Everything you need to know about Denoise in Lightroom Classic

Denoise — Denoise was designed to remove noise with the help of Artificial Intelligence in photographs taken in low light situations that require high ISO settings without loosing sharpness and detail. Denoise does a noticeably better job than the traditional Noise Reduction tools, removing noise while maintaining color separation, preserving details in an image, and cleaning up noise in shadow areas. Currently, Denoise can be applied to Bayer and X-Trans raw files. For additional information, be sure to check out the video below:

Accessing Denoise — There are several ways to access Denoise.

• In the Library or Develop module, select Photo > Enhance. 
• Right-click in the image area and select Enhance from the context sensitive menu.
• Use the keyboard shortcut Control + Option + I (Mac) | Control + Alt + I (Win)
• Click the Denoise button in the Detail panel. 

Note: You can’t apply Denoise on an image more than once, although you can return to the original raw file to apply Denoise using different settings.

Previewing Denoise — Click and hold in the preview area to toggle between Enhanced and Without Enhance.  

• Click the magnifying glass to zoom out, then click in the preview are to zoom to a specific location. 
• Use the Hand tool in the preview area to scroll the image.

The default Amount is set to 50, but you can use the slider to tone down or amplify the amount of Denoise in an image. To reset the slider to the default of 50, double click on the circle. Note: applying the minimum amount of Denoise will not look the same as unchecking the Denoise option because some aspects of noise reduction (especially color noise) are still applied when Denoise is enabled (even when the value is set to 1).

File Naming — When applying Denoise, the resulting file will be saved as a new DNG and the file name is appended with “-Enhanced-NR”.

Applying Adjustments — Denoise carries over any enhancements made to the source image. However, I would suggest that you apply Denoise early in your workflow so that you’re making adjustments on the cleanest file possible. Otherwise, enhancements that you’ve made (Sharpening and Texture for example), may need to be revisited after running Denoise. 

• Content Aware Healing spots don’t preview in the Enhance dialog. However, Lightroom Classic will automatically update any healed areas after applying Denoise. Note: if you have a lot of healing spots, it might take a bit longer to render the new document and you’ll want to be sure that you review the results.
• Masking will also be automatically updated after applying Denoise. 

Batch Processing — To batch process images, select them in the Filmstrip and choose Denoise to adjust the Amount slider in the Enhance dialog.  Or, press Option (Mac) | Alt (Win) and click the Denoise button to apply Denoise to all selected images without displaying the Enhance dialog (Denoise will apply the same Amount value as the previous time Denoise was applied).

Manual Noise Reduction — All of the legacy Manual Noise Reduction features are still available in the Detail panel if you want to add “additional” noise reduction, either globally or locally. Use the Luminance and Color sliders to lessen the appearance of noise in images. Option -drag (Mac) | Alt  -drag (Win) the Luminance and Color sliders to display a preview of the slider’s effect. To help reduce (or even remove) low-frequency color mottling (small clumps of magenta or green areas in an image for example), increase the Smoothness slider.

Photo Merge — While you can’t apply Denoise on images created by Photo Merge, you can apply Denoise on the individual images before applying Photo Merge to create Panoramas and HDR images. 

Raw Defaults — When Denoise is enabled, Lightroom Classic also applies Raw Details. 

Super Resolution — Currently, Denoise and Super Resolution can not be used together. However, you can first run Denoise on any Bayer/X-Trans raw file, export the results to an output-referred format (such as TIFF), then running Super Resolution on the TIFF file. 

Adding Grain — If the resulting image looks too smooth after running Denoise, use the Effects panel to add Grain. 

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