hello i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft today i'm making an initial review of on one no noise ai
if you aren't aware of the software it's a new noise reduction offering from on1 who also
developed the excellent on one photo raw software applying ai to problems like sharpening and noise
reduction has caught on in the past couple of years and it feels like on1 are a little bit
late to the game it's going to be interesting to see how usable their software is as well as how
well it performs currently i'm using topaz denoise as my go-to software of choice for noise reduction
and it performs very well in most situations but this video isn't about making a direct comparison
although i will share a couple of these instead i want to look at on one no noise to see how well
it performs from a usability perspective is it easy to use how well does it remove noise and are
there any problems that i'm seeing let's start by launching on one no noise as a standalone editor
the advantage of this is that you can edit raw files directly which apparently is when
the software performs best you can also use the software as a plugin for the likes of photoshop
whilst there are benefits to this the drawback is that you're processing data that's already been
processed so the noise reduction isn't as good i'll look at an example of this later in the video
when you first launch no noise ai as a standalone editor you initially see an empty screen you can
then either open photos using the dialog or you can drag and drop them onto the interface i've
already sorted out a few raw files with quite nasty noise to see how the software performs
the first one we'll look at was shot handheld with a panasonic lumix lx5 pocket camera back in 2011.
the camera was set to iso 400 but it has a tiny sensor that really struggles with low light
if i zoom to 200 magnification you can see there's a lot of noise particularly in the sky
but when i turn on the noise reduction preview you can see a big improvement it's also possible
to have the preview in split screen mode which makes the improvement more obvious
but the other thing that i want you to notice is how much clearer the image is
initially i thought this was down to the sharpening settings but it isn't
i can set the sharpening sliders to zero and the image is still much crisper
look at the detail in the aerials on the tower
in fact let's zoom into this area at 400 percent because i want to show you how clean and sharp
the results are the detail the software is producing is nothing shot to spectacular
so far i'm just using the default settings although i have turned off the sharpening
looking at the tower you can see there are some artifacts around the fine detail in the aerials
but watch what happens when i reduce the enhanced detail slider
although the image doesn't look quite as sharp it's now extremely clean
now let's look at another example with even more severe noise this is another lx5 example that i
shot handheld well after sunset the iso was set at 3200 and i shot this specifically for testing
noise reduction software with the noise preview turned off you can see how bad the noise is at 100
magnification when i turn on the no noise processing it's instantly cleaned up what's
surprising me most about this image though is not only how no noise removed the noise but
how much detail is retained in the distance with traditional non-ai noise reduction the
detail seems to be destroyed by the processing to show you what i mean here's a section of the
image at 200 magnification after processing with nick define this was the best i could
achieve after a lot of adjustment define just can't cope with the level of noise in this image
but with no noise you can see much more detail in the sand and the noise has
gone
i just want to show you one final example though before looking at some comparisons
this time it's a handheld snap taken with a panasonic
gx1 micro four three camera at iso 800 as before you can see lots of noise when magnified to 100
if i increase the magnification to 200 percent you can see that the image is soft in the foreground
but when processed with the no noise auto settings it seems to snap into focus and the
noise is removed from the sky having tested on one no noise on quite a few raw files i'm
extremely impressed by the results it appears to be exceptionally quick at processing the raw files
and i've only spotted a few minor problems in the results what i would say though is that you
shouldn't just rely on the auto settings i seem to get my best results when i turn off the sharpening
and check for the best enhanced detail setting at two hundred percent magnification
whilst i'm not covering it in this video it's also worth pointing out that on one no noise supports
layers and masking this means you can build up an image applying different settings to different
areas for excellent results i'll look at this in another video because there's so much you can do
now let's look at a couple of comparisons in a little more depth the first comparison that
i want to share is made by applying the noise reduction directly to the raw files
i've then combined the images as layers in the single photoshop image to make the comparison
easier the first layer is the raw conversion made in photoshop without any sharpening or noise
reduction whilst i haven't made any adjustments in photoshop photoshop has applied lens corrections
you can see the difference this makes when i turn on the no noise layer which doesn't
have any optical correction let's zoom now to 200 magnification to check the results
you can see plenty of noise in the original but that's been very effectively removed in the no
noise layer but what did surprise me a little was that the no-noise image wasn't sharper
in comparison i didn't sharpen the original raw file but when i was doing the conversion
no noise look sharper but in the output file it doesn't look any sharper because
of this i decided to run the image through topaz sharpen ai which did seem to improve it a little
finally here's the topaz denoise version using the low light noise reduction i tried all the settings
in topaz and low light noise was the best with clear ai mode being a close second comparing the
on1 no noise results i can see topaz denoise has applied lens correction and reduced the contrast
but when it comes to noise reduction performance on one no noise looks to avenged it if we check
the tower again at 400 percent you can see some noise artifacts in the topaz version now compare
that with on1 no noise and the results are better especially when combined with topaz sharpen ai
now let's look at the second sample raw file which has severe colour and luminance noise as
before i've converted the raw file using photoshop with the noise reduction and sharpening turned off
i then copied the image and processed that rather than the raw file to produce the different layers
this should be a more demanding test of the software as it doesn't have the raw data to
work with if i zoom the image to 100 this is the best i could achieve using nick define
now this isn't to criticize nick d fine in any way as it works well with less severe examples
of noise unfortunately it can't clean up this image leaving noise and creating artifacts
when i turn on topaz denoise you can see how much better the processing is
when we compare this with on one no noise you can't see much difference between the two
but if we zoom to 200 percent and look just behind the post you can see that it has a
little more detail retained in the sand i'm sure you'll agree that the results are impressive when
you consider this was a pocket camera with a tiny sensor at 3200 iso in low light conditions out of
interest i also process the raw file directly in on one no noise to see if it's any better
whilst there isn't any optical correction you can see that it's retained much more detail it appears
the on one recommendation to process the raw file rather than a tiff or jpeg is a good one before
we leave this example there is a problem i've noticed when using on one no noise you can see
it best along the edges of the sand there are a few pixels around the edge of the image frame but
the software doesn't seem to clean up you can also see the same problem when processing the raw file
directly you may need to crop this out although at 100 magnification it isn't very noticeable now
to the final comparison which is more of a test than a comparison this time i process the raw
file using on one no noise but then i continued to process the image in photoshop until it was
finished often when applying strong adjustments any noise left in the image can become obvious
my adjustments were made first in knit colour effects pro to enhance the dynamic contrast
after that i used nick viveza to enhance the colour and regular contrast then i dodged the sky
and the hills to lighten them slightly after that i made a frequency separation to enhance the sky
finally i added a soft dark vignette around the edge of the image
looking at the image at 100% magnification it looks clean and i don't see any noise ordinarily with
adjustments like this you would risk noise showing up but this image is noise free and very usable
overall i'm extremely impressed by the results when using on one no noise the auto adjustments
are good but you can improve on them with a little care there isn't much in the way of control over
the noise reduction but then that's the whole idea of applying ai to noise reduction where things do
become a little bit more complicated is if you want to use the layers and masks which i'm going
to cover in another video overall performance seems to be quick and the results are super clean
the only real problem seems to be the few pixels around the edge of the frame that seem to be left
but that's easy enough to fix whether this is the best software for you will depend on your needs
and expectations i would though recommend downloading and testing the trial version
before deciding to make a purchase and if you do decide to make a purchase
i do have a 15% discount code which i'll share in the youtube video information
i hope you've enjoyed this review if you have please take a moment to share it with others
i'm robin whalley you've been watching lenscraft i'll see you soon for another thank video