Question about Denoise and masking

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1

I just downloaded Denoise 2.2.1 and all is working well. I’m wondering if someone could answer a question I have.

Masking is clearly a useful tool to use in Sharpen AI (especially with Stabilize) as I often run into situations where I only want to sharpen a specific subject and leave the other components of the photo alone where artifacts could be introduced.

Most of my photography is wildlife so I generally want to eliminate all noise in my photos. Denoise does great at that and even retains/enhances detail by giving a preliminary sharpening unlike typical denoising algorithms. What I don’t understand is when would someone want to mask a particular area of a photo to select for denoise and leave the other parts of the photo alone?

2

I imagine you would mask out areas of the image where there are textures you don’t want Denoise AI to get rid of. For example, the fabric thread texture of someone’s jacket or sand at the beach. Also, often some images have visible noise in some areas while it’s barely visible in other areas, so you want to preserve as much of the original image as possible, as opposed to unnaturally smoothing everything. As well, you might do one light pass of denoise over the whole image and a second pass only in the more noisy areas.

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