Regression: Remove Noise is auto-recovering blurred faces

Regression: Remove Noise is auto recovering faces (regardless if recover faces is on/off, and selecting faces does not change the outcome)

Steps to reproduce issue:

  1. Turn on Remove Noise
  2. Slide strength and detail to any setting
  3. Instead of a blurred face remaining blurred, it is now being “recovered” with very awkward results.
  4. Toggle “Recover faces” on/off and it doesn’t change the results, it still auto-recovers blurred faces
  5. Choose “refine subjects” and erase a subject with a blurred face (shouldn’t be a subject to begin with), save, and it still doesn’t change the outcome
  6. the only thing that stops it from happening is to turn off “remove noise”

Expected this to only be a feature when “recover face” is selected and the “face” is selected. Otherwise the face should remain blurred.


Topaz Photo AI [v1.2.4] on [Windows]

It’s possible you’re seeing some undesirable output from the Remove Noise model. To be sure, send us the image and we can double-check.

For context, the Remove Noise model will still attempt to improve faces, but it may just do so badly (especially for small or low-quality faces). Face Recovery runs another model on top of Remove Noise output that creates better results. We haven’t heard any other reports of Face Recovery running when it’s disabled.

If this issue is caused by the Remove Noise model, we do have an upcoming improved Remove Noise model (see roadmap that should help with the issue.

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Ah, I wasn’t aware Remove Noise would try to reconstruct faces. Good to know. Hmm, I wonder if that can be dialed up/down in the future for those pesky background faces? (I shoot a lot of sports and it likes to fix those blurry faces)

So I repro’d it another way and realized that I had on “Remove Noise” AND “Enhance Resolution”. I suspect that the “suppress noise” coupled with the “remove noise” are both trying to fix those blurred background faces. So my workaround right now is to turn of noise reduction when using enhance resolution. This drastically reduces the ai trying to reconstruct the faces.

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