- [Instructor] We recently
released the new RAW model in DeNoise AI version 3.3. And I've been seeing some questions about when you should send your RAW file, or even if you should send
your RAW file to DeNoise AI to use that model. And it's important to discuss because in order to use the RAW model, you have to first send your
RAW file to DeNoise AI, before you do any other edits. If you right click and select edit in, and then select DeNoise AI
over here as the option, you won't be able to use the RAW model because Lightroom will
create a copy of your photo in either TIFF, JPEG or PNG file formats. And none of those file formats are supported by the RAW model. So again, you'll have to
send your RAW file over to DeNoise AI at the beginning,
if you want to use it. Unfortunately, I have another video that goes through in detail that workflow, as well as using a standalone workflow, if you wanna send your
RAW file to DeNoise AI. So I recommend checking that out. But let's take a more practical look at when you should consider using it and when you might not need to. So I've got these two photos here, the first one was taken in
Hawaii with an ISO of 1600. And then the second photo was taken by my colleague
Hillary at an ISO of 20,000. Now that is a high ISO value, but she took it for illustrative purposes and it actually does a
fantastic job of illustrating why you would wanna use the RAW model. Also, if you look at ISO 20,000, even at a pretty open aperture of 6.3, she was only able to get a shutter speed of one, three 20th of a second, which for wildlife is really important. So this ISO setting is not
really that far fetched for this particular example. All right, let's open up
the sea turtle photo here. Now, if we go to the develop module, I just wanna show you, I already
made some edits over here, and if we press the backslash key, you can see that's the original photo. And I'm showing that to
you for a specific reason, it'll make sense in a second. But here's the edited photo and you can see, I really
didn't do that much. Just kind of fix color and
tone just a little bit. So if we zoom in here,
you can see at ISO 1600, there is just a little bit
of noise that I can see throughout, especially
in the background here. You can see how it's
kind of noisy over here, and that really becomes more pronounced as you start editing your photo. So the first recommendation
that I would make when deciding whether to send
your RAW file to DeNoise AI is to edit the photo. Edit your RAW file, and then zoom in, in certain areas to see if
that noise is very pronounced. Here, it's not very pronounced, so I'm not that worried about
having to use the RAW model, but I can if I want to. And so to do that, I'll go
back to grid view over here. And I'm gonna take the photo
over here in the grid view, and I'm gonna drag it
onto the DeNoise icon. Now, indeed now as you can see, if you look at the navigator on the top and in the preview window, you can see that the image is darker and that's because when you
send a RAW file to DeNoise AI, we don't take into account
any edits that you make. Which is why I showed you
that before and after preview, because I wanted you to
see the original photo, which is what we have in DeNoise AI. And you can see that with
the new suggested panel, we've automatically
suggested the RAW model, which makes sense, because
we sent a RAW file to it. And if you click on the image, you can see the original and then let go, and
you can see the after. And then if we move up here a little bit, you can see that the background
has really been cleaned up. If we press and hold, you can
see all that noise over there. And then when we let go,
that noise has been removed. So now that we're done, let's click on save image
to return back to Lightroom, but first make sure that
you have DNG selected. And this is again, if you're sending your
RAW file to DeNoise AI, and you're using the RAW model, I highly recommend selecting
the DNG image format and source as the saved directory option, and then click save. And now that we're back in Lightroom, we now need to reimport that
photo that was just created and to do that, right click on the folder where that original photo is located and then select the synchronize folder and then click on synchronize. And now you'll see, there is the original
photo that was edited, and then we have the
output file from DeNoise AI using the RAW model. So the first thing you can do
is select the original photo and then press and hold on
the command or control key, and then click on the output file and then click on sync settings. And here you can specify which parameters you want to sync over. So I've only selected the options that I actually made changes
to, and I'll click synchronize. Now, in some cases, you might notice that if
let's go to compare over here, you might notice that there
are some slight differences between your originally edited RAW file and then the DNG photo. And that has to do with
how we build our DNG files. We've done a really good
job of getting really close to the original RAW file, but sometimes you might need
to make some manual edits. And so I'll go back to the
grid view, select the DNG file and click on develop. And what I'm gonna do here is just kind of open up a few things. I'm gonna open up the shadows a little bit and open up the black point. And then let's go to the original
photo, back to this photo and maybe open up the exposure
just a little bit more. And so what I'm doing is kind
of toggling between the two, trying to see if I can get it similar. And then here, I'm just gonna maybe
adjust the white balance just a little bit. And here we're pretty close. I don't wanna spend too much time because I don't want to bore you, but I wanna show you
just some of the things that I have had to do to get the DNG file, to look close to the RAW file. But what's more important is that if I go and I compare the two and we
zoom in, you can see that, especially in areas where there
is noise, that's all gone, but we've retained all
of that important detail in the DNG file. And even looking at these two
images in the compare view, you can see that they are quite similar. Now, one, let's do one more thing. Let's go ahead and with
a typical workflow, we'll right click on
this photo, go to edit in and select Topaz DeNoise AI. And for this example,
I'm just gonna use JPEG and have everything else as
default, and then click edit. Now, the first thing you'll
notice with the edit in workflow is that we do bring over
the changes and edits that you've made to your RAW file because we've baked them into a new, in this case, JPEG file. And if we go to the model list, you'll notice that RAW is grayed out because we didn't send the
RAW file, we sent a JPEG, which is not compatible
with the RAW model. But let's go ahead and change
our view to comparison view. And this gives me an
opportunity to show off some of the improvements
to comparison view. We also have a video specifically
showing these features, but I wanna show them to you here. One of the things I can do now is take control of this top left quadrant, which is nice because
