One of my primary NR tasks is cleaning up noisy skies. I find that DeNoise-AI struggles with this and nearly always falls short of what legacy Denoise-6 can produce.
Does anyone understand the reasons behind this? I assume it is related to the current AIDN short-comings processing luminance noise?
eg
I often find that Dynamic Skin Smoothing in Nik’s Color Efex Pro makes great work of noisy skies.
It seems that your noise reduction is set very high for a image like that and I would probably reduce the Reduce Noise slider to maybe 0.20 to 0.30 and not Enhance Sharpness but maybe set Recover Details to about 0.10.
It is always advisable to try with Auto first to see what settings it will give. If you don’t want the preview to be updated automatically, saves waiting, then set the Automatically Update Preview to No and then click on Update Preview when you want to see the result.
This is one of my test images, because it is so bad, the image was shot at 12,800ISO and you can see the settings that I use here. I believe that the settings in DeNoise AI go way to high anyway, In this case the noise is almost all removed at a setting of 0.25::
It takes a bit of effort to find the picture (click on the first post) but clearly the second picture is better but they are not labeled so I don’t know which it is.
#2 is DxO Prime NR. #1 is Denose-AI. (OP post #13).
So, you chose DxO Prime as being superior on that image.
I just ran a test using a Sony RAW picture so there was not corrections to it. The first is a 200% crop original where you can see noise in the sky. The second is Denoise AI and the third is AI Clear within the Denoise AI stand alone. I think AI clear did the best overall job of keeping detail and removing noise. These are all screen captures.
Yes, Auto is the obvious starting point, but it didn’t get the job done; not even close. So, I cranked the setting up for this demo so the first potential response wouldn’t be “increase the NR”. And the setting actually makes zero difference in this case.
I can only conclude one of these scenarios:
a) AIDN cannot detect this type of noise (eg luminance) present in the sky
or
b) ADIN is not working properly on my AMD GPU. Both myself and another user are seeing odd warnings in the trace logs with debug tokens that specifically reference “AMD”. One would assume that OpenGL would abstract that away, but maybe not.
Of course, if the latter, then I would need to start down the arduous path with a support ticket.
PS Attached example shows without too much doubt that Studio:AI-Clear removes more sky noise than AIDN, but not as much as manual tweaking with DN-6 (at least, in this case)
Note: Working original is a Tiff file processed from Raw.
In my typical usage scenarios, I find that Studio:AI-Clear outperforms DeNoise-AI (in either mode) in almost all of my scenarios. I think that is why the user-base got out the pitchforks when they thought AI-Clear might go away. Your test also goes toward confirming that in this usage scenario (noisy skies).
An inexplicable irony…I noticed that Sharpen-AI actually removes more sky noise than DeNoise-AI! (which the latter hardly removes any).
Changed to v1.1.2t (Dev) provided by TL support.
Obviously, v1.1.1 is broken on my AMD system; updated supported ticket.
Denoise AI is version 1.1.1 for me and no notice to update. Were you notified to update to 1.1.3?
Typo…it should be v1.1.1 (updated).
