Noise Reduction can be an important part of a photographer’s workflow. In this guide, I’m going to compare some of the most popular Noise Reduction software applications on the market, to give you an idea of which might be best for you. Specifically, I’ll be comparing Topaz DeNoise AI against On1 NoNoise AI, DxO PureRAW, and Adobe Lightroom Classic 11.

As a professional photographer who also teaches photography online, I’m always striving to get the best out of my images. Whilst it’s nice to get everything right in camera, that isn’t always possible, and noise is often an unavoidable side effect of photography.

I’ve spent a lot of time editing photos and trying out a range of noise reduction tools, which I use in my photography workflow on a regular basis. My degree in computer science means I actually enjoy testing software, and I always relish the opportunity to combine two of my pleasures (computers and photography) in a review like this.

I’m going to cover a few things in this post. Naturally I’ll be comparing the features and actual noise reduction performance of the software which I’ll do using my own images. I’ll also compare how each tool fits into your photography workflow, look at how easy they are to use, and look at how quickly they process images. I’ll also look at any extra features that the software might have.

As well as the performance and features comparison, I’m also going to go through what you should be thinking about when choosing a noise reduction application. First though, let’s take a look at what noise and noise reduction is in photography, and why you might want to invest in a noise reduction tool like those I’m reviewing today.

What is “Noise” in Photography?

Noise appears as random color or brightness variations across an image, which can give it a grainy or splotched appearance on close inspection.

There are two types of noise in digital photography, color noise and luminance noise. The former appears as colored speckles and the latter appears as a grainy effect. You can see both types of noise in the below image.

Both types of noise appear in some form in all digital images, however there are a number of factors which can cause increased noise. The first of these is the ISO setting of your camera. As a general rule and all else being equal, the higher the ISO, the noisier the image will be.

This is because the ISO setting works a bit like the gain on an amplifier. As you increase the gain on an amplifier, the sound gets louder, but any errors or unwanted sounds also get amplified. As you increase the ISO on a camera sensor, the chance of random errors being recorded also increases. Images shot in lower light tend to be noisier due to the high ISOs used in these scenes.

The size of the sensor and the physical size of the pixels recording the light on the sensor also contribute to image noise. Smaller sensors with higher megapixel counts tend to create noisier images. Larger sensors with smaller megapixel counts tend to create less noisy images.

Whilst noise is normally undesirable in photography, there may be times where a photographer doesn’t mind noise in a photo or even wants it. For example, if trying to achieve a certain effect for a vintage or grungy style of photo, noise might be of value.

However, noise is generally something most photographers what to avoid. When it can’t be avoided in camera by using low ISOs, then you will want to use noise reduction software to remove it from your processed image files.

What is Noise Reduction in Photography?

Noise reduction is basically the removal of digital noise which can appear in an image.

Because noise is random, it normally appears all across an image in an arbitrary manner. This makes removing noise a bit of a challenge, as the noise reduction tool needs to be able to correctly identify which pixels are unwanted noise, and which are actually part of the image. The unwanted noise pixels should be replaced with pixels that seamlessly blend into the existing image.

Too much noise reduction can result in lost image detail, giving an image a soft, almost plastic look. Too little noise reduction means your images can look like a grainy speckled mess. Good noise reduction should result in a clean noise-free image that looks natural.

Do You Need Noise Reduction?

Whilst noise reduction is important to ensure your images look their best, running dedicated noise reduction software is not necessary for every photographer. It depends a lot on what you will be using your photos for.

This is because when you resize an image to a smaller size, it becomes a lot harder to see the noise. If you primarily share your images on the web and on social media sites where they are normally viewed at a fraction of their original size, then the benefits of dedicated noise reduction tools will be far less obvious. Your photo editing software’s built-in noise reduction will generally do a good enough job.

However, if you plan to enlarge your images, print them out, or are regularly tightly cropping your images (such as with wildlife photography), then noise reduction can become very useful.

What to Look for in Noise Reduction Software

Before evaluating each piece of noise reduction software and comparing them, I want to go through the various features that noise reduction software offers so you know what to consider when comparing the available options.

Noise Reduction Performance

Of course, the first thing to look for in noise reduction software is how well it actually performs. I’ll be testing each piece of noise reduction software on my images and sharing my thoughts in this post to give you some pointers. However, I strongly urge you to do some testing of your own with your own image files from your own camera.

