Robin Good comparison. You might also do one extra comparison and that is the result of exporting to tif, jpeg or dng. I trialed the new ON1 No Noise ai, purchased Topaz DeNoise Ai and my current version of DXO Photolab 5 / Deep prime and did a comparison similar to what you did using Sony raw (ARW) files. Similar results to yours. However, I want to retain as many advantages of the raw file when processing in Capture One so I tried exporting back to CO as a dng. The final colours of the imported dng from Topaz were way off and even their tech support waffled on the answers and finally refunded my purchase. The ON1 dng colours were wild screaming magenta - total deal breaker. The DXO dng wasn't perfect, however, the colours were very close to the original raw and took only a few minor tweaks to get to almost 100%. I ran this comparison on a number of raw files from Sony ARW , Fuji RAF and Panasonic ORF. Similar results. I then imported the same original raw files into Lightroom Classic - (most recent version) and while results were very slightly different both Topaz and ON1 dng were horrible failures. BTW - the same files exported back to CO and LR as a TIF worked fine - DXO had less colour differences and no artifacting, however, they were all quite close. The downside was the absolutely huge size of the TIF files for both Topaz and ON1 - DXO was a little smaller, however, still over double the size of the dng. I also ran the same files through the Topaz Sharpen AI - same results. Windows 10 - most recent build - Mac may possibly produce different results.
Thanks. I did consider other comparisons but there wasn't much difference in the results from what I could see. I was also trying not to over complicate the video by covering too much.
You're very welcome. There is quite a lot to compare between the two packages once you start to think about it. It took me a while to pull this together into a sensible comparison. It's good to know that you liked it.
Thanks. I will be doing more comparison videos inthe future but have found that comparing two products is probably my limit if I want to do them justice. Adding more products just gets confusing and you don't cover them properly. It's on my list to do Topaz DeNoise but probably not Neat Image (I'm assuming you mean Neat Image rather than NeatPhoto). I haven't upgraded my license for Neat Image for quite a few years and don't use it now. I try to keep my reviews to products I own and use.
Yes I have and I use it regularly. I have done a comparison in the past (ruclips.net/video/7gSWb1fHKWo/видео.html) but will probably do another in the future as Topaz is constantly evolving.
Hi Robin. I wonder if you can help me? I have been watching your excellent videos on photolab5. I currently have it on free trial I have a very old copy of LR and need to update. However I can not seem to find a way of adding a vignette to an image and there appears to be no way of rotating the crop tool. Silly things which I take for granted in LR. Thanks
Yes PL Prime is slightly more realistic and less destructive. But DxO are in danger of missing the boat… PL Prime is still far too slow even on an M1 Mac and the main preview window is still clunky and inaccurate. It’s been like that for years. I used to rely on PL up until this year, but I now find ON1 Photo Raw is a better overall one stop photo RAW editor & browser and No Noise AI blows PL away on non-raw images. The ON1 photo browser is more advanced and you can get much more creative with the ON1 photo editor, which is great for landscapes. The only caveat is it’s easier to overdo things using ON1. As long as you restrain the ON1 No Noise AI luminance and detail settings and don’t go mad with over editing in ON1, it’s a much more versatile photo editor which has overtaken PL this year with the release of No Noise AI. It is also much better value for money and is becoming a realistic Lightroom/Photoshop alternative for people who dislike Adobe bloatware and inflexible pricing. DxO Photo Lab is great if you only ever do simple RAW edits, but it is really starting to fall behind as other software developers add new AI algorithms into much better photo editing packages.
In fairness, DxO has always said that the main preview window only represents standard noise reduction. Also that ut's the magnified inspection tool you need to use for an accurate preview.
No Noise A.I. is fully integrated in ON1 Photo RAW 2022.1 which is ON1's full specd photoeditor. In the next Update of ON1 Photo RAW they will also include their new product Resize A.I. I have an older version of ON1 Photo RAW and No Noise A.I. but use DXO PhotoLab 5 Elite for RAW editing because its rendering of colour and contrast looks just better to me. You can have similar results with ON1 but you just have to tweak more and take more time.
