Three of the most common technical problems you’ll see in digital photographs are exposure errors where the image appears too dark or too bright, excessive amounts of noise, and unplanned blurred objects in the image. These last two issues are usually the worst since most major photo editing applications can easily correct brightness issues, but it’s at the expense of introducing more noise and blurriness to the image.
Topaz DeNoise is a noise reduction plugin developed by Topaz Labs that works with several major photo editing applications, including Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate. To start out with a rough test of the plugin, I looked for one of the noisiest photos I had. I found this one shown below which has a great deal of visible noise in addition to a lot of other problems. (Click any image for a larger view.)
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Now, I knew that Topaz DeNoise wouldn’t be able to fix all the issues with this photo, but I did want to see how it would handle the noise. Just applying the basic filter (one click), gave me this modified image.
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Again, there’s still a lot of work to be done on this photo, but I was pretty impressed with the initial results of the plugin. Now, let’s take a look at the product’s other features.
