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If you’re wondering whether artificial intelligence will lead to the death of photography, here’s a good news story – AI is amazing at fixing those frustrating noisy photographs.
We tested Adobe’s AI-powered Denoise function in Photoshop CC's Camera Raw and Lightroom on several noisy, high-ISO images. This bird picture is a proper test of the tool – a heavily cropped, underexposed image shot in a dark forest at ISO25,600 on a Nikon D850. The Denoise tool worked wonders on this as well as other grainy photographs, producing better results than with older manual noise tools.
The tool is particularly effective at preventing colours from bleeding into one another. In our photo, the original individual colours were barely perceptible but the tool pulled out the blues and reds in the subdued subject to an astonishing degree that brings the image to life.
The process also cleaned up and revealed details that were almost invisible in the original. In addition, any noise in the shadows has been enhanced and smoothed out. But be aware that you can only apply Denoise to Raw files – it’s not currently available for jpegs. So open up a few high-ISO Raws and try it out…
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