Adobe just released this new AI-based noise reduction feature for their Lightroom program and it is just ridiculous in how good it works. This isn’t even an ad or anything, I just think it’s noteworthy to show you guys. Photos shot with mirror-less camera bodies tend to produce quite a bit of noise, from my experience, but the amount of megapixels nowadays create such large digital images that you don’t really see the noise when the photo is compressed for viewing on say, a smartphone…

I wanted to test it on some older photos that were unusable for me before because they were shot in such dark environments, at very high ISO range, on an older mirrored Canon dSLR. The photos aren’t nearly as big (almost half the size in fact) as those created on a mirrorless body so the noise is more coarse and obvious. Many of you may remember the photos that did work out for me from this set, shot in Osaka on the highway in the pitch black of night. These are the ones I tossed aside. I wanted to see what this new Noise Reduction feature would do and the results are insane. The AI makes up for the loss in detail caused by the noise, retains sharpness, and still creates enough range for the photos to be further manipulated…

I’ve always kept all my old RAW images thinking that some day there would be new technology to give new life to a lot of photos I never thought were usable. I guess we are there now. The advancements of AI technology offer so many new possibilities, but it’s also making it way too easy for people to be ‘good’ at something that once had a steep learning curve like photography. A gift and a curse I suppose…

I attached a quick little snippet of how this photo came to be. It doesn’t show everything obviously because it’s sped-up and my screen recorder doesn’t display all menus. The other two photos were processed in the same way. Crazy to think that even when the AI Noise Reduction is cranked all the way to 100% it still manages to retain all the detail from the rain and the finer elements contained within the subject matter…

Thanks for looking!!