Topaz Denoise vs Lightroom NR

bakubo wrote:

SHood wrote:

noellenchris wrote:

timo wrote:

Is Topaz DeNoise AI really much better than the standard noise reduction slider in Lightroom? I've been playing with the trial version, and it seems to me that with careful manipulation of the settings with both programmes you end up with pretty much the same result - certainly close enough that the difference would not be obvious on a screen or in a pretty large print. Have people generally found the cost of the Topaz plugin worthwhile?

HI, I tried several times to do what Topaz does in LR NR and Topaz is better for me. But I only use Topaz for touch photos, otherwise I use LR as I find it's good enough to fix most of my shots.

However, I'm beta testing LR Classic and they have put in a AI Denoise to test and it's better than the traditional LR IMO. Since it was just released one day ago, I'm sure it will improve drastically over the next few releases. The masks and heal tools were similar paths where the final release was much better.

It will be interesting to see how the new AI NR works with sharpening. I find that these are tied together, so hopefully Adobe has improved the sharpening algorithm as well.

Yes, I had the same thoughts. Topaz Photo AI which gets better with every weekly release combines denoise, sharpen, enlarging, and face recovery. I rarely use the enlarging functionality, but the others in combination are sometimes very useful. It would be great if Adobe could do this also within LrC.

I hope they leave the AI malarkey out of portrait retouching, both current AI products modify facial features by partially/completely replacing them (and if you know how AI, more precise machine learning, is working then you would expect that to happen)...