I downloaded and used Deep Prime and was really impressed with the results, especially with my 1 inch sensor sony raw files. I would love to purchase this to perform batch noise processing on my raw files, however the resulting dng files are of an enormously large filesize. I don’t want the output to be jpg, as I want to further process in ON1. Any tips, solutions or ideas from anyone on how to go about this? Or should I just use nonoise AI (and lose the ability to batch process). Thanks!
The important thing to realise is that a DNG file will be larger (much larger) than the RAW file it comes from (in most cases). That's because colour channel data in most RAW files has yet to be interpolated by the RAW converter during the demosaic process. This has already happened in the DNG file which is why it's larger. Using a different piece of software to generate the DNG isn't going to solve the size problem. The best solution is to follow a workflow where you review and rate all your images before starting to convert them. You then only convert and work on the ones you think are best, converting those to the DNG format. The rest of your images are still retained but in the RAW format. Later you may choose to delete the lesser RAW files or you might find a hidden gem in there.
@@RobinWhalley Thanks Robin for replying, and so quickly! That actually makes a lot of sense, I will adopt that approach to cull some dead wood. Two birds, one stone. Thanks and much appreciated sir!
I know I'm late here. I've been using On1 Raw as my main processing tool for quite some time. I shoot m43 so in some cases, effective noise reduction is important to me. I do have DxO Photolab 5 and bought it specifically for the noise reduction and lens correction tools. With the incorporation of Nonoise into On1 Raw I will only very rarely use DeepPrime. I do think it produces slightly better results with problem files. But absence of effective layering tools in Photolab make it much less attractive to me as a day-to-day tool. I'll probably still run "special" files through DxO. Noise reduction in On1 Raw prior to Nonoise was pretty abysmal. It's now dang good. So I no longer see as much need to use other tools.
@@bradleyanderson247 Yes, I really do need to make a more in depth comparison using On1Photo RAW. Whilst I have it, I tend not to do my noise reduction in it. I've found in the past that it didn't handle the lens correction for the my Fuji lenses well. Perhaps I need to take another look.
@@RobinWhalley I have been playing and tweaking quite a bit with No Noise AI over the past fortnight. I have a fuji x100 original which I have owned since new, and sure it is a bayer sensor, but the results seem very good. Not that the X100 raw files contain very much noise to begin with ;-) However, the results I am getting from my 1” Sony files are astonishing…….corrections also look good. I am also looking to purchase a m4/3 camera soon, so I have run some downloaded raw sample files through it and again I am really impressed. I guess my conclusion is that for me No noise AI works wonders (to my eyes) with “smaller” sensor files. I am not necessarily looking for perfection, but the results I am getting are really great. Your milage may vary with xtrans fuji files, but it would be sure worth a look…best regards.
Yes Topaz is another good product but I don't think it's accurate to simply say that it's better. It may be for you but each person has different needs. Personally I have achieved the best results from the perspective of quality and colour accuracy by starting with DxO PhotoLab and DeepPRIME and then processing the resulting image with Topaz Sharpen AI. It also fit's with my overall workflow.
Noise reduction software continues to see tremendous advancements. At any point in time, one of them may leapfrog over the others. If you are already happy with one, I see no reason to switch just because another one is currently “the winner.” However, I experience huge advantages in using DxO Photolab Elite as the raw editor, not only because of DEEPprime, but because it seems to do the best job at demosaicing for three cameras I have: LUMIX, Canon, and Fujifilm. Worth mentioning is that there is another major player in this market, Topaz DeNoise AI, which I frequently use along with DxO, but at the end of editing. I find that most adjustments in contrast seem to leave added noise, and DeNoise AI will generally clean that up without artifacts. In fact many of the filters in the marvelous Nik Color Efex Pro can add quite a bit of noise, but which DeNoise AI will erase.
