JD750 Loc: SoCal

I saw an on-line short tutorial about workflow, the author recommended performing noise reduction early, right away, because many of the processes used in editing will magnify noise.

I was of the impression that noise reduction was normally done toward the end of an editing process.

Any thoughts here?

UTMike Loc: South Jordan, UT

Following.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

Beginning. If you sharpen first, you can make the noise sharper and harder to treat.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

Any of the processes that magnify noise will do that regardless of which order things are done in. You could do some denoise only to find that by the end of the edit you need to re-work the denoise.

One of the targets with denoise is to give the photo the minimum that it needs. You can't accurately assess that until the rest of the editing is completed. Plus sharpening and denoise should be done together so that both can be optimised. It's not a good idea to do sharpening too early in the edit. The answer is to do sharpening and denoise together at or close to the end of the edit.

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Of course at the beginning... but I recall that if you change the dimensions for printing the author suggested a quick check of noise... using the screen splitter in Topaz deNoise AI...

If I try to do anything after Gigapixel... my computer bogged down with the big file... so increasing pixels is the end task.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Now in April 2024, it depends almost entirely on the software and image capture format. If you're in RAW using a combination of Topaz AI tools and the Adobe subscription software, you would run the Noise processing as step 1, letting Topaz output a DNG wrapper around your RAW, then bringing the DNG into the Lightroom Library to continue your edits. Your RAW file remains; and then, whether you bring that into LR and 'stack under' the DNG is a personal preference on 'completeness' of your catalog approach.

Other software choices present other workflows. Using a 'plug in' tool that can't handle a camera's native RAW format will likely be used toward the end of the process workflow, as a final / near final step on the fully edited image, preferably as a 16-bit TIFF in the ProPhotoRGB colorspace. These massive TIFFs and the lack of batch (volume / multi-image) processing makes the plug-in a tedious approach for more than a 1-off approach.

As Adobe advances, still other approaches will likely develop. Personally, I 'own' and maintain older unsupported software like LR6 and the non AI Topaz DeNoise6 that lets me batch process images. I could imagine a situation where I had a new LR version and could 'mask' the subject against the background and then DeNoise just the background. Noise in the sky of airshow shots in one my typical batch process runs in DeNoise6 after initially cleaning the entire image via LR's noise processing.

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

I agree with CHG…shock.. depends on software. My primary post processing app is On1 2024.3. Their NoNoise is great inside On1 so I am working on the original image which in my case will. always be raw of some type. It does a great job.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Thank you everyone for taking the time to reply. This is very helpful.

And it didn't occur to me that it could be dependent on the software but of course that makes sense.