Topaz Labs
We just got a new AI software from Topaz Labs two days ago. We already had the Jpeg to RAW AI, AI Gigapixel and Sharpener AI from Topaz Labs. This one the Topaz Denoise AI, as the name suggest removes noise from your photos. It uses AI to remove noise without loosing detail and sharpness. So today I will share with you my impressions of it, and some comparisons to my currently most used noise reduction Photoshop plugins, the Imagenomic Noiseware. I don’t have many photos taken at high ISO settings, but there are some interiors and night shots where I had to use high ISO, so I will use those for the examples.
Topaz Denoise AI
Same as with other Topaz AI applications, the interface is very simple. You load your image and process it. You only have three sliders: remove noise, enhance sharpness and restore detail. They do exactly what the name suggests. There is also a brighten preview option, where you can have it brighten your photos, so you can see the noise better. This has no effect on the image processing, it’s just to make you work simpler.
One nice feature here is the support for RAW images, so you can directly work on the source file. Better to do this before you did other edits on the image. You can save the export as a DNG file RAW afterwards.
But let’s go to the examples. There are three images in every example. The original photo as TIFF (lens correction and chromatic aberrations removed before noise reduction, some brightened a bit to make the noise more visible). Second one is a Noiseware noise reduction with strong noise preset and detail protection set to 6. Last one is the Topaz Denoise AI result, with all the sliders at 0.25.
Please take the comparison between Noiseware and Denoise with reservations. You can set the sliders differently in both, and the results may greatly vary based on photo. There is no way I can show all the possible results here, so this should be taken just as small preview, and one should try both for oneself (there are trials available). I will focus here only on the Denoise results.
Please click on the images to see bigger versions, to see the noise.
In this interior photo, Topaz Denoise very nicely removed the noise and added quite nice structure to the pillars. Strangely, which I noticed in multiple photos, some lines caught a bit of a green color tint. You can see it in the middle here and also in the top right corner. Hard to say why this happens. Original and Denoise versions in one photo for comparison here.
Here is a very noisy photo, taken in the middle of the night. Again, you can see how Denoise tries to add more structure to places that it removed noise from. Original and Denoise versions in one photo for comparison here.
This is my favorite result here. The car looks so clean afterwards. All the detail is preserved and overall this is a great result. Original and Denoise versions in one photo for comparison here.
This is a different example from the same photo as the previous example. Again, very nice result, very clean, very crisp. Original and Denoise versions in one photo for comparison here.
One last example here (again from a car, really have very few photos taken at a higher ISO :)). Again a very nice clean result here. Original and Denoise versions in one photo for comparison here.
My Impression
I quite like the Topaz Denoise AI results. It’s obvious it does more than just noise reduction. It looks for the structure, similar to other Topaz AI plugins, and tries to recover it after the noise reduction process. The results are really clean and good quality. And to think this is all with very weak noise reductions set at 0.25. You can go as high as 1.00 which just smooths out everything.
You can give Topaz Denoise a try by going to the Topaz Labs website and getting the trial version.
