hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today i'm going to cover off a few
questions that i've seen about topaz labs de noise ai and how i get the best out of it
for the purposes of this little tutorial we're going to be using lightroom
classic but you can open straight up into photoshop there is a how-to on how to do that
and make sure that all your plugins are connected okay linked in the description below from the guys
at topaz labs full disclosure here everybody if you use my link that i have in my description
below i do get some pennies if you buy this product however you guys also know that i've used
this particular tool on nearly every single image that i've entered into previous awards including
this one so i wanted to open up this photograph of percy the french bulldog there is a video on his
shoot and how we got this picture and why we had to deal with horrific light and that will
be linked above but we were iso a thousand in a deep dark part of the wood and as a result we have
got a lot of noise now percy himself is absolutely fine i can work with him but if i'm going to enter
this into awards this is too much noise really for me to be comfortable with and therefore i would
use and did put this through topaz labs denoise ai this image did achieve a silver with the guild and
it also achieved a finalist in the mpa's pet photography category of their international awards
with that all said and done when you've done your exposure changes when you've done your
white balance changes and when you've lifted your shadows and dropped your highlights if you do that
at that point stop and run it through denoise so when you convert into denoise from a raw file it
does convert the file into a tiff that's kind of the best way of going but what that does means you
lose a little bit of the dynamic range and how much you can pull back compared to a raw file
so using percy's image that we've got here right now i'm going to go ahead and right click on the
image in the timeline right clicking on that gets me this window i'm gonna edit in topaz denoise ai
either one of those two either is fine now if you don't have these options but you have denoise or
the trial free trial of denoise ai go ahead and look at that link in the description for how to
connect the two up as plugins we're going to click on edit in topaz labs you then get up this box
so we do want to edit a copy with lightroom adjustments because that is our shadows highlights
white balance and exposure adjustments we're going to put it through as a tiff we're going
to keep the color spaces whatever the image color space was at the time for me that was adobe rgb
we're gonna make sure that the bit depth is 16 bit because that is the most amount of color
data we're going to put the resolution at 300 and we're not going to put any compression on at all
when you've done that we then click edit and at this point it makes a copy of our file down here
and then it opens up the copied version in denoise ai okay so when you're in denoise ai
you will have something that looks like this now i switch my workspace round so that the uh toolbar
panel is at the left but you don't have to do that that's fine so your view might have this
to this side that is fine now what you want to make sure is that there is a change happening you
can see clearly that there is a difference between this side and this side if there is no difference
at all you need to reinstall topaz labs something has gone wrong and the tool is not working you
should be able to see a clear difference okay so over in the tool panel side you have denoise ai
ai clear and low light these are different formats of the denoise artificial intelligence system that
runs through the images denoises ai is what i use for most images it does a good job low light is
what i go for if i have a dog with a lot of fluff going on also low light is great for if you are in
super noisy conditions that will give you a very clean finish but it will sacrifice some of the
detail ai clear is a little bit different ai clear works much better on colour noise than any of the
other options there but denoise ai is what i use most of the time now usually when you go in your
settings will be set to auto now when you open up an image and you're using the auto settings
i have personally found that that is way too strong and for me personally i would not be happy
losing the level of detail that we lose with this level of noise reduction and also the over
sharpening as a result like the over sharpening on here is just ridiculous so turn off auto and
with auto turned off i then drop my remove noise down to about four i mean this is like a rough
guesstimation here but for most images about four i then change my enhanced sharpness to about five
literally the tiniest little bit and sometimes even less than that on both of those but you can
see the difference on percy's head here we have a much smoother finish and it's not that obvious
now the noise over here if you look in the background area has been removed but
the noise over here has not so this is what i'm looking for when i'm thinking okay
do i need to increase something and in this situation yes you know i do i need to increase
my remove noise so i'm gonna put that up to six and see if that takes care of this section
it's done a pretty good job could do with a little bit more so i'm gonna push it again
and do you see how we're basically going up in little steps we're not going hey here have
it all so at this stage we've now had the noise taken care of but what i do want to make sure is
that the detail on percy and percy's coat isn't removed and in this situation you're likely if
you're photographing horses to see some of the coat disappear so let's say for argument's sake
that we need some detail back in so this is something that i tend to have to do reasonably
regularly with horses because the coat just disappears so if we need to add coat back in
don't panic because there is a masking feature in denoise ai so if you click the mask you will end
up with just like in photoshop a white mask and you can paint on it with either black or white so
i'm going to click on sub which will paint black on the mask so that means leave this area alone
and i'm going to change the radius to be whatever size i need it to be
the softness to be whatever softness and then the opacity to maybe about 50% when reclaiming detail
so at this stage we're on a black brush on a white mask and therefore if we go ahead and paint
we will end up with a black area in our mask now turning the overlay off
you should be able to see within this section that the noise has been added
back in so i'm going to go to add to paint it with white i'm going to put that to 100 and
i'm going to just go back over that so let's go and i'm going to make the softness of the brush
super hard so that you can see the edge i'll point out on the screen right now you should be able to
see the noise and the knot noise area and so just like that using your brushes using your mask you
can bring back areas that have been lost when you're happy with the denoise that's been done
you can just go ahead and click apply mask on the mask and then go ahead and click apply on that
and that will set out the export of this adjusted version when that is complete it will pop that
straight back into lightroom with its duplicate copy selected at this point i usually change the
color by right clicking and doing set color label and put it to green because green to
me means that that is the one that has been denoised so now if we zoom in to 200 we have a
super clean image like ridiculously clean but we've still retained all of the important details
and where we did our little interesting mask there is a circle around the edge of that that you can
clearly see at this stage i'd then go forward move that into photoshop and complete my edit of course
the final edit for this was an award edit so i'll put that up on the screen and now but i hope this
video has been helpful in showing you guys how to use topaz labs denoise if you have any questions
please do drop them into the comments box below i'll see you all again really really really soon