we have four models here and I wanna see all four models at once. So I'm gonna toggle this
original switch off, and then I'm gonna select this, and actually we already
applied the standard. So now we have all four models
in each of the quadrants. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and reposition the focus box. And so looking between these four models, I think I like clear the most. So this is how I've started to
use the new comparison view. Now that I've identified
that clear is the model that I prefer the most, I
will turn original back on. So that now gives me a
view of the original photo in the top left quadrant. Another cool thing that we can do now is compare the same model
using different settings in multiple quadrants. So it used to be where you
can only have one model in each quadrant. Now I can take this quadrant over here and change it to clear as well. And if I go to this setting,
you can see that for clear, we have medium and high
for noise and sharpness in this top, right quadrant. In this bottom left quadrant, I'm gonna change the remove noise to low. And then in the bottom right quadrant, I'm gonna change the model
to clear and select high. Now I can really refine which
settings for the given model I want to use. And so I can take my focus box and move it over here for example, and yep, this top right model seems to have the best
combination of settings so I'll double click on that. And then I will click on apply
to return back to Lightroom. And now that we're back in Lightroom, you can see here is the original RAW file. This is the DNG file that
we use the RAW model with. And then here's the JPEG
file that has the clear model applied to it. And so what I wanna do is
compare the RAW to the JPEG file to see if there are any major differences. So here you can see
that for the most part, they look the same. Again, we had to manually
address the DNG a little bit, but if we zoom in, you can see that the RAW
model is a little bit cleaner. If I'm specifically looking back here in the smooth areas of the bouquet and definitely is cleaner, but it's not like there's
anything terribly wrong with the clear model with the JPEG file. What's most important is
that when I look at the head, for example and any area that has detail, all that details there while having none of the noise removed. And in fact, I kind of
prefer the way detail has been preserved in the clear model, but that's just a matter
of preference here. So again, in this example, I actually prefer using
my regular workflow where I edited the RAW file first and then use the edit in workflow
to create a new JPEG file, which gets sent to DeNoise AI and then apply the noise reduction and return back to Lightroom. Now let's go to this parrot photo here that was taken by my colleague, Hillary. And again, she used ISO 20,000, but when you look at the
EXIF information here at ISO 20,000, she still
was only able to get, one, three 20th of a second at F63. You would think if you were
shooting at ISO 20,000, she would be able to get, for example, a shutter speed of maybe, you
know, one, 2000th of a second, even at a smaller aperture. And in my opinion, it was the
right call to use that ISO because she was able to get
the parrot perfectly sharp. However, you know, there's
tons of noise over here. And if I go to the develop settings, I just wanna show you that
I did edit this RAW file. Here is the original,
and I didn't do much. I just kind of applied some
tonal and color corrections to fix the image. And just like before, let's start with sending the
RAW file over to DeNoise AI, by clicking on it from the grid view and then dragging it
onto the DeNoise icon. And as you can see again, we did not take into account
the edits made in Lightroom because that's how the
RAW model workflow works. But you can see that the
noise has been removed. If I click, it's just amazing how much of that noise has been removed, but all of that really great
detail is still preserved. So I'm gonna go ahead
and click on save image, and then again make sure that
DNG and source are selected and then click save. And again, to get that
DNG file into Lightroom, go to the folder that that
RAW file is in, right-click and select synchronized folder, and then click on synchronize. Then let's go ahead
select the original photo, press and hold command or control, and then click on sync settings
and click on synchronize. And if we compare the two, they
look pretty close together. You can see all of that really,
really important edge detail has been preserved, but none
of the noise is present. And that's really impressive. Also, all I did was sync the edits. I didn't really have to
make any manual changes. I could fine tune this one a little bit, but for the purposes of this video, you can see that they look pretty similar. Now let's go back to the grid view. And just like before, I'm gonna
right-click on this photo, edit in and select Topaz DeNoise AI, and we'll just select JPEG and click edit. Then let's go ahead,
go to comparison view, we'll disable original. And in this top left quadrant,
I'm gonna select standard just so that we have all
four models displayed. And between these four models, I prefer the severe noise model the most, so I'll select it and double-click it. And I'll also go ahead
and change to zoom to fit. And so that's looking good. Now that I'm happy, I'm gonna go ahead and click on apply to
return back to Lightroom. And now that we're in back in lightroom, you can see that we have
the original RAW file here. This is the DNG file that
we applied the RAW model to. And then this is the JPEG file that we applied the severe noise model to. So let's compare these two files. And right off the bat, the first thing that I noticed,
if I zoom in over here, you can see just how
much better the RAW model is at preserving important edge details. Especially you're looking
over here at the beak and then at the edges
of these fine feathers. They both do a great
job of reducing noise, but the other thing is,
actually let me zoom in and out. Zoom out just a little bit. The important point that I wanna make is just looking at the flat
areas of the background. The RAW model does a much better job of presenting those more evenly. Whereas in this model here, I can see some splotchiness
in the background. Now, part of that does have
to do with the fact that JPEG is a compressed lossy file
format, that makes sense. But still, this is where it makes sense to send your RAW file to DeNoise AI first, get that improved noise reduction and then apply the edits to that DNG file. And so I hope these two
examples, give you a little bit clear of an idea of when it makes sense to send your RAW file to DeNoise AI first at the beginning of your editing workflow. And when it's okay to just go
ahead and edit your RAW file and then use the edit in workflow along with one of the
four existing models. If you don't have DeNoise AI, head over to topazlabs.com
to download a free trial and use it with your own photos to see how the RAW model works. Thanks a lot.
