Lightroom’s Denoise AI Produces Stunning Results from RAW Images
Since I shot at f/9 with shutter speed set at 1/80th of a second, my Nikon D850 selected an ISO of 25600. But look how clean the image. Such is what you can expect from Lightroom denoise AI. The image, by the way, is of my son, Matt, in his physics lab at UCLA.
The Bloat Bug
Notice I say “from RAW Images.” So long as you use the Lightroom denoise AI tool on RAW images, you can expect stunning results of a clarity that doesn’t give the impression of a plastic-like overlay melting subtle details. Just don’t make the mistake of using Lightroom’s denoise AI on a jpg image. As any of the information out there will tell you—it doesn’t work. I’d be afraid of what might happen if I did that, given how buggy the new tool, unfortunately, is.
It used to create a DNG file. After August this year, that’s no longer the case, and all the information denoise AI generates goes into the Lightroom catalog. That’s been a problem, as the catalog gets bloated. After I cleaned up maybe half a dozen RAW images with denoise AI, my catalog backup went from 81 megabytes to over three gigabytes.
I haven’t found online a specific description of how that happens from so few uses of the tool. I used it maybe 20 more times, and my backup increased to 4.04 gigabytes—not an exact ratio in keeping with the first increase in size. I had done some looking around the web, and I found that, sure enough, it’s a bug. By what I’ve read, Adobe intends to fix it.
Adobe states that the recent 15.0.1 update does fix some bugs, but Adobe doesn’t mention any associated with denoise AI. If they do fix the bloat bug, I intend to remove images from my catalog and hard drive. Those images I used denoise AI on. That will return—I hope—my catalog to normal size. And then my hope will be that it’s just the matter of pulling those images I deleted from an external hard drive, reloading them, and using denoise AI on them once more.
Because Lightroom denoise AI makes a great difference.
Look how sharp the eye and crisp the edges of the head. I shot the great blue heron at f/14, 1/320th of a second, the camera producing 3200 ISO. The image has been radically cropped close—the pixels greatly reduced in number—because, as I say elsewhere, it’s not easy to get bird pictures from a 200mm zoom.
Crisp Results
In the meantime, I’m not using the AI tool, only the old manual denoise tool, which produces such lousy results by comparison to such crispness and clarity. One thing to keep in mind when you do use denoise AI—it’s an easy tool to use—is that you should apply it to the RAW image(s) you’ve selected before you do any other edits
The image below serves as an example of using the manual denoise tool. I shot it yesterday morning before sunrise, and the camera selected 25600 ISO. The manual tool helped somewhat, but overall the image is of poor quality.
The manual denoise tool didn’t get rid of all the grain, as the AI denoise not only has done for the other two featured images, but has also produced clean, clear images with crisply subtle edges. Not a plastic-like quality of eliminated details. The photo above shot at f/7.1, 1/50th, ISO 25600, it has good balance from the left in relation to the edge of the truck bed. Motion in the right hand and in the waves, too. It would have been a more interesting image without the ugly graininess.
My hope is that Adobe does fix the bug. The tool is too good to go to waste.