The Best JPEG AI Noise Reduction Workflow for Lightroom

Earlier this year, Adobe released an update to Lightroom that included a new AI-powered noise reduction tool referred to as Denoise AI, which is a bit confusing because Topaz Labs also has a noise reduction app with the same name. While Lightroom's utility is powerful and provides outstanding results, it's currently limited to RAW and DNG files.

While that may not be a problem for many photographers, it hits a wall for anyone who wants to apply it to a JPEG... for instance, when you forget to configure your brand new drone to shoot in RAW before taking it out for its maiden flight. Not that I'd ever know what that'd be like. 😅

On top of that, we Lightroom (not Classic) users also have to work within the constraint that the app doesn't support 3rd party plugins. In this case, the 3rd party app I'm referring to is Topaz Photo AI. Fortunately, we do have access to just about any 3rd party app when sending photos from Lightroom to Photoshop, which also gives us a big benefit that Classic users using native 3rd party plugin support don't have: smart objects. With that said, you obviously need to subscribe to Adobe's Photography Plan to get access to Photoshop, which is integral to this workflow.

In this video, I'll show you how you can apply some truly excellent noise reduction with Topaz Photo AI by leveraging Lightroom's connectivity to Photoshop.

Want to learn even more about Lightroom?

I'm actively working on a brand new course called Lightroom Everywhere. If you've wanted to learn how to get the most out of Lightroom's cloud-based ecosystem on the desktop, smartphone, and tablet, then this course is for you. I'm super excited about it and I hope you consider pre-ordering it. You're going to learn tons, trust me!