Pros & Cons
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- Excellent and automatic noise reduction
- Adjustments for fine-tweaking
- Brush for local application of denoising
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- No photo browser—only one photo at a time
- Lightroom/Photoshop plug-in workflow is less integrated than that of DxO PureRAW
Topaz DeNoise AI excels at one specific job: clearing out digital noise from your photos. It gives you more control over its operation than its closest competitor, DxO PureRAW, which is also excellent at what it does. Topaz DeNoise is far more effective at removing noise artifacts than Lightroom, Photoshop, and other general photo-editing software, which require you to fiddle with sliders and don’t produce as good results on high-ISO digital photos. Though I was less than thrilled with Topaz's all-around photo software Topaz Studio, the company’s noise reducer is at least as good as DxO’s, and in some ways even better. Both are excellent products, and your choice depends on the type of photos you have and how much control you want over the process.
How Much Does Topaz DeNoise AI Cost?
You can get Topaz DeNoise AI directly as a download from its maker’s website for $79.99, though that list price is occasionally discounted. You can get a free trial version that has no time limit, but files you save with it will be watermarked across the middle, so as not to be usable.
Top competitor DxO PureRAW costs more at $129, but it corrects more than just noise. Its free trial is fully functional with no watermark, though limited to 30 days. The excellent ON1 NoNoise AI costs just $69 as a standalone product, or you can get it included with the company’s ON1 Photo RAW workflow software for $149.99.
How Do You Use Topaz DeNoise AI?
Using Topaz DeNoise AI is a simple matter of browsing for image files in a file picker or dragging them into the app from File Explorer or Finder. Unlike DxO PureRAW, you can use non-raw files like JPGs as well as raw camera files, so if you need to do that, Topaz DeNoise AI is your choice. One drawback, however, is that Topaz DeNoise AI can only work with one photo at a time, where DxO PureRAW creates a gallery for later reference. That’s not an issue if you use it as a plug-in.
I like that Topaz DeNoise AI lets you choose characteristics of the source image you want to apply denoising to: Standard, Clear, Low Light, Severe Noise, and Raw. Note, too, that you can try it out with sample shots included with the app. The view of the photo is updated with the noise reduction even as you zoom and pan around the image. You can view the original, see a split screen, or a side-by-side comparison—some products don’t offer this many comparison view options. You can even compare the different denoising methods (Standard, RAW, and so on) on the same shot in a grid.
How Well Does Topaz DeNoise Work?
I loaded in some test shots to see how good Topaz DeNoise AI and its main competitors are at cleaning out the noise from photos while preserving detail. On my first test using its RAW setting, Topaz DeNoise AI produced a more detailed image than DxO PureRAW, with less blurring. The RAW setting produces the best image detail of any of the choices when the test shot is in raw format.
The next image compares Topaz DeNoise AI with ON1 NoNoise AI using the same photograph.
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In this case, both photo editors produced excellent results, and which one you prefer is really a matter of taste.
What Makes Topaz DeNoise AI Different?
A big difference between Topaz DeNoise AI and DxO PureRAW is that the DxO product is a completely automatic tool, while Topaz DeNoise AI gives you sliders to adjust its noise removal strength—even separating out color noise reduction—and detail and sharpness in addition to offering an automated option. The other big difference is that DxO not only corrects for noise, but also for camera and lens distortion, which sometimes results in a better end product, as with this ISO 10,000 shot of a Mangrove Cuckoo in the hills of Saint Lucia.
For an example of using standard photo software rather than one of these single-purpose AI-powered tools, here’s the best I could get rid of noise in this same shot using Lightroom Classic. The results are not bad, but they're nowhere near as good as any of the others. Ignore the brighter light in the Lightroom Classic version—what's important is the detail retained while eliminating noise in the Topaz DeNoise AI image, and in fact, for this photo, the DxO PureRAW fix above beats both of those below.
Local DeNoising
Unlike the DxO and ON1, Topaz DeNoise AI lets you selectively denoise areas of the photo based on a mask you brush on, which is useful for when you want an effect of noise for the background. You can easily control the brush size and feather for this selection with shift keys and the mouse wheel, and the Edge Aware option is more than welcome. A red overlay clearly shows the result of your brushed-on mask.
Using Topaz DeNoise AI as a Plug-in
Topaz DeNoise AI works with Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop as a standard external-editing plug-in. By contrast, DxO PureRAW integrates more conveniently with the Lightroom Classic catalog database— you can use its plug-in right inside Lightroom. PureRAW also works as an extension to Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder, something Topaz DeNoise AI doesn’t offer. With Topaz DeNoise AI, you have to open the separate app after its plug-in creates a TIFF copy of the image you’re working on. The TIFF image appears updated in Lightroom after you process it with Topaz DeNoise AI. It’s not that much more inconvenient than DxO, which helpfully creates a subfolder in the same folder as the original with DNG raw files of the improved image.
What’s Your Best Tool Against Photo Noise?
If you don’t always shoot in perfect lighting situations but still want your digital photos looking clean and clear, you owe it to yourself you get one of these automatic AI-powered denoisers. They’re a snap to use, and the results are far and away better than what you can get with standard photo software like Lightroom, Photoshop, or Capture One. In our testing DxO and ON1 do better with low light, while Topaz DeNoise AI is better with shots at normal light. It’s likely your camera model and lens will play a role in which app produces better results for youi.
We recommend you take advantage of all the products’ free trials to see which works best for your equipment and shot types. If you want more control over settings or need to work with non-raw camera files, Topaz DeNoise AI is the way to go. If you want hands-off automatic adjustments that fix lens distortion as well as noise, DxO PureRAW is better. Both are Editors’ Choice winners among photo utilities.
Final Thoughts
Topaz DeNoise AI
Topaz DeNoise AI automatically and effectively removes digital photo noise from your shots. It offers more control than competitors do, even letting you apply the fix locally with brush masks.