This is because every camera and lens combination will output slightly different results, and you will definitely want to test how your setup works with your noise reduction software. The software also performs differently depending on your hardware setup, so it’s important to check that for your computer system as well.

Finally, what counts as “good” noise reduction is quite subjective, like many things in photography. What looks great to me might look too soft or artificial to you, and vice versa. Testing the software against your images and adjusting the settings to see what results look like on your images is the only way to truly be sure. You can download trial versions of each version of the software, and many of them also come with a money back guarantee.

Here are links to each noise reduction application on test so you can download them and test them out yourself.

Note that Lightroom is not a dedicated noise reduction tool. I’m using it in this post primarily as a comparison as it’s the photo editing application of choice for many photographers and it has built-in noise reduction tools.

RAW Support

You would normally look to reduce the noise in your images as early in your photo editing workflow as possible. Assuming you are shooting in RAW, this means that the noise reduction tool you are using will need to support the RAW format that your camera produces.

Every camera manufacturer has their own RAW file format, and these can differ between camera models from the same manufacturer. For example, Canon have CR2 and CR3 files, Nikon have NEF files and Sony has ARW files.

Any photo editing application, including noise reduction software, needs to be able to read the RAW file in order to make any changes to it. So, when you are evaluating noise reduction software, you will want to check that it supports your camera model.

If it doesn’t, there is the option to convert the RAW file into a more universal RAW format like Adobe’s DNG format. Alternatively, you can use an edited format like TIFF, and apply noise reduction a little later on in your editing workflow. More on when to apply noise reduction in another part of this guide.

Note that noise reduction tools can also normally work with photos not shot in RAW, such as JPG files from smartphones. The results are likely to be less impressive as these files will already have been processed, and some form of noise reduction will likely already have been applied.

Price

Whilst the noise reduction performance of the software is obviously important, price is also going to be a consideration when it comes to choose the right software for you.

Noise reduction software is available at a range of prices, starting from around $70 USD up to over $120.

Buying a piece of software that focuses on one function might seem like an extravagance, or you might feel it’s an essential purchase. When comparing prices, definitely compare the performance of the product as well as additional features to see if it’s the right option for you.

In some cases, the noise reduction software might also be sold as part of a more full-featured photo editing application which is available for a little bit more. This will normally have a full range of photo editing tools, as well as the noise reduction capabilities of the standalone software.

For example, On1 sells their NoNoise AI tool as a standalone product, but it’s also part of the On1 PhotoRAW product. This latter is one of our favourite Lightroom alternatives for photo editing and photo management, and it’s only around $30 more for the full suite.

Instead of spending $69 for a product that does one thing, you could spend $99 on a product which does many things including noise reduction. If you are already in the market for a photo editor, this can be an excellent option.

GPU Acceleration

Noise reduction, as I’ve already alluded to, is a complicated process. The noise reduction tool needs to correctly identify the two types of noise (color noise and luminance noise), and then remove them from the image.

However, obviously it can’t just delete the pixels – they need to be replaced with something else. A digital image isn’t made up of layers, so where you delete a pixel there isn’t anything behind it.

Most noise reduction software works by analysing the area around noisy pixels, and using that analysis to decide what to replace the noisy pixels with. This analysis is key, and is why some noise reduction software can result in a plastic and overly smoothed look. If you are working with details of skin or feathers, it’s vital that the replaced noise pixels fit the existing texture so the result looks natural.

This pixel level image analysis takes a huge amount of processing power, and the higher your camera’s megapixel count, the longer it will take as the tool has to analyse more pixels.

To improve the speed at which they work, many noise reduction tools leverage the power of a Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU. These are also commonly called graphics cards.

Graphics cards are a specially designed piece of hardware inside a computer which are commonly used for graphically intensive workloads such as computer games. However, they can also be utilised for other specific tasks, such as image manipulation.

Whilst a computer’s central processing unit, or CPU, can also handle these tasks, their general-purpose nature means they aren’t usually as fast at it as a dedicated graphics processor. A high-end graphics card will often be faster at these specific tasks than a fast CPU.

