Creative Advantages Using Denoise in Adobe Lightroom

 By now, if you use Adobe products to process your images, you would be aware of the new denoise filter powered by AI. We have all seen the examples and read the questions on where in the process it should be used. For those areas of photography where noise is an issue, we now have a tool that will help.

I have been considering what this means for infrared photography. In particular what it means for the those like myself using non converted cameras with infrared filters attached. Having a non converted camera means that you need to capture the light that sneaks between the blocking filter added by the manufacturer and the IR filter you have placed over the lens.

Lower light levels means that the photographer faces a balancing act between exposure times and noise. Longer exposure times add their own aesthetic to an image, one I enjoy. But sometimes longer exposure times are not suitable. But shorter exposure times leads to a noisier image and a loss of colour and detail.

So, what does Denoise AI from Adobe do for this equation? Is it quite a minor improvement? Do you need to pixel peep to see it? With anything like this, you can spend hours reading and watching to find out. Or you can do a few tests.

The test image I chose is pretty much a worst case example. Hot day which gave the sensor a good dose of thermal noise. The camera was my Canon 80D, which is not the worst camera for noise but it's nowhere near as good as the Canon 6D. The lens was my plastic fantastic 18-55 lens with a hoya 720 nm filter on it. This is where it gets noisy, I was trying to see what a handheld exposure would look like, which meant I chose a shutter speed as fast as I dared. The shutterspeed was 1/6th of a second at ISO 3200. That's what experimentation does for you, it pushes you right out of your comfort zone. The idea was to get a feel for what was possible. The image below is the best I could do at the time

Three years later, I was looking for a high ISO infrared image to torture test the denoise feature. When I came upon this same test image in the archives, a little curiosity crept into my mind. Would handheld infrared images be possible? Surely not! On to the test bench the image went. As you can see from the zoomed in section of the image below the results are not perfect but they are a great improvement on what was possible. The image with denoise applied is on the left and the original image is on the right.

The image below is the finished image.

I will let you draw your own conclusions but for me this opens some interesting new possibilities.