Above is a photo I took a few years ago that I have hoped to reproduce a better version of in the future due to the image being relatively high noise and the Milky Way not being quite where I wanted it to be, but conditions are always changing in the Everglades and climate change is making it increasingly unlikely I will ever see much water in that location with clear skies again. That being said a good denoising product could greatly improve the usability of the image, but denoising has its limits.
With the release of ON1 NoNoise AI 2021, I decided to give improving the above image a shot, but so far in only the most rudimentary way possible. I decided to take my edited photo and drop it in ON1 NoNoise AI 2021 directly from Lightroom which gave me the below image. I’m not sure if you can see it but the image is significantly cleaner, but there are some funky mush artifacts in places along with parts of the image that the software seems to have not touched at all between the branches, but it would likely make a better small print than the above image and could be reworded to hide the flaws.
That being said my next step was to open a RAW file in ON1 NoNoise AI 2021, which is what the program recommends. After denoising the image I exported to a photoshop file and imported it into Lightroom where I copied the edits from my previous image and then tweaked a few settings creating the below image. This time the whole image has been improved, but there are still mushy spots if you pixel peep in the water, but I think this could be used for a slightly larger print than the above image if I spend more time editing. It’s interesting that there was a pretty dramatic color shift from doing this that also added color to the portion of the Milky Way reflecting in the water. This seems like the best approach for editing, but it’s very hard to judge the final results if you’re pushing the RAW file exposure up a stop or more.
I didn’t want to make these test images about processing skills or photoshop skills so I did very little to tweak the final product, but I personally feel like this could be used to save lower noise images with minimal effort. It looks like pushing your equipment and camera to the extreme will still take a decent amount of editing work to get the best results and I would love to try other Denoising products on the above image to find the best, but my selection of denoising software is limited at this time. If you want to look at larger copies of the above I created a gallery here on 500px.
ON1 NoNoise AI 2021 is not perfect and it isn’t a one-click solution for the above type of image, but I’m intrigued by the possibilities and will be searching for noisy properly exposed images to test ON1 NoNoise with in the future. If you have any that you would like me to try and will allow me to share the results feel free to contact me with your file, a general statement that I can share the image, and that you own all the rights to the image.
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