However, the noise reduction software does need to be specially coded in order to support offloading tasks to the GPU instead of the CPU. If you have a graphics card in your desktop or laptop computer that you want to utilize for noise reduction tasks, you’ll want to be sure to purchase noise reduction software which supports GPU acceleration. This is normally made clear in the promotional material, and there will also usually be options within the software to enable or disable the feature.

I’d normally advise buying noise reduction software which does include GPU acceleration, even if you don’t have a graphics card currently, as it future proofs you should you upgrade to a GPU at a later date.

If you have an existing graphics card, do compare performance between using the GPU and just using the CPU. In some cases, especially if you have a newer CPU and an older GPU, the CPU might actually be faster.

If you are in the market for a new computer, check out my guide to the best laptops for photo editing. Many of these have built-in GPUs to help you get the most out of your photo editing applications.

Batch Editing

If you often work with a large number of similar images, then you will want to think about the batch editing options that the noise reduction software offers.

For example, you might be a wedding photographer who has taken lots of shots of an event or a wildlife photographer with multiple shots of animals.

Whilst you might be happy to sit down and tweak the noise in every image individually, the chances are that many of your images will be similar enough that you’ll be applying similar settings to all of them. Tools like Lightroom allow you to apply the same edits to multiple images at once, so this sort of feature is handy to look for in noise reduction software too.

Noise reduction software can also take time to run, so the option to load up multiple images as a batch and have them process whilst you do something else can also be a real benefit.

Automation and Control

Another feature to look at is what level of automation the tool offers. This will vary depending on the software. It might be a one-click solution, where you simply load the image and noise reduction is applied entirely automatically with minimal user input. Alternatively, it might require fully manual editing of various sliders.

Ideally, the software will come with a best of both worlds approach. There should be a fully automatic mode, where the software performs an analysis of the image and suggests the correct settings. Then you should have the option to adjust and tweak to suit your needs.

Of course, you might prefer a more manual or more automated approach. It’s up to you. The main thing is to pick the software that fits into your workflow.

AI Features

You will have noticed that the word “AI” is tacked on to the end of some of the products in our round-up today. This stands for “Artificial Intelligence”, and suggests that these specific tools are capable of something a bit special.

Let me explain what’s actually happening. When these manufacturers refer to AI, what they mean is that their software has been trained using something called machine deep learning. Basically, the software has been presented with millions of images, to get an idea of what a good noise-free image looks like and what a bad noisy image looks like.

When you load up your noisy image, this machine learning helps the tool figure out, based on its extensive training on the millions of images in its dataset, which areas of your image are noisy and what to replace them with.

This can result in far more natural and impressive results than the more traditional pixel level analysis, where nearby pixels are used to blend in to existing pixels. However, it can also sometimes get it wrong, leading to less than impressive results.

Overall, my testing leads me to recommend a noise reduction tool with AI capabilities, as the results on the whole tend to be more impressive. However, I do recommend you test any tool out before making a final decision.

Masking

In photography, masking essentially refers to an area of the photo that you have selected in an editing application. Once you have selected, or “masked” an area, you can choose to only apply edits to that area. You can also invert the mask, and apply edits everywhere else.

Most photo editing tools come with range of masking options, and it’s something I cover in detail in the editing section of my online photography course.

Some noise reduction software also offers masking controls. These allow you to more carefully define which areas of the image you want to apply noise reduction to. This is helpful especially with some of the AI powered tools which don’t always get it perfect, meaning you can tweak the results.

Plugins for other Photo Apps

Many photographers looking for noise reduction software already have an existing photography workflow in place. That means you probably already use a photo editing application like Adobe Lightroom to edit and manage your photos.

If so, finding a noise reduction tool that seamlessly integrates into your existing setup will make your photo editing workflow a little bit easier. Many noise reduction tools ship with plugins for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, which is arguably the most common photo management and editing product on the market.

A plugin makes it easier to send an image from Lightroom to the noise reduction tool, apply the noise reduction, and then have the adjusted image come back to Lightroom where you can continue to work on it.

Some software also ships with plugins for other software, like Capture One or On1 Photo RAW, but as these are less commonly used, this isn’t as standard.

Of course, a plugin isn’t totally necessary, and you can still use noise reduction tools entirely standalone without a plugin. But it is a nice to have feature.

Additional Features

When evaluating noise reduction tools and their price, it’s good to compare any additional features they might offer on top of noise reduction.

