Let's Get Rid of The Noise

I don't usually do software reviews but sometimes I run across a tool that is so much better than what I have to work with that I have to tell others about it.  This time it's DeNoise AI from Topaz Labs. 

I have plenty of photo editing tools, including Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and On1 Photo RAW 2019.  Until recently I have resisted the siren call of the latest greatest piece of software that will make all my photos look fantastic.  I find it's better to be proficient in a few than to have a toolbox of expensive packages that I rarely use.  About a month ago I saw a review of the DeNoise AI package and thought I would give it a try.  Several friends use Topaz Labs software but I had not gone down that path.  They offered a free trial so I decided to give it a try.  I'm glad I gave it a try.  I'm now the proud owner of another piece of software for photo editing.

The reason I decided to put the $79.99 down and buy a copy is the quality of the images that come out of the software.  I like to photograph birds, which means I'm shooting at shutter speeds of 1/1000 - 1/2000 second.  My long lens that I use for bird photography works best at f/6.4.  That means I am often shooting at high ISO values that result in noisy photos like the one below.

1/1000 sec at f/6.4 ISO 12800

This photo is cropped down to about 25% of the original size of the RAW file out of my Fuji X-T3.  You can see the noise in the background.  That's more noise than I like.  I used the Lightroom Noise Reduction tools and was able to remove some of the noise, but lost some of the details in the bird.

Lightroom Noise Reduction Applied

The last version was editing using DeNoise AI.

Topaz DeNoise AI

The Topaz software was better at removing the noise and did a much better job at retaining the details in the feathers, eye, and claws.  If you want to compare each version, click on one and then use your arrow keys to flip through each one on your screen.

The DeNoise package is easily called from within Lightroom or Photoshop.  You can also open and edit files outside these packages.  It an take a few seconds to process the image.  On my desktop system it makes good use of the graphics card processing power to speed up the process.  This is something Adobe has yet to get working correctly. You experience may vary, especially if you are using a laptop.

Here is another example showing before on the left and after on the right.

This is not a tool I will use all the time.  A properly exposed image with ISO values of 800-1600 may not need to be run through DeNoise AI.  However, I will be using it on any high ISO images where that nasty grain shows up.

Now, the team at Topaz Labs is not perfect.  Their website has many broken links and I know of one photographer who had trouble getting their copy activated after purchasing.  He had some difficulty with their tech support but in the end, he got it working and is happy with the product.

I suggest you give the free trail a test drive and decide for yourself.  Use this coupon code for 15% off any Topaz product.  http://topazlabs.refr.cc/richards

Lightroom CC Auto Exposure

Lightroom has always had an Auto Exposure feature that attempted to fix an image exposure by analyzing the image and automatically changing the tone sliders. I never used this feature because it didn't come close to what I considered the correct adjustments.  Adobe recently released Lightroom CC Classic version 7.1, which is supposed to make major improvements to this feature.  I was interested to see if it is really better.

According to Adobe, the new "Enhanced Auto feature has been optimized by machine learning." to automatically apply the best edits for the following slider controls: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Saturation, and Vibrance. Using an advanced neural network powered by Adobe Sensei, our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform, the new Auto Settings creates a better photo by analyzing your photo and comparing it to tens of thousands of professionally edited photos to create a beautiful, pleasing image."  The button is no longer called the “Auto Tone” — now it’s called “Auto Settings” because it goes beyond just the tonal sliders in the Basic panel by adding Vibrance and Saturation into the mix. So in theory, the auto button should adjust my photos to what a professional photo editor would do.  Let's see.

Example 1 

Original Unedited Image

Original Tone

Lightroom 7.0 Auto Tone

Version 7.0 Tone

Lightroom 7.1 Auto Tone

Version 7.1 Tone

One reason I never used the earlier versions of the Auto Tone feature was that it always seemed to make the image too bright. You can see this in the version 7.0 example above. Scott Kelby called it the "overexpose button." The new version does not seem to have that problem.

The official differences from the old Auto-Tone are:

• The new Auto tone will also adjust the Vibrance and Saturation in addition to Basic panel tone controls.  It does not touch the Clarity setting.
• The analysis is done on the cropped image, ignoring what is outside the crop. If you crop after applying Auto, the Auto button will re-activate – click on it again to redo the analysis.
• The analysis also takes into account your existing white balance and camera profile.

One thing I have noticed in my testing is the analysis can take a few seconds to complete.  The Auto button is disabled until it is complete.  This is not listed in the "official differences".

Of course, testing on one image is not enough.  Here are a few other examples of the unedited and 7.1 auto results.

Example 2 - an easy one.  Click on one of the images and use your arrow keys to flip back and forth between the two images.

Original

7.1 Auto Tone

The sky was too light in this example and auto brought down the highlights.  It also dropped the blacks -14 and reduced the contrast by -17.  It's not exactly what I would have done, but still a good starting point for future refinement.

 Example 3 - click this image to see a larger side by side comparison.

In this more difficult example, there was a great deal of contrast in the original image.  The auto turned the contrast down -20, dropped the highlights -63 and brought up the shadows +44 to even out the image.  Really not too bad.

My final test image is the hardest yet.  It was taken under extremely difficult lighting conditions inside a glass factory.  The room was dark but the molten glass was very bright.  The auto tone didn't handle this image very well.

  Example 4

In my opinion, it made the image too dark.  I guess that is not one of the tens of thousands of professionally edits that were fed into the artificial intelligence.

