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Watch: How to get super clean images when shooting high ISO raw files

The ISO capabilities in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras today is pretty amazing. But it’s not perfect. You’re still going to see an increase in noise as you ramp up the ISO, even if it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. But we all love clean, noiseless images, don’t we? Along with the improvements in ISO performance, we’ve also seen big leaps in noise reduction technology. But many of them still aren’t perfect, often eliminating noise at the expense of detail.

For some images, you really do need to keep that detail and in this video from Scott Walker at Walks on the Wild Side, we learn three different methods of noise reduction. These methods include simple Lightroom Edits, Topaz Denoise AI and a pretty complex method that’s very involved but “fixes everything”. He also covers a “Pre-noise reduction” process you can do before you bring your photo into 3rd party software.

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The best photo noise removal software in 2022

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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are everywhere in photography now. I recently wrote about whether we should be worried about AI in photography. My conclusion is that we shouldn’t. Today I’m demonstrating the power of AI in the form of a battle, putting the leading noise removal software head-to-head. I’ve searched through my raw images to find a particularly noisy shot to work with. [Read More…]

Google’s new NeRF AI has learned to see in the dark better than any camera you own

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Computational photography is a big thing these days. Not only when it comes to smartphones but also with software for the desktop using photos shot with a “real camera”. One particular area where it’s beneficial is noise reduction. It’s built into many smartphone camera apps automatically and it’s available for the desktop in applications like Noise Ninja and Topaz DeNoise AI, not to mention denoising features built into apps like Lightroom.

Google’s new Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) AI, titled RawNeRF (AKA NeRF in the Dark), however, blows them all away, with images that are not only so good they look almost flawless but it can then go on to generate completely artificial 3D scenes that you can move around in after the fact, as well as adjust exposure, gamma & tone mapping and even focus – including bokeh balls!

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DxO PureRAW 2 is now 4x faster on Apple Silicon and adds Fuji X-Trans file support

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DxO has announced DxO PureRaw 2 which brings with it some pretty big performance increases, with a 50% speed boost on Windows and runs up to four times faster on Apple Silicon-based Macs. The new release also adds support for Fujifilm’s X-Trans files, promising “demosaicing and denoising like you’ve never seen before” that “corrects every possible lens defect”.

Like the previous version, PureRAW 2 uses convolutional neural networks to perform the demosaicing and denoising process. But over its predecessor, it sees a couple of new ways of working. You can pre-process your images from directly within Lightroom, to generate already-enhanced Linear DNG files for editing, or you can do it straight from the Windows Explorer or macOS Finder interface.

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DxO PureRAW cleans up noise and softness in your photos before you load them into Lightroom

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DxO has announced DxO PureRAW, their new software to… Well, I suppose “pre-process” is the best term to describe it. It pre-processes your raw files before you load them into Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Capture One or whatever raw software you happen to use. Its goal is to help improve your starting point with increased sharpness and reduced noise.

DxO PureRAW is not a plugin. It’s a standalone application through which you run your raw files before your usual editing workflow. It claims to remove noise, chromatic aberration, vignetting, distortion and to improve sharpness and clarity using DxO’s DeepPRIME AI tech after which it exports out a set of new DNG raw files for editing.

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Which Camera is the Noisiest? This visual database compares sensor noise

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The quality of long exposures is determined mostly by the amount of noise a camera produces. The lower the noise levels, the better the exposure. This is especially true if you are shooting lots of nightscapes or night skies, where most of the photo is black.

And Brendan Davey shoots a lot of night photos, in fact he shoots enough of them that it was worth a while for him to create a database which compares the amounts of noise each camera (or camera sensor) produces.

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DeNoising Vidoe: Neat Video vs. Denoiser II

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When it comes to noise in photos, we are pretty accustomed to using DeNoising tools. When it comes to video, there are similar options that apply that same logic to footage, rather than to a single frame.

The folks over at Film Riot took two of the more popular options, Neat Video and Denoiser II (both at about $100) for a test drive and compare the results. Ryan talks about a third plugin called Dark Energy which he says surpasses them both, but sadly, it fell of the comparison for costing $100 more.

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