I recently updated my version of Adobe Lightroom. It prompty announced a new feature: High ISO noise reduction using AI. Adobe's AI based filters have been mostly positive previously. So, I was keen to try it out.
The first thing I discovered is that it only works with RAW files more or less straight off the camera. Anyway, I have tons of RAW files at medium to high ISO. In 2015 when I was first getting into photography seriously, I took a ton of pictures of my friend's sprint car at the dirt track. Often the racing would go fairly late into the night requiring a steady bump in ISO to maintain a decent shutter speed for the fast moving race cars. The photo I selected was shot at ISO 6400, 200mm, f/5.6, and 1/60s.
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Zoomed out, they look pretty similar. If we compare at 100% zoom, the difference becomes very apparent. Again the original is above with the enhanced image below it.
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One of the primary use cases for a feature like this is astrophotography. I don't expect the stacking process will go away anytime soon but this filter certainly helps the more casual of us astrophotographers get decent results with a minimum of effort.
Here we'll take a look at a shot from my trip to Iceland last September. We were so lucky to have such an impressive display of aurora. I took this shot with the "night sight/astro" setting on my Pixel phone. I set it to capture in RAW and the first image is the original shot at ISO 787, 2.35mm, f/2.2, 0.5s (very strange settings if you ask me, but that's another story).
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In this case, we hardly need to zoom in to see the difference. So when we do zoom to 100%, the improvement is very impressive. I'll be interested to experiment with this feature as a precursor to traditional stacking.
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Time to take another look at my old pics to see how this feature can give them a new lease on life.