dave kelly so if you could only pick one piece of topaz software for denoising and sharpening which would it be because we all know that both denoise ai and sharpen ai both can do noise reduction and both can do sharpening when it comes to noise reduction in my opinion topaz denoise ai is the best in its class out there there are new pieces of software out there all the time that come close but nothing really quite comes up to the standards of denoise ai and that's my opinion now also when it comes to sharpening now i'm referring to not just basic sharpening of an image but i'm talking about sharpening issues for instance camera shake or you missed the focus when you took the picture these type of sharpening issues generally cannot be fixed unless you have a product like topaz sharpen ai and there's nothing out there in my opinion that even comes close to topaz sharpen ai the reason i'm doing this video today is because you know topaz sharpen a int noise ai have gotten so much better with these new updates the topaz are doing on on these two pieces of software and they're continuing to get better and better and better in past videos i mentioned that uh topaz sharpen ai was good for images up to around a thousand iso but with some of these newer updates i think it's a lot better and that's what i want to discover today now this image i'm using today is an image by ken tony thank you ken i've been using some of ken's images and he's graciously let me use some of his great bird images and so i really want to thank you for that ken but this image was shot at a very high iso of 6400. now normally i would not even try this in topaz sharpen ai i would take it to denoise first but i'm going to make a test today and see if we can get rid of that type of a noise condition with sharpen ai so let me go ahead and zoom in i'm going to zoom in to 400 so you can really see it i want you to really be able to see there is a lot of noise in this image and it's a little on the soft side by the way i'm using lightroom classic today let's go into the develop module let me show you what i've done to this image and let's open up the basic adjustments and you'll see here i'd i've just done some very basic adjustments here i've done no presence adjustments because i've i highly recommend that you do not use any presence adjustments no texture clarity or dehazing whenever you're denoising or sharpening your images so i recommend that and that is if you're going to use denoise ai or sharpen ai and the other thing i always do is in detail shut my sharpening off shut my noise reduction off i always use the default setting of 25 for lightroom for color noise reduction i find that gives you the best results you can experiment with that and see what you get but i highly recommend that you do that leave that at the default setting of 25 and then on lens corrections i have my remove chromatic aberrations and enable profile corrections and i do that for every image next up i'm going to send this into topaz sharpen ai now sharpen ai since its latest updates has some new settings in it and this is one of the reasons i'm doing this video today because of these new settings and i'm going to see if we can take a high iso image like this one iso 6400 and get away with sharpen ai for both noise reduction and sharpening i'm going to right click my image with my mouse go to edit in and sharpen ai topaz sharpen ai and we're going to edit a copy with lightroom adjustments i always use tiff profoto rgb you could use adobe rgb if you wanted to but i i prefer pro photo rgb it's the largest color space bit depth you have your choice between 8 and 16 i always use 16 you're going to get the best edit editing results when you use that now resolution anywhere between 240 up to whatever your printer likes if you have a certain printer that you use all the time your own uh personal printer like my printer is an epson in it likes uh res a resolution of 360. so generally i'll do my resolutions at 360. but for today i'm just going to use 300 which will be fine and as far as compression i always choose no compression i highly recommend that and now all we need to do is click edit and that'll fire up topaz sharpen ai and we will get started we're now in topaz sharpen ai and we're in the comparison view and to get to the comparison view if you don't have it it's just come up here to view and you can choose comparison view right here now there's different views you can choose but we're going to start out here on comparison view now the upper left hand corner is the original image with its noise and out of focus issues and all that and to the right of that is the motion blur model underneath the original is the out of focus model and to the right of that is the two soft models so these are the three models that we have in topaz sharpen ai and then take notice underneath uh the three models here we have three different modes we have a normal a very noisy and a very blurry we're going to look at all those here shortly and underneath that we have settings and we have settings and i have auto checked on so that means that topaz is going to automatically detect what settings it thinks that these uh three models should have well now we're zoomed in to a hundred percent and by looking at all of the three different uh models i think the best one or ones are the motion blur and the out of focus look the best the too soft looks a little bit on the soft side but next up we're going to do some pixel peeping on all the models so we can really come to a conclusion which one will be the best so let's go ahead and change our view from comparison view to the side-by-side view and let's also zoom into um 200 and the reason i'm going to the side-by-side view so we have a lot more real estate of the image to look at and i'm zoomed way into 200 and we're starting out with the two soft model here but in actuality i think i want to start out with motion blur let's start out with the actual motion blur give it a second or two to update itself now remember we're in the normal mode so i can see some noise right in here and here and around the edges out here and down in here so i can see a little bit of noise so we're not there yet so we're looking at the motion blur model next let's look at it with the very noisy mode so let me click that give it a second or two to update itself and we'll see what the difference looks like it's almost there now it's there now that looks pretty good it