For example, some tools include built-in lens profile correction and image sharpening tools. As these are common tasks to perform on most images, having these built-in to the noise reduction tool can further enhance your workflow.

These aren’t generally deal breakers, but if you are struggling to decide between two similar products, features like this might be where your decision is made.

When to Use Noise Reduction Software

You might be wondering which point in your workflow is best to apply noise reduction. In my opinion, you want to apply noise reduction as early as possible. This is because as you start to edit the photo, you apply changes to the image which are also applied to the noise. For the noise reduction software to be most effective, running it on an unedited RAW photo means it can get to work on the unadulterated version of the image.

As previously mentioned, you can also usually run noise reduction tools on JPG files, however this will not yield the best results compared to using them on RAW files as JPG files are already processed.

Each noise reduction tool will normally have a recommendation as to the best point in your workflow to run it for the best results. However, you might have a specific workflow that you prefer. For example, if you are planning to crop your images, you might prefer to crop first and then just apply noise reduction to the cropped area of the image.

Noise reduction can be a time intensive process, so you can save time by only reducing noise on the area of the image you intend to use. You might also prefer to make some basic tonal edits in your photo editing application before removing noise.

In my testing, there is not a huge difference between using noise reduction before doing any editing, versus applying noise reduction after doing some basic edits. However, you should be careful of any default settings applied. For example, Lightroom applies both color noise reduction and sharpening to images automatically when you load them. In my experience, you need to turn these adjustments off before sending the image to the noise reduction tool to do its best work.

Depending on the noise reduction tool you choose, you might not have a choice, as some will only work on RAW files prior to editing them.

Noise Reduction Software

There are a number of noise reduction products on the market today. I’ve picked four of my favorites to review in this guide. In each case I’ve used the most recent available version of the software. If these products update in any way that meaningfully changes how they perform, I’ll update this guide accordingly.

I have primarily focused on standalone noise reduction tools in this round-up, on the assumption that you already have an image editor you use. However, some of these tools are also available as part of a photo editing application, so if you are also looking for a photo editor then one of these options might make more sense. I’d also recommend reading my guide to the best photo editing applications on the market for more suggestions. I’ve also included Lightroom as it’s a popular tool with many photographers, and it has noise reduction tools built-in.

It’s also worth noting that in some cases, you get more control over the noise reduction process with the full photo editor compared to the standalone noise reduction tool. This is because the standalone tools are designed to slot into an existing workflow and just get the job done with minimal user intervention. However, if you prefer to have more control over your editing process from end to end, this is something to keep in mind when evaluating.

First, I’m going to go over all four options and outline their features and pros and cons. Then, I’ll look at how each software actually performs, both in terms of the images produced, and also in terms of processing speed and file size output.

Topaz DeNoise AI

Topaz Labs have a range of tools which focus on specific tasks, including an image sharpening tool and an image upscaling tool.

In this guide, we’re obviously looking at their denoise tool, which is called Topaz DeNoise AI. The “AI” in the name reflects the fact that the tool uses machine learning to remove noise. Topaz Labs train their denoise engine using millions of images. It compares your image against this dataset in order to get the best results for your image.

In terms of where it fits in your workflow, Topaz usually recommends running DeNoise AI before you make any other changes to your image. However, they do also say that you can run DeNoise wherever you want in your workflow and it should work ok.

Topaz Labs provides a plugin for Lightroom, so if you use Lightroom, you can send your image over to Topaz for denoising at any point in your editing workflow. If you choose to do this, I suggest turning off the default sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom before you send the image to DeNoise AI.

You can also load RAW files directly into Topaz if you prefer, although you have to do this outside of Lightroom.

When it comes to options, DeNoise has a lot of controls to offer. First, there are five noise reduction models to choose from: Standard, Clear, Low Light, Severe Noise, and RAW. Each of these is designed for a different amount of noise, and when you load an image into Topaz it will analyse it automatically and select what it thinks is the best model. However, you can also change the model, and compare different models. The five models are designed for different levels of noise, and Topaz describes them as follows:

• Standard – well rounded noise reduction and detail preservation
• Clear – for smooth surfaces such as petals, skin and water
• Low Light – for challenging lighting conditions with lots of noise
• Severe Noise – for excessive noise from shooting at a high ISO
• RAW – for processing RAW files. Only available if you load a camera RAW file, although you can also use one of the other four models.