Yes, all the tools are very much moving around in position now. Most of them produce excellent results. It's only when one of them doesn't work properly that it becomes a deal breaker for me. DeepPRIME just works and works well. It's easy and I don't need to spend time worrying. I do also use and like the Topaz products, especially Sharpen AI which makes a great job of bringing out detail, especially when used after DeepPRIME.
Using DXO processing 40GB DNG files then exporting takes 1m 50s for Deep Prime and over5 min for Deep Prime XD. My file end up around 130MB. On1 only takes secs to process. I built my pc years ago and has a i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz processor with 32 GB of ram and I don't really want to go to the expense of getting a GPU just to run DXO quicker. I like DXO but may end up with On1 or Topaz.
@@RobinWhalley thank you but that was of a year ago and Topaz has been updated several times . I would like the comparison to be with most recent of both . Thank you
Having used both quite a bit, I too favour PL5 for a reason only really glanced on here - its improvements tend to follow a Hippocratic Oath sort of philosophy - "First, do no harm." I have never had DeepPrime negatively impact image quality compared to the original, whereas ON1 Photo RAW (which also includes NoNoise) often is quite zealous with the initial pass and needs to be toned down to improve the naturalness of the image. For this reason, while functionally they are both great are removing noise, PL5 is far better for batch workflow of multiple images - since you can quite comfortably apply DeepPrime to EVERY SINGLE IMAGE as a default preset, and be sure that doing so will only yield benefit (low ISO images are largely unaffected and high ISO images are always improved). Additionally, because PL5 applies its processing on export rather than while I'm editing, it's again much better for batch processing as I can batch adjust dozens of images in PL5 in a speedy fashion and then click Export and go make a coffee while all the heavy lifting is done, rather than the ON1 PhotoRAW process of clicking NoNoise for each image and then waiting 5 seconds while it does its thing and then doing followup tweaks.
I agree that On1 Photo Raw is generally over zealous and requires toning down. What I tend to do, is process one image from a batch, then using the browse option, copy and paste the adjustments to other images from the same batch. It might not be perfect, but I find it the most effective way to adjust multiple images.
I had done this test yesterday and noticed that ON1 nonoise was a bit sharper but if you have a look down the bottom you will see it is applying 20% sharpening. I thought DXO did a slightly better job with the noise but I had adjusted the slider a little bit. Where DXO excels is when you have a much higher ISO and consequent noise ON1 seems good up to about 12500 ISO above that DXO is better.
When I made the comparisons in the video I had the default sharpening in On1 turned off but it was still sharper. I finally tracked it down to the Detail slider which is supposed to be detail recovery as part of the noise reduction. It does appear to be applying sharpening when this is used. I also couldn;t test above the ISO level I used as that's the limit of my camera. Although the camera ISO can be extended above this limit, noise reduction is then applied in the camera before writing the RAW file. At the end of the day, they both perform very well.
@@RobinWhalley I found by error because I loaded these photos into FB that high MB photos are degraded and the DXO file I loaded was considerably softer than the original. The ON1 photo was only 2 MB because I had resized it to 2000 on long side. The DXO photo was 18000Mb and made a lot worse because to identify it I added some text at the bottom which increased it to 27000 MB which I reduced to 9 MB in Affinity photo. I did not realise that I could resize it in DXO and found by making the long side 2000 it reduced to a similar size to ON1 without losing detail.
I think that adding the lens sharpness and chromatic aberration controls to DXO would have been a fairer comparison. I understand turning off sharpness controls but ON1 does add sharpness anyway and DXO really isn't supposed to be used without the lens and chromatic aberration controls. Chromatic aberration, like DeepPrime/PRIME noise reduction, is performed before demosaicing and can influence the results of DeepPrime.
