I used Denoise 5/6 in the past to smoothen and remove dust from product photos. In that older version text on labels etc. never became jaggy. Now I tried Denoise AI and expected that it will do everything better than Denoise 5 but that does not seem to be the case. No matter how low I set sharpness and how high I set denoise, text and some other elements always become jaggy and there does not seem to be any way to remove that “effect”. Even applying a mask does not completely remove that “jaggy” effect. Not sure if this is some “side effect” of AI technology and reduction of manual settings in AI. Has someone else observed this?
I’ve attached an image of an old Power Shot G2 manual cover. The image was scanned at 600dpi and initially saved as a 24 bit color depth TIFF file. That image was opened in Affinity Photo and then processed in Denoise AI v3.2.0 used as a plugin…
There was not a lot of difference between the comparison views (Standard, Clear, Low Light and Severe noise) with Settings set to Auto, so for the sake of the exercise, I chose “Severe Noise”. The settings suggested by Auto were Remove Noise=3 and Enhance Sharpness=28. Again for the sake of the exercise I set Remove Noise to 75 and Enhance Sharpness to 10.
After returning the image back to Affinity Photo, I exported the image at reduced size (2000 x 2899 px and as a JPG.
Even when viewed here at 200%, the text is quite clear, even the very small “Canon Zoom Lens” on the front of the lens.
That said, I don’t know whether your “product shots” are original camera shots, or scanned from some paper source, and I’m not sure where the “dust” is from. Was it on the original item when photographed? I would normally associate “jaggies” with low resolution and so some detail about your image size and format would perhaps help.
I’m not sure that Denoise AI was intended to be used for “smoothing”. I see its main function being to to remove or reduce noise (primarily Luminance noise and to a lesser extent Chrominance Noise) with minimum loss of clarity, and so I am not surprised that I can achieve more “smoothing” using the manual settings in Denoise 6…
In my view “AI” does not necessarily mean it can do better than a manual process carried out by a skilled operator. My expectation is that AI will simplify the process and achieve usable results with minimum skill needed on the part of the user.
Thanks a lot @Greyfox. These were some older JPEGs I tested with. In some Photigy workshops Denoise 5 was used to clean up product look, make it look more polished and the old Denoise did a very good job there. This is why I tried the new AI. So I think I will stay with the old version and/or use Photoshop’s filters to achieve the result where needed.
