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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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DxO PhotoLab 4 comes with AI-powered high ISO noise reduction

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DxO’s PhotoLab has seen a lot of improvements over the years. Their latest iteration, PhotoLab 4 comes with some pretty impressive high ISO noise reduction along with a host of workflow speed and other features. These improvements allow you to customise the user interface and provide easier access to your more commonly used tools, as well as adding a few new ones.

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Topaz DeNoise AI for night photos review

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Topaz has recently launched its newest version of DeNoise AI, and I have tested the software on a night image. Does this latest iteration of Topaz’ noise reduction program live up to the hype? According to Topaz, DeNoise AI has received several updates and improvements.

When you run the program you can choose between two modes: manual and auto. Auto comes with only one slider (Chroma Noise). In manual mode, you can also adjust the level of sharpening and noise reduction applied. In addition, you can also decide how the program displays the changes in real-time. I have only used the split-screen option when testing the software. The real-time preview isn’t very accurate. The processed image looks quite different from what the preview suggests.

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Kandao Raw+ offers automated image stacking for raw files without ghosting

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Stacking raw files isn’t anything new. We’ve been able to do it in Photoshop for years. But doing it in Photoshop requires some legwork. If you’ve got moving subjects in your shots, you need to mask things out, which can take a lot of time depending on the shot. Kandao’s new Raw+ software, however, figures it out automatically.

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How to remove or reduce high ISO noise in Lightroom

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Sometimes, when we’re out with our cameras, the light is a little lower than we’d like and we need to ramp up our ISO to compensate. But raising the ISO introduces noise. Potentially a whole lot of noise. And while you can never really get the image to look as good as it would have if you’d been able to shoot it at a low ISO, there are things you can do.

In this video, Unmesh Dinda from PiXimperfect shows us how to use the noise reduction tools in Lightroom to help reduce the impact of noise. This technique also applies to using Adobe Camera Raw. He then goes into Photoshop to illustrate how we can further bring back some of that lost detail.

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Use this simple Photoshop technique to shoot in the dark and effectively reduce noise

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Modern and high-end cameras can shoot without significant noise even at very high ISO values. But many of us still don’t own such cameras, so the ISO value where the photos are still usable is pretty limited. Koldunov Brothers share a simple Photoshop technique that will let you shoot In the dark even with a smartphone and reduce noise effectively.

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How to reduce noise in your photos with no 3rd party plugins in Lightroom and Camera Raw

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There’s plenty of great applications and plugins out there that will help you reduce noise in your images. Some are standalone apps while others are plugins. But there’s a lot you can do straight from within Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom without all that.

This video from Blake Rudis at F64 Academy talks us through the noise reduction features in ACR. As it uses the same raw engine as Lightroom, the same settings and techniques work the same way there, too. So, if you haven’t really dived into it before, or you’re relying on 3rd party apps, here’s how it all works.

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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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How to reduce noise and more easily work with “Blend if” layer sliders in Photoshop CC

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Photoshop’s layer blending options are some of its most powerful tools but also one of its most frustrating, particularly the “Blend if” sliders.  Designed to help you blend a layer with those below it based on the luminance of colour channels, actually seeing what’s effect it’s having on a layer often can be difficult.

In this video from the f64 Academy, Blake Rudis shows us a technique for dealing with “Blend if” to be able to easily see what part of the image our layer is covering, and applies it to some noise reduction.

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