How to remove noise from bird photos

I researched online for content related to bird photo editing and came across a recommendation for TopazLabs’ DeNoise AI. This software does some magic and removes a lot of noise from photos without getting that muddy watercolor effect.

This will be a quick post. My normal bird photo editing workflow involves importing the raw photos to Lightroom on my iPad or PC, applying basic edits, and exporting it as a JPEG. However, sometimes my photos have some slight noise in them. I’ve always wanted to get that super clean look you see of birds in magazines from professionals.

Thanks, Reddit

I browsed Reddit for content related to bird photography and came across a recommendation for TopazLabs’ DeNoise AI. This software does some magic and removes a lot of noise from photos without getting that muddy watercolor effect.

It produces much better sharpening results than basic Lightroom does.

This is the original image I am working with:

red-winged blackbird on a branch with wings open
The original image looks great already.

Get the photo ready to import

I bought and installed DeNoise AI and got a photo ready to import. Here is a closeup of the image before processing.

Slightly noisy Red-winged blackbird photo

I prepared the image by cropping and brightening the photo a tad. From there, I exported the photo as a .TIF. This is a lossy (uncompressed) image format. Then it was ready and I dragged it into DeNoise AI. You may also export it as a RAW file.

Time to work magic

The program did its magic from there and produced results I was thrilled with.

DeNoise AI worked magic to remove all the noise from the photo.

After exporting the photo from DeNoise AI, I readded it to Lightroom.

A must-have now that I know about it

Now that I’ve about this cool piece of software, I picked up their Sharpen AI software and it works wonders as well. I have a feeling I’m going to produce a lot of print-worthy photos from now on.

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