Possiblt Ian but I wanted to keep things simple. In my comparisons I removed the default sharpening from On1 that you mention but the result was still sharper. I did subsequently confirm that the Detail slider used to recover detail is applying some form of sharpening. When I removed that, the image sharpness was slightly less than DeepPRIME.
Not really. The only thing you might want to try is using the mouse pointer Magnifier that's built into your computer. Both Mac OS and Windows have this feature. It's best to Google your how to turn it on for your particular operating system.
Robin
Good comparison.
You might also do one extra comparison and that is the result of exporting to tif, jpeg or dng.
I trialed the new ON1 No Noise ai, purchased Topaz DeNoise Ai and my current version of DXO Photolab 5 / Deep prime and did a comparison similar to what you did using Sony raw (ARW) files. Similar results to yours. However, I want to retain as many advantages of the raw file when processing in Capture One so I tried exporting back to CO as a dng. The final colours of the imported dng from Topaz were way off and even their tech support waffled on the answers and finally refunded my purchase. The ON1 dng colours were wild screaming magenta - total deal breaker. The DXO dng wasn't perfect, however, the colours were very close to the original raw and took only a few minor tweaks to get to almost 100%. I ran this comparison on a number of raw files from Sony ARW , Fuji RAF and Panasonic ORF. Similar results.
I then imported the same original raw files into Lightroom Classic - (most recent version) and while results were very slightly different both Topaz and ON1 dng were horrible failures.
BTW - the same files exported back to CO and LR as a TIF worked fine - DXO had less colour differences and no artifacting, however, they were all quite close. The downside was the absolutely huge size of the TIF files for both Topaz and ON1 - DXO was a little smaller, however, still over double the size of the dng.
I also ran the same files through the Topaz Sharpen AI - same results.
Windows 10 - most recent build - Mac may possibly produce different results.
Thanks. I did consider other comparisons but there wasn't much difference in the results from what I could see. I was also trying not to over complicate the video by covering too much.
I was actually doing some tests on this topic. Thanks for the video!
You're very welcome. There is quite a lot to compare between the two packages once you start to think about it. It took me a while to pull this together into a sensible comparison. It's good to know that you liked it.
Great review! I would love to see it repeated with the addition of NeatPhoto and Topazlabs DeNoise AI. Thanks again, Robin.
Thanks. I will be doing more comparison videos inthe future but have found that comparing two products is probably my limit if I want to do them justice. Adding more products just gets confusing and you don't cover them properly. It's on my list to do Topaz DeNoise but probably not Neat Image (I'm assuming you mean Neat Image rather than NeatPhoto). I haven't upgraded my license for Neat Image for quite a few years and don't use it now. I try to keep my reviews to products I own and use.
Have you tried Topaz Denoise AI? I would be interested in seeing a comparison to DxO
Yes I have and I use it regularly. I have done a comparison in the past (ruclips.net/video/7gSWb1fHKWo/видео.html) but will probably do another in the future as Topaz is constantly evolving.
Hi Robin. I wonder if you can help me? I have been watching your excellent videos on photolab5. I currently have it on free trial I have a very old copy of LR and need to update. However I can not seem to find a way of adding a vignette to an image and there appears to be no way of rotating the crop tool. Silly things which I take for granted in LR. Thanks
Yes PL Prime is slightly more realistic and less destructive. But DxO are in danger of missing the boat… PL Prime is still far too slow even on an M1 Mac and the main preview window is still clunky and inaccurate. It’s been like that for years. I used to rely on PL up until this year, but I now find ON1 Photo Raw is a better overall one stop photo RAW editor & browser and No Noise AI blows PL away on non-raw images. The ON1 photo browser is more advanced and you can get much more creative with the ON1 photo editor, which is great for landscapes. The only caveat is it’s easier to overdo things using ON1. As long as you restrain the ON1 No Noise AI luminance and detail settings and don’t go mad with over editing in ON1, it’s a much more versatile photo editor which has overtaken PL this year with the release of No Noise AI. It is also much better value for money and is becoming a realistic Lightroom/Photoshop alternative for people who dislike Adobe bloatware and inflexible pricing. DxO Photo Lab is great if you only ever do simple RAW edits, but it is really starting to fall behind as other software developers add new AI algorithms into much better photo editing packages.