got rid of most of the noise right here i can still still see a tad bit of noise let's see what happens if i take the suppressed noise up more let me see if i can get rid of some more noise let it update itself now i still see it there so let me set it back to auto all right so there's a little bit of noise there but let's try the uh very blurry mode and see what changes happen here this is the experimentation stage we're just trying all these different modes out to see now i can still see a little bit of noise in here but i like the sharpness of the bird i think that looks really nice that looks like the best we can get out of the motion blur now let's try out of focus so i'm going to click on out of focus and we'll start out in normal in the auto position here it'll update here in a second now it looks a little funny in this area right in here but and there the noise is pretty good though i don't there's maybe a slight amount of noise in here but not much but let's go ahead and click on very noisy and let it update itself and see what kind of result we get it's almost there it's rendering right now okay it's rendered out this looks a lot better it doesn't uh you know it looks a lot clearer right in this area so it looks really good the noise is is pretty much gone right in here it looks pretty nice and now let's try it under very blurry and see what kind of result we get and don't forget we're using the auto settings for all these if we need to make some readjustments we will okay so now here we are under very blurry now i can see a little bit of noise right in here so that's not going to be good so let's go back to very noisy and that actually looks really good the noise is gone let's move around to this area of the image and let it update itself because remember there was a little bit of noise down in this area before and that noise is all gone everything's looking really good so far so so far i think i'm pretty happy with this out of focus but just for the heck of it let's try too soft under the different modes as well so let's click on two soft next and we'll let it render out in normal first so there's the normal and it does look a little soft and also there's a lit there is some noise in here as well actually all over the image i do see some noise so let's click on very noisy give it a second or two to update itself and i still see a lot of noise so that's not working and now let's try very blurry and see what kind of result we get it's still rendering out now it's done now it's got rid of most of the noise there's still a little bit of noise in here and but the bird looks relatively sharp it looks pretty good let's see what happens if i can get rid of this noise if i take this suppressed noise up further to the right let's let it re-render itself and no that noise is still there that's not really helping it so i'm going to go ahead and go back to out of focus and it remembers my last setting of very noisy with the auto setting and there is no noise in here whatsoever the bird looks sharp everywhere and let's do some pixel peeping like here's a leaf over here let's let that render out and see what this looks like here it's always good to look for artifacts in any kind of weird issues but look that's nice and sharp and the noise is totally gone we'll examine a few other areas here everything looks good here let's look over in this area here yeah the noise is totally gone so remember i'm at iso 6400 and looking good so now let's go let's go to zoom to fit now whoops says large preview size warning well you know what i don't want to be in this side-by-side view let me go to a single view okay and now we'll do zoom to fit and it's going to say hey large preview size warning again using fit view on large images may introduce slow down when updating the preview i'm going to click ok and see how long it takes to update itself actually it didn't take long at all i'm going to left click with my mouse and hold my mouse down and you're going to see the before so i'm going to left click hold my mouse on here's the before i'll release the mouse and here is the after so what do you think i hope you can see that we're going to send this back into lightroom and we'll do a little further pixel peeping in lightroom but i'm happy with my result using the out of focus model along with a very noisy mode it took us a bit of experimentation to get to the final result but i think it was worth it now all we need to do is click apply and we'll be sent right back into lightroom i'm gonna let this render in real time and denoise and sharpen ai are a lot faster since the last updates and now we're back in lightroom and we're gonna go ahead and do some pixel peeping so let me go ahead and zoom in to 300 percent but check that out there is no noise anywhere on the image and the areas that needed to be sharpened got sharpened beautifully the bird is now a lot sharper than it was and uh there is no noise whatsoever now this image started out as an iso 6400 image and from all my testing i believe iso 6400 is the cap off point anything above there you're gonna need uh topaz denoise ai to get rid of that noise successfully but iso 6400 and under i think sharpen ai is all you really need well there you go everyone if i only had one choice between topaz de noise ai and sharpen ai i would definitely pick sharpen ai because up to iso 6400 it can denoise and sharpen it can do everything so that's pretty cool but if you have extremely high iso images you will need both now remember when you're using both products always use the noise before you use sharpen ai but if you're using sharpen ai for images up to iso 6400 obviously that's all you need for everything i hope you enjoyed this tutorial today if you did please give it a like share with your friends and if you're not yet a subscriber to my channel please subscribe click that bell notification icon then every time i upload a new tutorial you'll be notified about it i want to thank each and every one of you for joining me today in the joy of editing with dave kelly and i'll see you all right here next time but until then happy editing

Channel: The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Views: 5,639

Keywords: Topaz, Topaz Labs, Topaz Sharpen Ai, Topaz DeNoise Ai, Lightroom, Sharpen, Remove Noise, Sharpening, Noise Reduction, Blur, Camera Shake, Missed Focus, Focus, Promo, Promo Code, davidkelly

Id: xynEgQJToCo

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021