John & Maria's Photography Pages

Testing Lightroom Denoise and Blur tools - a first look

With the advent of a new computer* that can more easily handle the increasingly demanding processing power needs of Lightroom and Photoshop (especially combined when I photostack) I thought it was time to try the new AI Denoise feature in Lightroom.  I've always been reluctant to try high ISO photography with my Olympus cameras because noise does increase as I go over 800 ISO.  If Denoise can handle 1600/3200 or even higher ISOs I does extend my range of photography possibilities.

Lightroom also has a new Blur tool.  Still in beta at the moment I thought it was also worth a try to see if:

• I could produce smoother backgrounds to better make the subject "pop"
• reduce the overall noise to clean up the image.

Here's the image; Polyommatus icarus, the common blue butterfly on Geranium 'Salome'.  Taken at f4 at 150mm, ISO 800, with the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro it's actually quite decent untouched apart from normal processing from the RAW file.  (You may need to click on the images to see them at a larger size.)

Noise is certainly present but it's not too bad, even looking at the 100% crop below.  Note the slight graining behind the butterfly's wings.  The overall background is also not quite as smooth as I would like.  (Though the crop is a bit misleading in only showing the bit of the background that is nicely blurred.)

I then applied the Denoise / Enhance tool followed by the Blur tool. At 100% the results are more noticeable than on the reduced size image below but even on this one it's noticeably smoother and less grainy and the background is further out of focus, giving a cleaner appearence that makes the subject stand out more.  More "pop", in effect

The 100% crop of the butterfly definitely shows a cleaner, smoother background, enhancing the differentiation between the subject and the background.

This was only the first test of these two tools and not a particularly demanding one.  But even so, I can easily tell the difference.  The Denoise is certainly memory and processor hungry but even that only took a couple of minutes to process the image.  I'm certainly likely to use these two tools more often.  I still need to test at higher ISO's and images with more demanding background / subject separation needs but that's for when it stops raining!

*For those interested - especially the similarly cash strapped - the new computer is a fairly cheap (£400) BosGame mini gaming PC with AMD Ryzen 5000 processor and Radeon graphics.  32Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD drive provide the necessary memory capacity for the type of image processing work I do.  It's far from the best available - but it does the job and that's the important thing.  I'd grown very tired of waiting for ages while even a simple stack of 8 images took many minutes to align and merge.  It's now, while not instantaneous, far, far faster.