In fairness, DxO has always said that the main preview window only represents standard noise reduction. Also that ut's the magnified inspection tool you need to use for an accurate preview.
No Noise A.I. is fully integrated in ON1 Photo RAW 2022.1 which is ON1's full specd photoeditor. In the next Update of ON1 Photo RAW they will also include their new product Resize A.I. I have an older version of ON1 Photo RAW and No Noise A.I. but use DXO PhotoLab 5 Elite for RAW editing because its rendering of colour and contrast looks just better to me. You can have similar results with ON1 but you just have to tweak more and take more time.
That's a good point that I didn't mention. It may have been better to compare PhotoLab DeepPRIME to On1 Photo RAW noise reduction.
I downloaded and used Deep Prime and was really impressed with the results, especially with my 1 inch sensor sony raw files.
I would love to purchase this to perform batch noise processing on my raw files, however the resulting dng files are of an enormously large filesize. I don’t want the output to be jpg, as I want to further process in ON1. Any tips, solutions or ideas from anyone on how to go about this? Or should I just use nonoise AI (and lose the ability to batch process). Thanks!
The important thing to realise is that a DNG file will be larger (much larger) than the RAW file it comes from (in most cases). That's because colour channel data in most RAW files has yet to be interpolated by the RAW converter during the demosaic process. This has already happened in the DNG file which is why it's larger. Using a different piece of software to generate the DNG isn't going to solve the size problem. The best solution is to follow a workflow where you review and rate all your images before starting to convert them. You then only convert and work on the ones you think are best, converting those to the DNG format. The rest of your images are still retained but in the RAW format. Later you may choose to delete the lesser RAW files or you might find a hidden gem in there.
@@RobinWhalley Thanks Robin for replying, and so quickly!
That actually makes a lot of sense, I will adopt that approach to cull some dead wood. Two birds, one stone. Thanks and much appreciated sir!
I know I'm late here. I've been using On1 Raw as my main processing tool for quite some time. I shoot m43 so in some cases, effective noise reduction is important to me. I do have DxO Photolab 5 and bought it specifically for the noise reduction and lens correction tools. With the incorporation of Nonoise into On1 Raw I will only very rarely use DeepPrime. I do think it produces slightly better results with problem files. But absence of effective layering tools in Photolab make it much less attractive to me as a day-to-day tool. I'll probably still run "special" files through DxO. Noise reduction in On1 Raw prior to Nonoise was pretty abysmal. It's now dang good. So I no longer see as much need to use other tools.
@@bradleyanderson247 Yes, I really do need to make a more in depth comparison using On1Photo RAW. Whilst I have it, I tend not to do my noise reduction in it. I've found in the past that it didn't handle the lens correction for the my Fuji lenses well. Perhaps I need to take another look.
@@RobinWhalley I have been playing and tweaking quite a bit with No Noise AI over the past fortnight. I have a fuji x100 original which I have owned since new, and sure it is a bayer sensor, but the results seem very good. Not that the X100 raw files contain very much noise to begin with ;-)
However, the results I am getting from my 1” Sony files are astonishing…….corrections also look good.
I am also looking to purchase a m4/3 camera soon, so I have run some downloaded raw sample files through it and again I am really impressed. I guess my conclusion is that for me No noise AI works wonders (to my eyes) with “smaller” sensor files. I am not necessarily looking for perfection, but the results I am getting are really great. Your milage may vary with xtrans fuji files, but it would be sure worth a look…best regards.
Topaz Studio is far better than this. I would suggest using Capture One. Colors are better produced on Capture One.
