Clean up Your Photos with Adobe Denoise

Adobe recently added a new AI-powered tool to Lightroom and Camera Raw: Denoise.

You can find it in the Detail Module in the Noise Reduction section.

Denoise does an amazing job removing digital noise from photos while retaining detail. In the past, Adobe users had to use third-party programs and plugins to achieve the same level of advanced noise reduction.

With Denoise, you'll never have to leave Lightroom or Camera Raw to achieve high-quality results.

Watch the video below to learn more.

Denoise is incredibly easy to use and, as the video above demonstrates, very effective. On a practical level, Denoise makes it easier to use high ISOs and smaller sensor cameras without worrying about the resulting noise. It also makes it easier to reveal detail in darker areas without having to rely on time-consuming exposure blending.

When leading wildlife photo tours, my clients are often concerned when shooting in low light because of the resulting high ISOs. In the past, my advice has always been to shoot even when the ISO gets high. Sure, the photo might be too noisy and ultimately be unusable, but if you don't shoot, you're guaranteed to not get the photos. Besides, you never know whether future advancements in noise reduction will allow you to recover previously unusable photos.

Well, I'm glad I gave that advice as the future is now! Denoise works wonders, even on high-ISO photos I took years ago with cameras that were very noisy.

For example, I took the night photo above many years ago in Africa during a night drive. Because it was so dark, I used ISO 20,000 to make this image. Even though I used a high ISO, I still had to significantly increase the exposure of the sky while processing the photo to reveal the detail in the clouds.

As you can imagine, the resulting noise rendered the image completely unusable. In the video above, I demonstrate running this photo through Denoise, which did an amazing job removing the noise, although I was left with a few edge artifacts from the aggressive noise reduction.

After filming the video, I did some further clean-up work in Photoshop to remove the edge artifacts. While the end product isn't perfect, Denoise allowed me to recover a previously unusable image. Frankly, I'm amazed at the results!

There are alternative noise reduction options available, such as Topaz Labs Denoise AI. While this review isn't intended to offer a head-to-head comparison with these other products, I will note that I ran the same image through Topaz Denoise AI. The result was comparable; in some ways, the Adobe result looked a little bit better while in other ways, the Topaz result looked a little bit better.

I think it's fair to say that you can confidently remove noise from your photos - without having to use a third-party program or plugin - and never worry that you could get significantly better results elsewhere.

The bottom line? Adobe has done a great job with this new Denoise tool. You can bet I'll be digging through my digital image archives, looking for noisy photos that I previously thought were unusable.

Also, I'm going to start thinking about pushing the limits of low light and high ISO to make creative photos at the very edge of light, with the confidence that Denoise can remove the resulting noise while retaining important image detail.