Once you’ve selected the AI model, there are a number of additional settings. You can choose to have the software apply the settings it thinks are best, or you can manually adjust the settings for noise and sharpness. There are also sliders to tweak color noise specifically.

As well as the global adjustments, Topaz Denoise comes with a masking tool, so you can manually adjust areas where the noise reduction is applied. In my use of Topaz Denoise, I have noticed rare occasions where it might get it wrong on an area of the image, and the masking tool is an easy way to correct that. For most images this isn’t necessary, but it is nice to have.

Topaz DeNoise AI also has batch editing, so you can load a number of images into the software, adjust the settings, and then batch process them. The only downside of this is that you do need to load up and preview each image to trigger the AI analysis prior to running the noise reduction. You can’t just load up a bunch of images and hit a button – there is still some work to be done before you can process all the images. If you want batch processing with minimal input, I’d suggest checking out DxO PureRAW.

The good news is that Topaz DeNoise AI is designed to be performant. By default, it only loads a part of the image you are working on, and it displays the noise reduction of that area rather than applying noise reduction to the whole image (which would be quite slow). It’s also GPU accelerated, meaning it takes advantage of your graphics card to improve performance.

The downside is that if you pan around the image or change the output settings, the image preview has to be regenerated which takes a few more seconds.

I do like the interface and the various options Topaz DeNoise AI has for displaying the preview. You can choose a split screen view, where you move a slider to quickly switch between the original and the edited version. You can choose a side-by-side view, with the original file on one side and the edited version on the other. You can even choose to load four AI models previews at once so you can choose which you prefer.

Once you have your image settings dialled in, either manually or you are happy with the automatic settings chosen by the AI, you can process the image.

Time wise, this will vary depending on the size of the image and the amount of noise. The power of your computer and any GPU you have installed will also make a massive difference. Expect it to take in the region of a few seconds up to around a minute to process an image.

Speaking of results, Topaz was consistently near or at the top in terms of the image quality in my tests, which you can see further on in this post. However, it did produce the largest file sizes of all the tools by quite a margin.

Overall, I really like Topaz DeNoise AI for noise reduction. The interface is very clean, it works well, and the results are great. I like that it integrates with Lightroom or can be used on its own. It also has plenty of control options, even though the automatic settings work well the majority of the time.

Of course, like many tools in our round up, this is a one-trick pony, with a singular focus on noise reduction. Topaz do have other products, and you can purchase them as a bundle, but they all load separately and there’s no one unifying interface. The price is also very reasonable, among the most cost-effective dedicated noise reduction tools in our roundup, especially with the discount code.

Price: $79.99 (save 15% with code FRIEND15)
Lightroom Plugin Available: Yes
GPU Accelerated: Yes
Consider If: You’re looking for a powerful yet easy to use noise reduction tool that delivers great results
Don’t Consider If: You want more from a piece of software than one function
Trial Available: Yes, download here

On1 NoNoise AI

On1 NoNoise AI is a standalone noise reduction tool from On1, who make a range of photo editing software including On1 Photo RAW.

On1 designed NoNoise AI from the ground up to be one of the fastest noise reduction tools on the market, a goal they appear to have achieved as you’ll see in the tests a little further on in the post.

One thing that NoNoise AI does differently to the other noise reduction tools in this roundup is that it applies the noise reduction to the whole image when you load it.

Whilst it does this quickly compared to other tools, it does mean that loading an image seems to take a lot longer compared to a tool like Topaz DeNoise, which only processes a small preview area. So even though overall NoNoise AI is faster end to end, it doesn’t always feel like it is because you have to wait for the image to process before you see it.

However, once the image is loaded, you have a range of options, and you don’t have to wait for the engine to update the preview every time you move a slider. It’s all very snappy and responsive once your image is actually loaded.

Once the image is loaded, you can adjust the noise reduction settings and sharpening or leave them on the automatically adjusted settings. You can preview your changes in real time, and use a split screen view to compare the original and your edit. Once you’ve got the noise reduction and sharpening dialled in, you then have the option to further refine the noise reduction using the masking tools, and you can also crop your image.

