While I still think of the AI denoise feature as new because I forgot to update lightroom for a few months, the feature has been out since April of this year. While AI features and technology can be scary, especially for artists, this feature has been tremendously helpful and has saved a few photos that were shot at too high an ISO for their lighting environment. When used with the user’s judgment just like any other function of lightroom or photoshop, the tool drastically decreases noise and improves photo quality.

While I am a big fan of film grain, I am not a fan of digital image noise in my own work, and have spent many collective hours trying to slide the old denoise slider in lightroom as far up as I could, while still maintaining detail and sharpness. This new feature however allows for the photo to retain it’s detail and sharpness while using AI to remove the digital image noise, both regular noise and color noise.

This zoomed in photo shows the drastic change in appearance and regaining of detail that can come from Lightroom’s AI denoise.

I have been using this feature on lots of my photos, but it has come in handy the most with my photojournalism work for The Wood Word at Marywood U where the lighting conditions can be much more difficult to manage. Typically noise becomes much more apparent when you up the exposure in an image editing software, and when your flash runs out of battery at the tree lighting and you start to panic, you hope and pray that your photos won’t come out too dark enough to save. Now I don’t have to worry as much about being able to lighten exposures and dealing with noise, and can focus on getting the right shot.

The only issue I have ran into with this feature is that the AI part of the feature can have trouble preserving detail accurately in peoples faces, especially around the mouth. Distortion of people’s faces can be a very bad issue to have, so always proceed with caution when using any sort of automatic editing feature, and use your best judgement.

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