Adobe AI Denoise: A Powerful New Tool for Noise Reduction in Camera Raw & Lightroom

We are taking a quick break from all the NAB announcements to cover a new image editing tool announced by Adobe and integrated into the latest versions of Camera RAW and Lightroom known as AI-powered Denoise which uses the power of artificial intelligence to reduce the noise on RAW images without reducing the image quality.

There are many Denoise plug-ins that you can use in Photoshop, lightroom, and many other software or as stand-alone tools. Adobe of course had a noise reduction feature in both ACR and Lightroom but we never found it to be very effective.

With the new AI-powered Denoise Adobe is taking a huge step forward and bringing what might really be a groundbreaking feature that will enable photographers to work in significantly higher ISOs without having to worry about unwanted noise and loss of details.

In the video above Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE explains how to use the new A.I. Denoise and shows a few examples of the results that you can expect. 

Using the new Denoise is very straightforward. You need to go to the detail section in ACR or the noise reduction section in Lightroom and click Denoise. 

The next step will be to choose the amount of Denoise you want. The default is 50% and at the moment this seems to work well for most images. Note that you can’t use the new Denoise with super-resolution so you have to choose one or the other. You can also create a stack and that is more or less everything you need to know about this new tool.

The process can take a few seconds (depending on your computer and your image and you can also choose to do this to several images in one go.

The results (and we have tried this on some images we recently shot at high ISO in pretty low light are very good. This tool doesn’t make miracles of course but it certainly gives you a lot more to work with on images that previously were either time-consuming to fix or simply not usable.

Greg Benz with a comparison of the new Adobe Denoise and DxO PureRAW 3

It is worth mentioning that the new Adobe tool only works on RAW footage at the moment (Fuji X-Trans sensors are not supported at this time as well).

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and Lightroom section here). You can also find more PhotoshopCAFE videos here on LensVid.