Thanks to all who responded to my previous email/post about applying AI to bird photographs. Many responses were very thorough and did a great job of explaining the author’s point of view. My intent is to do a few more emails on different facets of AI and then collate your thoughts and present them back for your review (that is if AI hasn’t killed us all before then).
As I began reviewing the ways I use AI on my bird photographs I realized that I now use it on every photograph I process. Not just a little twig or blade of grass but on the entire image. My workflow nowadays is to cull down my images to the likely keepers and then apply AI to them before doing any further post-processing. What do I do? I use Lightroom’s Denoise function – on every one. Lightroom uses AI to analyze every part of each image and removes any noise it sees (Topaz and other denoise programs do the same thing). In other words, if I were to make a rule that no AI could be used on any image shared on Great Bird Pics I couldn’t add any more of mine! Let’s take a look at an example (your cell phone’s screen may not be large enough to see the differences between the three images below).
First here’s a picture of an Orange-collared Manakin I saw in Costa Rica. I adjusted the lighting in Lightroom but did not apply any noise reduction.
As you can see the noise makes everything look fuzzy. Noise is created by the camera when it doesn’t have enough light information to capture so it places dots in its place.
Next the image has had Lightroom’s (AI) Noise Reduction applied. No dots – just a beautiful picture of a colorful bird.
In this case AI was applied to the entire image – not just parts of it. Looks pretty good.
For arguments sake let’s take a look at one final version of the image. In this case I turned off the AI Noise Reduction and applied the Manual Noise Reduction function that has been a part of Lightroom for many years – but it doesn’t use AI.
The Manual Noise Reduction removed the noise but the image now looks “soft” – many of the feather details have been lost. Rather unsatisfying but no AI either.
So here’s this week’s question – is using AI Noise Reduction acceptable or not? For those of you who previously responded that you didn’t think AI should be used at all, what do you think now? I look forward to reading your responses (reply to the email or make a comment on the post).
PS – I my final version of this picture I used AI Remove to get rid of the out-of-focus stalk and leave on the right side of the image.
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