Turn the noise down with Denoise AI

James Paterson shows you how to use Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw AI to fix noisy images and improve quality

- James Paterson

If you’re wondering whether artificial intelligence will lead to the death of photography, here’s a good news story – AI is amazing at fixing noisy photos. We tested Adobe’s new AI-powered Denoise function on several noisy, high-ISO images. The bird photograph is a real and proper test – a heavily cropped, underexposed image shot in a dark forest taken at ISO25,600. The Denoise tool worked wonders on this and other grainy photos, giving better results than with older manual noise tools.

This Adobe tool is particularly effective at preventing colours from bleeding into one another. In our photograph, the original colours were barely perceptible but the tool pulled out the blues and reds in the subject to an astonishing degree. It also cleaned up and revealed details that were almost invisible in the original photograph.

In addition, any noise in the shadows has been enhanced and smoothed out. You can only apply Denoise to RAW files – it’s not currently available for JPEGs. So open up a few high-ISO RAW files and try it out...

STEP BY STEP FIX NOISY HIGH ISO SHOTS

Apply Adobe Camera Raw’s Denoise AI early in post for best results