On1’s masking tools are by far the most powerful of all the dedicated noise reduction tools in this round up. As well as manually masking using a brush, there’s an AI powered subject selection mask, radial masks and graduated masks. There’s even luminosity masking.

That’s not all though. The tool also comes with On1’s subject removal and heal tools, so you can remove unwanted objects as well. There’s also layer support, giving you even more flexibility over your editing.

I’ll be honest, whilst these features are nice to have, most people are going to be buying this tool for noise reduction. Having extra features is nice, but most users will likely find them in their main photo editing application.

Since the noise reduction engine used by On1 NoNoise is the same as the one which is used by On1 Photo RAW, if you want those kinds of tools, you would be better off opting for the full product. It’s only a little bit more expensive, and you get all the editing controls as well as image management tools.

One thing I did notice with the DNG files output by On1 NoNoise AI is that they lost my lens and camera profile, so Lightroom couldn’t apply any auto corrections. This is slightly vexing, but hopefully something a future update will resolve.

Price: $69
Lightroom Plugin Available: Yes, also allows export of unedited DNG files as well as TIFF files
GPU Accelerated: Yes
RAW Support: Yes
Consider If: You are looking for the fastest noise reduction tool on a budget which also has some extra features and powerful masking
Don’t Consider If: You want the best-in-class noise reduction
Trial Available: Yes, download here

DxO PureRAW

I have used DxO software for a number of years, primarily for the PRIME noise reduction feature which has always done a great job of noise reduction especially on skin tones. So I am definitely interested to see how DxO PureRAW stacks up against the competition.

Like On1, DxO has two versions of its noise reduction software. It has a standalone product known as DxO PureRAW, and a full featured photo editor called DxO PhotoLab Elite.

The noise reduction system is the same, the difference is that PureRAW focuses purely on noise reduction, whilst PhotoLab is a full featured photo editor. It is worth noting that PhotoLab gives you more control over the noise reduction, whilst PureRAW is more of a single click solution.

This is by design. PureRAW is designed to fit into your workflow before you do any other editing. It takes in completely unedited RAW files and applies DxO’s noise reduction. These are output as DNG files which you can then load into your normal photo management and editing app.

You don’t get any preview of the results, although you can look at them once it’s done editing for a before and after comparison.

You do have some options when it comes to RAW processing. First, you can choose between three types of noise reduction, which are HQ, PRIME and DeepPRIME. DxO describes these as follows:

HQ is for images taken in normal lighting conditions without excessive amounts of noise. This is the fastest noise reduction option.

PRIME is designed for images taken in low light conditions which are quite noisy. This takes longer to process than HQ.

DeepPRIME is the most advanced noise reduction tool DxO offers, which uses deep learning AI to produce the best results. It is also by far the slowest by an order of magnitude, and the only processing option which supports offloading to a GPU. However, it is also quite picky about the GPU, needing a recent model.

In my testing on an old GPU, using DeepPRIME either threw an error and output a blank image, or it took much longer (3x longer) compared to just using a CPU. None of the other noise reduction tools I used had any issues with my older GPU, so as always, you’ll want to test on your platform. I have speed tests and quality tests for all the products a little later on in the post.

As well as noise reduction, PureRAW also has the option to apply lens corrections and lens sharpening. These correct for common issues like chromatic aberration, lens distortions and vignetting. DxO have a huge database of lens and camera combinations, so the settings are tailored to the setup for each image.

However, you don’t have any fine-grained control in terms of control sliders. You can only select one of the three processing engines, and elect to enable or disable the post processing lens correction and image sharpening options.

There is another downside to PureRAW that I should mention. The tool is designed as a batch processor, so the idea is that you load all your images into DxO PureRAW, pick which model to apply, and then process the images. Then you load them into your photo editing application.

The issue is that the settings you choose are applied to all the images in your batch. So if you have some images shot at low ISOs with lower noise, and some at higher ISO with high noise, you can’t have the software automatically apply the different noise algorithms automatically. You also can’t choose to apply lens corrections and sharpening to some of the images, it’s either all or nothing.

I’d like to see the software either give you the option to select a processing method, or to recommend the denoise engine based on an image analysis. As it is, you have to choose the images you want to process with a specific noise algorithm and batch those together, which makes the workflow a bit less efficient. In my testing, some images definitely benefit from the DeepPRIME technology, whilst others look just as good with PRIME. However, DeepPRIME takes on average twice as long to process an image.

