Finally, Adobe has done it, a term I don't like to use very often, but for this situation,
game changing.
Check out this new AI noise reduction that they've just put into camera raw and Lightroom.
Here's an image that's going to show this really well.
Shot it last week in Hawaii.
What we're going to do is just going to crop in here now.
This is shot at ISO 5000, so it's a pretty high ISO for the Sony A1, which is a very
large sensor.
All right, let's just crop in a little bit closer.
Yes, this sensor does in a cricket horizon.
Don't care about that.
We just want to look at the noise.
I'm in the Develop Module right now.
Look at the shadows all plugged up.
No problem, plenty of dynamic range.
I can open it up by opening up the shadows here.
But when I zoom in, look at the noise.
Now, this is something you could try to fix using the noise reduction, but let me jump
in.
I'm going to show you this new feature, then I'll give you the caveats, and then we'll
look at the comparison between this and standard noise reduction.
Okay, we open up the shadows, we see all this noise and all kinds of issues in here.
You've got two ways you can access it.
You can either right click and choose enhance or we can scroll down.
Under noise reduction, you're going to see an option here that says de noise.
If you're in camera raw, this is where it is.
Now, let's click de noise.
What it's going to do is it's going to bring up this enhance preview.
If you recognize this dialog box, this is the same one we use for super resolution.
This is using AI power.
Now, you can adjust the amount of D noise.
I'm just going to keep it around about the middle.
I'm going to click enhance.
What it's doing right now is it's creating a new D&G file that's going to sit next to
the original image.
We'll talk about caveats, limitations in just a moment.
Let's have a look at this.
If you remember what this photograph looked like before, I zoom in.
Look at this.
Tell me that is not mind blowing.
Let's talk about what the limitations are, recommendations, and then I'll compare it
with the original noise reduction.
And there's one other thing that it can do which it's not really being advertised, but
it's amazing.
So it only works on Beyer raw files, which are the ones directly out of your camera.
So that means the images you might have saved as D&Gs may not work at this particular time.
And Adobe said that they're going to expand it to work on other file types.
So eventually, hopefully, it's going to work on JPEGs and TIPS as well.
Another limitation is it has to create a new image right now.
Another thing that Adobe said, in the future, they're hoping to have it where it can actually
just enhance the original image.
So if you want to use de noise and super resolution, you can't use them both on the same image.
You can't apply it twice, so you got to choose one or the other.
Now, where should you apply this in the workflow?
Adobe is recommending that you put it in at the very beginning of the workflow.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is they're saying, Hey, it's good to work on a clean file.
But the other thing is if you're working on things like masks and different types of adjustments,
even the spot tool, because everything is nondestructive inside of live room and camera
roll.
That means that when you apply this adjustment, that adjustment is also going to update in
all the spots and the masks and other areas that you've used.
So number one, it could take longer to apply it, and then number two, some colors and things
could shift.
If you have a noisy image, maybe do some basic adjustments, but then apply it pretty early
on in the process before you do any masking or any localized work.
Let's compare it to the original noise reduction because there's a couple of things that are
really important for you to see here.
All right, so if you remember, here's the original version of it where it was just too
dark.
And then we cranked up the exposure, the shadows, and maybe even bring back the highlights to
recover it.
So we're bringing the tones out here, but if you remember, very, very noisy.
Okay, if we want to access the manual noise reduction, it's still in here.
Go under the detail and instead of choosing noise reduction, choose manual noise reduction.
Let's zoom in to 100 % by clicking and just setting it.
Now, if the color noise was turned off, you would see all these speckles.
So the first thing we do is just bring that until we even out the colors.
Still got a lot of issues with the grain.
We can increase the luminance.
Notice here, the colors are still very patchy, but we're getting rid of a lot of the grain.
We can see the texture here.
We can still see a lot of grain and noise in the image.
Looking at the ground here, you can see, yeah, there's a lot of issues.
Now, let's go to the one that we applied the de noise.
If we zoom in, look how clean it is now.
There's still a little bit of speckles in here, but you've got to remember what we started
with.
But if we look at the texture on the side there, it's beautiful.
We're not losing detail.
We're not softening the image.
Same with the ground here.
And if we look out over here into some of the areas that are going out of focus, you
can see the details are still there.
So a lot of the time when you apply manual noise reduction, you're going to really soften
the image.
But this is just not happening here.
I did mention one not so well known benefit, and that is with morays.
When you see textures and you get up close, you'll see these moray patterns in here.
I noticed, look at this, it fixed the moray perfectly.
All right, so we can see it's applied to see this little star icon.
Now, we can apply to multiple images at once.
All we need to do is click, hold down the shift key and click again.
So we've selected these four.
If I wanted to apply it to all four, I could hit de noise, then put the settings in.
The other option is if I just hold down the shift key and click on de noise, it will apply
it to all four of those images automatically in what's known as headless mode without bringing
up any other settings.
If I'm in camera raw, I hold down the Alt or the Option key to apply it to more than
one at a time.
I'm curious to know what your guys thoughts are.
Let me know in the comments underneath.
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Until next time, I'll see you at the cafe.