Today’s Question: Why does the Denoise with AI feature in Photoshop [via Camera Raw] cause the result to be saved as a new DNG file? Is the “old” way with Noise Reduction slider still available but hidden somewhere?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you don’t want to use the Denoise feature in Camera Raw or Lightroom you can indeed use the Manual Noise Reduction option so you can control the noise reduction effect yourself.
More Detail: With some of the advanced features in Lightroom and Camera Raw, such as Denoise and Super Resolution, the processing requires that the raw capture data be processed and demosaiced. As part of this process the image is saved as an Adobe DNG file.
The new Denoise feature leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to process the image, and involves using just a single slider for the overall strength of the effect. If you prefer to use the manual noise reduction (as I do for most images) you can simply make use of the Manual Noise Reduction feature.
If the sliders for Manual Noise Reduction are not shown, you can click the triangle to the right of that heading to display them. This includes sets of sliders for both luminance and color noise reduction, which you can fine-tune based on the image and your preference in terms of balancing noise reduction with the potential degradation in the image that noise reduction can cause.
