Lightroom AI driven Denoise!

I have just updated Lightroom and there is a new to...

An AI driven Denoise!!

Not had a play yet because I have to go out shortly. Has anyone mananged to play with it???

It’s really good - RAW only at the moment.

I've been using the AI Denoise from Topaz for a couple of years and have no issues with it. That said; it does add to the workflow - if Lightroom can now do the same job "in-house" it's a step saved.

It is described as a game changer for LR but as it is an entirely automatic function I have little use for it. Sharpening and noise reduction work against each other in LR as in all software so both need adjusting in individual photos for optimum results, for that reason I go to ON1 NoNoise for higher ISO images which allows control of noise and sharpening like LR manual mode but with far better results. The best I have found for sharpening is Photoshop but the denoise function is poor (in my experience).

Auto Denoise in LR produces a separate file like when using other software so it doesn’t save much in time either.

Rob makes a very good point here. They are different sides of the same coin.

I do not regard NR or sharpening as operations that should be automatically applied to the whole image either. If I take a portrait shot with out of focus background I will apply NR to the background, but not the subject. The opposite applies to sharpening, where I will sharpen the subject and not the background.

Any software that allows you to work with layers and layer masks can be used for this approach.

Since the 'I' in AI presumably stands for 'Intelligence', can anyone enlighten me as to why the denoise in Lightroom (or anything else, for that matter') should be considered to be intelligent? Or does AI just mean that the marketing people have latched on to the next trendy prefix?

Steve

Actually I am going to modify my view after giving the NR more of a test, this time I applied the sharpening first as well as the other processing and then tried the auto NR and it did a pretty good job. Pschute, for selective noise reduction I apply it to suit the main subject (if needed) and then select "background" to increase the NR where it is more obvious.

Not wanting wanting to derail this thread (maybe a new thread would be appropriate if the discussion regarding "Intelligence" is to continue), the meaning and use of AI is being dumbed-down with the current obsession of ChatGPT by the media. As usual, more hype and buzzwords than objective analysis is the order of the day.

With respect to photography, and with good timing, Sean Tucker has posted a video of his thoughts. link This maybe helpful in understanding how we can manage with the use and misuse of the technology.

For grumpy folk such as myself, we will have to dig deep to cope with the moniker of "AI" being attached to everything. How long before we see adverts for AI-enabled washing machines?

Great link, LongTimeLurker. Thanks.

Continued development of IT systems at an exponential rate will produce an AI system more intellectually capable than human beings. The implications of this might be less than favourable for the human race.

Perhaps we should just continue to enjoy our photography while we can, including the use of AI editing tools if we wish to enhance our images with them.

And perhaps an AI-enabled washing machine would be very useful, at least for a while!

Philip

AI is like Dolly, the cloned sheep and that did not workout too well for Dolly. Half a life span and riddled with breakdown disease.
When humans start to have AI implants for "greater intelligence etc" they will disconnect from the very DNA that has supported them for millennia but that is the current technology being sold by snake oil salesmen.
AI has benefits but i wouldn't alter my body to accommodate it for the sake of it.

As Rob, Peter and Steve have eluded to, the technology is only as good as those who designed it.

What 'it' cannot do at this time is make judgments and apply reasoning. Actions are created from a pre-determined list of possible outcomes, or, as in the the case of ChatGPT, from a body of human knowledge obtained by scanning the Internet for information. This means that asking ChatGPT to create a portrait, write an essay, answer a question etc, is akin to an automated Google search.

As with so many inventions, it is not the technology that we should concern ourselves with, rather the use of it by those who aim to deceive or cause harm. We only have to remember the work of Alfred Nobel, and specifically his reason to create the Nobel Prize, to understand how an invention can be misused. There is a prescient warning from Geoffrey Hinton about where we may be heading. Still, he isn't worried about washing machines coming together to take over the world, so I'm not worried

(Apologies to Spad for derailing this thread.)

I was asking myself the other day whether it would be right to use an AI to enhance one's imagery? Whose final result would we be viewing? The current crop, at root, are simply complicated series of IF - THEN decisions with no sort of 'intelligence' being involved. Their crowning output can often be viewed on the front covers of glossy magazines where their immaculate images seem to be just somehow not quite right. Denoised to squeekie cleanliness and sharpened to within the width of a bent pixel they have no notion of artistic presentation whatsoever. The time to worry will be when that notion does start to appear.

You started something here Spad - but not quite what you wanted .

I've recently seen a pretty convincing review of this AI noise reduction by some of the astrophotography folks on youtube in the context of nebula shots. The results look extremely good but close analysis seems to reveal the AI actually adding detail rather than just cleaning up the image or sharpening what is there - perhaps a distinction more import for scientific or record shots than purely artistic use.

I discovered yesterday that the LR auto denoise is actually a function within its Enhance mode. This takes a heavily cropped image, for instance, and adds pixels so it looks ok as a large file. So the denoise is actually doing the same, creating a new raw file: a 48MB original becomes a 175MB file. I have tried Enhance a few times in the past but ended up rejecting the files as zoomed in they don’t look right. That’s probably just an issue for pixel-peepers but printing large will show the faults. My other denoise software, and Photoshop, exports tiff files when using Pentax raw files which are equally large.