Masking in Sharpen AI

While playing with a flower image that had a blue sky background and using a mask on the flowers I discovered that the mask applies to both sharpening and noise suppression. I think that noise suppression should apply to the whole picture. If we want to mask a subject so it is sharpened (mask should be green, not red) we would expect the other non sharpened areas to have noise reduction. This is not the case, as it is not applied. This change should be incorporated in the next update.

I disagree. The aim of the NR is to reduce incremental noise caused by the sharpening process. If there is no sharpening, I would not want NR to wipe out details in those areas that were not modified. If I want more NR in unsharpened areas, I’d use Denoise AI.

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There is a slider to control the amount of noise reduction and it is useful to reduce noise in the whole picture. Not everyone has Denoise AI and simple noise reduction is perfectly ok for light noise in the sky for example. So the way it is now if I use a mask, I can’t apply noise reduction for the sky in the program. There could easily be a switch to turn the whole picture NR on or off.

It is an idea but could be seen as feature creep, something Topaz products have been criticized for where several products end up having redundant duplicate functions. Topaz studio provides basic NR already. The AI products are seen as Plugins mainly, in other words single function. If you wish to apply NR to the entire image in Sharpen AI you can always process the sharpen mask without NR, then run it again with NR but no mask or sharpening no?