In the end, no automatic feature is going to be correct every time, but this version seems to be much better than the previous versions.  I plan on using the new Auto Settings feature when I start my edits.  It can give me a good start with just one click.

The Nik Software Suite of Tools Is Now Free -- Is this the beginning of the end?

At one time, Nik software was one of the premier photo editing packages on the market.   Lately

development on the Nik suite has slowed up.   The writing was on the wall -- Google was investing in the mobile and web apps and not the Nik suite.
I bought a copy three or four years ago for a couple hundred dollars and have used it with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop ever since.   Then, a couple years ago Google bought the company to get the mobile app Snapseed.

Today, Google announced that the Nik suite of software is now free to all.  You can download in here.

Here is a list of all the tools in the suite:

• Analog Efex Pro - converts photos to the look of classic cameras, films, and lenses.
• Color Efex Pro -  a comprehensive set of filters for color correction, retouching, and creative effects.
• Silver Efex Pro - black-and-white conversion with darkroom-inspired controls.
• Viveza - selectively adjust the color and tonality of your images without complicated masks or selections.
• HDR Efex Pro - powerful HDR conversion tools
• Sharpener Pro - professional sharpening tools
• Define - noise reduction software that takes into account the camera, ISO and exposure

All these tools work with Lightroom, Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements as external editors or filters.   They are available for Windows and Macs.

Nik Color Efex Pro continues to be the tool I go to when I want to selectively apply edits.   The u-point technology in the Nik software makes it easy to select areas of a photo based on luminosity and color without the need to create complex masks.   Silver Efex Pro is my favorite B&W conversion tool.  HDR Efex Pro is the HDR software I use.    I have found the noise reduction in Lightroom to be as good as Deine and don't use that tool as much as I used to.

Should you download the Nik suite of software?   Well, it's certainly worth the purchase price.   I'm not sure it's worth the time it will take to learn the tools.  In my opinion, Google making the tools free is the final step before killing them off.  It has already been some time since the last software update.

What's the alternative?   I also have the On1 software suite that does many of the same things as Nik. I have not learned more than the basics of the On1 tools because I kept going back to the Nik tools I know.  Now I'm going to spend more time with On1 and move off the Nik tools.

On1 is investing in their development and will continue to improve the tools.  They are running a Spring Special right now and you can get the suite of On1 tools for $79.

Why I Shoot in Raw

OK, you non-photographers may be wondering about the blog title.  What in the world is shooting in raw and is it even legal?  Relax and I'll tell you what it is and why I use it almost all the time.

There are many formats that photos can be stored in.  Some are designed to preserves all the available information and others are designed to make files smaller while retaining most of the information.   Most  cameras are set to save the photos as JPEG files, which is a very common format that is designed to make files smaller by compressing the data, sometimes making the file 10% the size of the original.  This is important when you are storing a large number of photos on a computer, emailing the photos, or posting them on facebook or other photo sharing sites.   However, this compression comes at a price.  Some of the information captured by your digital camera has been thrown away when saved as JPEG format.  Also, when you take the photo in JPEG format, the camera applies some automatic edits before saving the file, including exposure, color, contrast, saturation and sharpening.  You can't easily undo these automatic edits if the file is saved in JPEG.

The alternative is to use a lossless format which keeps all the original information captured by the camera sensor.   Raw files are just that - raw unprocessed image files directly from the camera sensor.  None of the information has been lost and no processing has been applied to the file.  It is in it's original "raw" state.

The downside of raw files is they can be very large.   The ones that come out of my Canon 5D Mark ii are about 24 megabytes.   They can fill up a memory card pretty quickly and take a long time to download to a PC.  These raw files cannot be displayed or edited without some special software with raw converters, such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.

On a recent hiking trip I overheard a group of photographers in the Raw vs. JPEG debate.   One made the statement that you really don't get much benefit from using the Raw format and JPEG was just as good.   I just went about my business shooting the scenery in Raw format without jumping in and telling them they really weren't right.   The best way to illustrate my point is by example.

Here's an unprocessed raw file from our trip to Korea.

Unprocessed Raw File

This is what you typically see when there is too much contrast in the photo.  The sky is "blown out" where you can't see any detail.  The structure on top of the wall is dark where you can't see details in the shadows.   The information in these areas is still there in the raw file and can be pulled out in a photo editor that supports raw format.

Raw file after editing

Here's the end result after editing the raw file.  You can see the clouds in the sky and the details in the structure that didn't appear to be there.   If I had taken the photo in JPEG format much of this information would have been discarded in the compression process.  I didn't take a JPEF format of this photo, but I can simulate it by converting the raw file into JPEG format.

In the photo below I started with a JPEG file and applied the same changes that I did to the raw file to see if there is really a difference.

JPEG after editing

At first glance, you might say they appear the same.  Look at the clouds in these two version.  Some of the cloud details are lost in the JPEG version.  Also, some of the details in the structure are not as clear in the JPEG version.  The best way to see the differences is to click on one of the photos to bring it up in a new window and then use the keyboard arrow keys to flip back and forth.

This is just one example.  The more extreme the shooting conditions the more valuable the raw format becomes.

Not all cameras support raw format.  All DSLRs and some mid-range  compacts do.   If you decide to try raw format, then remember you will need a software package to read and process the files.

More photos from our trip to Korea are available online in the Travel Gallery