Topaz DeNoise AI

[jsachs]

I have been hearing good things about this plug-in/standalone noise reduction package from Topaz. If you have the previous DeNoise 6 plug-in, the upgrade to DeNoise AI is free. This is a slow but pretty impressive package for processing high ISO images or images that have had their shadows lightened significantly. Attached is a side-by-side compare of a tiny 100% crop of a larger image of water reflections. It does a nice job of filtering out the speckle and chroma noise while leaving the underlying image detail more or less intact. DeNoise AI is slow, but usually gets good results although it may work better on some images than others.

The next release of PWP 8 adds support for this plug-in.

[Winfried]

Does anyone have experiences how Topaz DeNoise AI performes compared to DXO Prime or NIK Dfine 2?
I guess DXO Prime works just with RAW.

[jsachs]

I just tried using all three using their default settings on the same very noisy image - not a scientific test by any means. The original was shot at ISO 2000 and the exposure increased by 3 stops using DxO PhotoLab.

Both DxO Prime and DeNoise AI produced very similar results. Dfine 2 was much worse. Since each noise reduction method has settings you can adjust, it is possible the rankings would be different if you were willing to spend time fiddling with the controls.

DxO can open and apply noise reduction to TIFF or JPEG files, although I believe you probably get slightly better results starting with RAW files.

You can see the comparison at http://www.dl-c.com/Images/Noise%20Reduction.jpg

[AHuntley]

Any thoughts on supporting Topaz Sharpen AI, too?

[jsachs]

Sharpen AI should be relatively easy to add.

[AHuntley]

Great! Thanks!!