I would like to see the option to turn off denoising in most models or have the option to dehalo on other models.
Let me explain why: most of the footage I try to improve is from older video either VHS or DVD and low resolution. Most models have heavy denoising even when setting Denoise Relative to Auto to -100 so much detail is blurred into nothingness that it becomes futile and a lot of it is not actually noise it’s texture. GAIA tends to be my go to model just because it doesn’t denoise aggressively even though the footage is far from high quality.
Now a lot of this old footage has been sharpened to try and reduce the blurriness which can create another problem of halo on edges. Now Topaz has come a long way in the dehalo department and it’s actually quite useful now but again it’s only available on models that aggressively denoise so I don’t have the option without the heavy denoising which again kind of defeats the object of the sharpening in the first place.
I see 2 possible solutions; add a checkbox for absolutely no denoising AT ALL to models where sliders can be adjusted or, add a dehalo checkbox with slider to models without the option.
Honestly my biggest bugbear with Topaz is the usually unnecessary heavy denoising that is destructive and removes details. Even most professionals will tell you to use the least amount of denoising you can get away with because of it yet a lot of Topaz models seem to rely on flattening every texture perceivable regardless of if there’s actually any noise.
If I could just turn denoising off completely I’d be way more inclined to vary the models I use.
I think most denoise happens by Chroma/Luminance, which is how models works, but if there happens additional denoising, it makes sense to have a choice to turn this down to zero.
Dehalo for all models would be fine. It’s not consistent, I also missing for some models other features. For example Artemis has no Sharpening levler, this and others.
My issue with the dehalo in all of the adjustable models, is that it tends to be a general blur. It doesn’t zero-in on halos and beautifully erase them. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe I’m wanting de-ringing? I want something that removes the duplicate off-set edges that get added with MPEG2 compression.
Yes Dehalo does generally blur everything, another reason not to add denoising in the mix. It’s targeting is very hit and miss. Here’s an example somebody was asking about recently:
You can see in this instance the dark edges are visibly reduced but the image is overall softer as well. It seems to give better results for the dark halo than it does for light halo and I usually end up using Hybrid for light halo first then Topaz to deal with the darker side of the edges. It’s not ideal and I have to resharpen after with an edge detect mask to prevent it putting back what I removed but it’s the best I can do. As I said I’d rather not add the denoising into the mix which just removes even more detail but right now there’s no other option. It’s also reducing contrast which doesn’t help the rest of the picture.
Yes dehalo does bluring and also denoise by the way how it works. This pixel shifts/new arragements causes the image to lose some naturalness. It’s a invasive function but could be helpfull depends on, most I don’t use it. More important than Dehalo would be that every model has an Sharpen and Anti-Alias/Deblur Slider.
The question is how much of the blur is caused by the background denoising that can’t currently be turned off completely and how much by the dehalo?
From my testing the Dehalo does blur but only very slightly if I compare images with it at zero and 35 and mostly actually limited to edges. The denoising is the far bigger culprit of image softening.
Denoise -100 very blurry lots of detail loss everything else at 0 to relative.
With grain added and additional sharpening dehalo still set at 0.
Then Dehalo also set to 35. Probably can’t see the difference with compression between these 2 and flicking back and forth it’s a tiny difference in the eyelash.
In conclusion blurriness is mostly caused by background denoising removing detail and texture, not necessarily dehalo but we can only ever know if the option to turn denoising off COMPLETELY
becomes an option.
On a side note to this: Denoising usually has heavy CPU/GPU load. At the minute it feels like I am just compensating adding grain, improve detail and sharpening to offset what I don’t want denoise to do in the first place. Turning denoise off could potentially hugely reduce processing times in more ways than one.
I think they need to re-create Proteus all over. The denoising in Proteus 3 was not great, it makes things look like paintings. Proteus 4, they made it so that Fix compression also denoises. That turned out to be a big improvement because it doesn’t make things look like paintings, but it also got rid of any chance of keeping grain. (I don’t know if Proteus 3 can keep grain, since I don’t like it and find it to be crutch for good quality images.)
I like the idea of the Auto parameter mode, but with the parameters they made, it has some conflicts. Proteus 3 over-sharpens on auto because you have both Sharpen and Anti-alias/deblur that can end up amplifying each other. Proteus 4 only works because they reduced the effectiveness of Anti-alias/deblur.
What we need is a model like Proteus that has Anti-alias/deblur split into two sliders that can be turned off. It needs to be able to Fix compression without denoising. All sliders need to be able to be turned off. Of course I would love a Dehalo model that only dehaloes. (The training data for this would be pretty easy to make or buy. Just get Blu-rays and train against matching DVDs. You can even compress the Blu-rays into MPEG2 at all quality levels to get better data.)
