Master the brilliant new Denoise tool in Lightroom

Adobe's new addition to Lightroom and Camera Raw uses Al to fix noisy images

- James Paterson 

If you're wondering whether artificial intelligence will lead to the death of photography, here's a good news story - Al is amazing at fixing noisy photos. We tested Adobe's new Al-powered Denoise function on several noisy, high-ISO images. This bird photo is a proper test - a heavily-cropped, underexposed image shot in a dark forest at 25,600 ISO on a Nikon D850. The Denoise tool worked wonders on this and other grainy photos, giving better results than with older manual noise tools.

The tool is particularly effective at preventing colours from bleeding into one another. In our photo, the original colours were barely perceptible but the tool pulled out the blues and reds in the subject to an astonishing degree. It also cleaned up and revealed details that were almost invisible in the original. In addition, any noise in the shadows has been enhanced and smoothed out. You can only apply Denoise to raw files - it's not currently available for jpegs. So open up a few high-ISO raws and try it out...

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