TopazDeNoise

hey everyone my name is Scott Key's from s Keys Images and wildlife inspired today I'm gonna do a quick tutorial on noise reduction and I'm gonna show you three different methods that I've used in the past and the one that I'm currently using now so in the past I've done noise reduction in Photoshop and I've used some third-party filters as well the product that I'm using now is topaz D noise so I'm gonna show you a little bit about that product and how it compares to the ways that I used to do this so let's get onto the video if you look at the screen I've got a Canada Warbler that I shot earlier this year and I tried to find something that had an ISO over a thousand so let me just pull up some of the dark areas with noise in general you're gonna see more noise in the darker areas than you do in the lighter areas and when I'm zoomed in to 300% you can certainly see that there's a grain to this image so I'm gonna apply three different methods of noise reduction I've created three layers over here so each layer is just a duplicate and I'm gonna toggle these on and off one at a time and at the end that'll give me the ability to really show a compare and contrast of these images alright so the first one is just regular Photoshop noise reduction and this is done through a filter and when you hit the filter menu you're gonna see a noise and you'll see options for adding noise and reducing noise so we're gonna hit the noise reduction it gives a preview and we're gonna zoom in and I've got this strength at 10 now and you can change this so I could go more or less typically with this I increase the color noise reduction which are pretty safe to do that doesn't tend to take a lot of details out I'm not gonna sharpen any details and I'm gonna bring the strength of this up to 8 and this was pretty typical of how I used to do this on quick edits because honestly it was just a pretty fast way to do it I'm gonna apply that to the image so again this was at a strength of 8 with no sharpening applied so let's go in and see what that did on these tog I can toggle the layers on and off so there's the before there's the after you can see that it did remove a little but a noise with some left of most interest is what it does to the subject though and one of the dangers of using noise reduction that it tends to soften the subject so when I put that noise reduction on you could see the subject just got a little softer not a whole lot so the noise reduction is on and the noise reduction is off so just a little softer let's see what happens when we do this in Adobe Camera Raw so many select a new layer and I'm gonna go up and hit the filter and now I'm gonna bring in the Camera Raw filter so you could also just reopen this in Camera Raw or you could edit this in Lightroom and there are settings here for noise reduction as well so when you go to the detail so if you look at my menu bar here I selected detail and noise reduction is the same here with color and I normally crank that up about 3/4 and then luminance which I only go about a quarter and again it'll allow me to preview so when I click on it it'll show me the noise reduction on and off and I'm just gonna increase this a little bit more and we'll see what that looks like no again no sharpening applied to this now this one I went a little stronger probably than I did in Photoshop you can definitely see the reduction in noise so when I look in this dark area here it is on much smoother here it is off you can see that grain come back into play but watch what it does to the subject so again I went a little stronger on the noise reduction so it does a nice job one of the things I used to do with noise reduction is I would create these noise reduction layers and then I would do masks and I would tend to paint out the noise reduction on the subject so that's certainly a viable option still now let's try the last method which is the one that I'm currently using now and that's topaz a beautiful thing about topaz is it works it integrates with Photoshop so that you don't have to send it out to a third-party piece of software so it's right in here you can see I've got a few topaz products that I'm using the one I'm using now is called D noise AI so they may two versions they make a standard part of their studio was just called de noise in this AI and the AI stands for artificial intelligence and it's pretty slick what it does it'll go in and try to figure out which areas should be sharp which areas should be should have noise reduction applied to them and then it will act appropriately and you can see I've got a couple sliders in here for removing noise enhancing sharpness and recovering details I've played around with these settings and my default for this has been somewhere between ten and fifteen on the remove noise similar on the enhanced sharpness and I haven't been using a much of this recovered details so in general you figure fifteen fifteen five is about right or 15 10 five has been a pretty common setting sometimes it also depends on the file size so if you're working with more megapixels with a bigger resolution camera you may find that you can move these sliders a little bit more and then again if you have less resolution you may be may be inclined to do fewer adjustments let me zoom in here at 400% now so now we're in real tight and we're gonna see that noise reduction applied and look how smooth this one got now I can adjust it I'm gonna leave it here so it's a pretty strong noise reduction what I want you to really pay attention to here is that when I toggle on and off watch the noise go but the detail stay I didn't have to do anything for that to happen now I can change that with enhanced sharpness and recover details but the program without much of that apply actually does it by itself it has determined what it thinks is the subject and it's applied a little bit of sharpening to that in the same time it determines what's the background and it really smooths it out so let's go ahead and apply that and that'll put it on to that layer that I was working on in the in the Photoshop area now this takes a little bit longer so you notice the other two processes were pretty quick they're integrated into Lightroom they're honestly not as powerful this one is going through and calculating every area of the image trying to get it right now let's compare all three so let's start with the Photoshop noise reduction and this was the original file this was the Photoshop noise reduction and again I didn't crank it up to ten but I cranked it up to eight so you know a fair amount of noise reduction here is the Adobe Camera Raw version where I applied more noise reduction and you can see it did a pretty good job on the background but the subject got softer so as I increase the strength of the filter it got softer and here's the Topaz product the smoothest of all the backgrounds clearly and also the sharpest on the subject now one thing I will do here is this product again it figures out where the borders are and no product is perfect so with artificial intelligence it will sometimes create anomalies so you do need to go in and look around and try to make sure that nothing weird happened on edges because I apply my noise reduction in layers I do have the ability to mask it out and I'm not gonna do a tutorial on that but you could mask out some of the noise reduction I can also control it with opacity so if I feel like I could bring some noise back in I can just dial back the opacity on this layer it'll bring it to a little bit more of a natural state where it was before and some of those artifacts will smooth out if there were any around the bill so again because this product determines which areas should be sharp in which should have the noise reduction applied you run the risk around the edges around the bill here around the feather details here that it could create some anomalies or artifacts now there's ways to clean those up and I actually do that I've noticed with this product it introduces blue so watch when I go from here what it did is it smooth this area it tightened up this area and in the process of tightening up the edge of the bill it added this blue color that was probably there a little but it enhanced it so sometimes I'll go back in and just clean up these areas where it looks like it might have done some of that let's look at this area right here you can see that was just a droplet and it applied some noise reduction and sharpening that probably would hold up okay but I am particular with this product that I go in and look at the details I'll look around eyes so let's take the product off and I'll just see if it introduced any blues here that I might want to get rid of and there's very simple ways you can desaturate color channels so you can just go up to blues and you can just pull the Blues down and then you can mask those on to the areas you want again not a tutorial on masking and cloning and desaturation really just a tutorial on the power of this topaz product so with that said I will tell you having used all three of these in the past using the photoshop noise reduction the Adobe Camera Raw noise reduction and when I used that I always had to go back in and mask it out because it made the subject too soft with the topaz topaz product I'm telling you I really don't do any masking anymore I let the program run the only thing I then do is decide if I want to go back and apply an opacity to that layer to bring a little bit of the grain back in if it went too strong so it gets my full endorsement it's got a few things that I'll comment on in the comments of this video so you'll see a couple links I do get some bonus points with topaz when you use the link below so if you're considering purchasing use the link below to purchase and if you send me a message either through email or direct message on Instagram @s keys images or I'll put my email address in here as well send me a direct message I have some coupon codes available that they were kind enough to send me that I can pass on so that's my review hope you enjoyed it and definitely a product that I would look into have a great day

Channel: scott keys

Views: 7,347

Keywords: topaz, denoise ai, photoshop, wildlife, bird photography, photography, editing, topaz denoise

Id: b_KHBsLne24

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019