Another issue is the price. At $129, DxO PureRAW is more expensive than Topaz DeNoise AI or On1 NoNoise AI. It’s actually even more expensive than On1’s Photo RAW editor, which is a full photography editing and management tool that replaces Lightroom, and which has On1 NoNoise built in.

I also think PureRAW could also benefit from the workflow that DxO PhotoLab comes with in terms of Lightroom integration, on Windows at least. With PhotoLab, you can send a RAW file (or files) from Lightroom, apply noise and optical corrections (and any other edits), and then send them back to Lightroom as DNG files. These automatically appear in Lightroom next to the original file, making for a seamless workflow. I’d love to see PureRAW adopt this approach.

It’s worth pointing out that whilst DxO PureRAW doesn’t come with Lightroom integration by default on Windows (on Mac you can drag files from Lightroom to DxO PureRAW), a user has put together this plugin for Lightroom which achieves the same thing. This allows you to select files in Lightroom, send them as RAW files to DxO PureRAW, and then for the RAW files to appear in Lightroom as DNG. In my testing this works great, and should be something that PureRAW ships with natively.

These quibbles aside, DxO PureRAW does shine when it comes to ease of use and for processing your images prior to loading them into your editing application. In my testing, which you’ll see further on in this guide, it also consistently produced some of the best results. The sharpening and lens corrections are also excellent, working particularly well on older images and across a huge range of lens and camera body combinations.

If that workflow and feature set sound good to you, DxO PureRAW should definitely be on your shortlist to try out. If you want more control and integration with Lightroom, then check out DxO PhotoLab instead.

Price: $129
Lightroom Plugin Available: No
GPU Accelerated: Yes, but requires a modern GPU
RAW Support: Yes
Consider If: You want a single click option that produces great results prior to your editing, with easy batch processing
Don’t Consider If: You want more control over the noise reduction process or you are on a budget
Trial Available: Yes, download here

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom barely needs an introduction. It’s one of the world’s most popular photo management and editing tools, and it’s also what I use for the majority of my photo editing.

As you would expect from a photo editor, Adobe Lightroom has noise reduction built in. It doesn’t feature any fancy AI tools, relying on more traditional pixel analysis and comparison to produce results.

By default, when you load an image into Lightroom’s editor it will remove the majority of color noise. You can then also adjust a number of sliders to remove luminance noise.

For low noise images, the sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom is definitely good enough. However, for higher noise images, my experience is that you can definitely get better results with a dedicated tool.

Another downside of Lightroom is that it’s only available as a subscription. If you are in the market for a photo editor that doesn’t require a monthly or annual payment and which also has excellent noise reduction built in, you might consider DxO PhotoLab Elite or On1 Photo RAW.

These Lightroom alternatives offer many of the same features at a one-off price, with the advantage of powerful noise reduction tools as well.

That said, Lightroom is still the hub of my photo management and editing workflow as I’ve not yet found an application that does everything it does quite so well.

Price: $9.99 a month ($119.88 a year)
Lightroom Plugin Available: N/A
GPU Accelerated: Yes, but not for noise reduction
RAW Support: Yes
Consider If: You are looking for an all-in-one option which includes reasonable noise reduction
Don’t Consider If: You don’t want to do a lot of manual tweaking, or want a one-click AI powered tool that will likely produce better results.
Trial Available: Yes, download here

Noise Reduction Software Results Comparison

I’ll now compare four different images to see how the various software stacks up in the four software programs. I’ll be using unedited RAW files from my Canon EOS R5 and my Canon EOS 6D.

For DxO, I’m going to use all three output options. For Topaz, I use the RAW AI model and everything else set to Auto. For On1, it uses the default settings. For Lightroom, I’ll tweak the sharpening and noise reduction sliders to get the best result I can manage.

It’s worth noting that all the noise reduction software applies some form of sharpening, and this has been left to the default setting. JPG files for use in this post were not sharpened when creating them from the DNG files output from each noise reduction tool.

Noise Reduction Test Image 1

The first image is this shot of a UK robin sitting on a branch. It was in a shaded area, and this was shot on a Canon EOS R5 at 6400 ISO. The small version doesn’t show too much noise, but if you click through to the larger version, you’ll see more noise.