Yes Topaz is another good product but I don't think it's accurate to simply say that it's better. It may be for you but each person has different needs. Personally I have achieved the best results from the perspective of quality and colour accuracy by starting with DxO PhotoLab and DeepPRIME and then processing the resulting image with Topaz Sharpen AI. It also fit's with my overall workflow.
Noise reduction software continues to see tremendous advancements. At any point in time, one of them may leapfrog over the others. If you are already happy with one, I see no reason to switch just because another one is currently “the winner.” However, I experience huge advantages in using DxO Photolab Elite as the raw editor, not only because of DEEPprime, but because it seems to do the best job at demosaicing for three cameras I have: LUMIX, Canon, and Fujifilm. Worth mentioning is that there is another major player in this market, Topaz DeNoise AI, which I frequently use along with DxO, but at the end of editing. I find that most adjustments in contrast seem to leave added noise, and DeNoise AI will generally clean that up without artifacts. In fact many of the filters in the marvelous Nik Color Efex Pro can add quite a bit of noise, but which DeNoise AI will erase.
Yes, all the tools are very much moving around in position now. Most of them produce excellent results. It's only when one of them doesn't work properly that it becomes a deal breaker for me. DeepPRIME just works and works well. It's easy and I don't need to spend time worrying. I do also use and like the Topaz products, especially Sharpen AI which makes a great job of bringing out detail, especially when used after DeepPRIME.
Using DXO processing 40GB DNG files then exporting takes 1m 50s for Deep Prime and over5 min for Deep Prime XD. My file end up around 130MB. On1 only takes secs to process. I built my pc years ago and has a i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz processor with 32 GB of ram and I don't really want to go to the expense of getting a GPU just to run DXO quicker. I like DXO but may end up with On1 or Topaz.
For me too …really needs to include Topaz Denoise Ai in the comparison ..it is far more feature rich and capable of tweaking .
Here's the link to my comparison ruclips.net/video/7gSWb1fHKWo/видео.html. It's on the list to do an update given how Topaz has evolved since.
@@RobinWhalley thank you but that was of a year ago and Topaz has been updated several times . I would like the comparison to be with most recent of both .
Thank you
@@graham_T As I say, it's on my list to do again
Having used both quite a bit, I too favour PL5 for a reason only really glanced on here - its improvements tend to follow a Hippocratic Oath sort of philosophy - "First, do no harm." I have never had DeepPrime negatively impact image quality compared to the original, whereas ON1 Photo RAW (which also includes NoNoise) often is quite zealous with the initial pass and needs to be toned down to improve the naturalness of the image. For this reason, while functionally they are both great are removing noise, PL5 is far better for batch workflow of multiple images - since you can quite comfortably apply DeepPrime to EVERY SINGLE IMAGE as a default preset, and be sure that doing so will only yield benefit (low ISO images are largely unaffected and high ISO images are always improved). Additionally, because PL5 applies its processing on export rather than while I'm editing, it's again much better for batch processing as I can batch adjust dozens of images in PL5 in a speedy fashion and then click Export and go make a coffee while all the heavy lifting is done, rather than the ON1 PhotoRAW process of clicking NoNoise for each image and then waiting 5 seconds while it does its thing and then doing followup tweaks.
Yes, it's a good point. DeepPRIME produces an excellent starting poisition and I also apply it to all the images I process.
I agree that On1 Photo Raw is generally over zealous and requires toning down. What I tend to do, is process one image from a batch, then using the browse option, copy and paste the adjustments to other images from the same batch. It might not be perfect, but I find it the most effective way to adjust multiple images.
I had done this test yesterday and noticed that ON1 nonoise was a bit sharper but if you have a look down the bottom you will see it is applying 20% sharpening. I thought DXO did a slightly better job with the noise but I had adjusted the slider a little bit. Where DXO excels is when you have a much higher ISO and consequent noise ON1 seems good up to about 12500 ISO above that DXO is better.
When I made the comparisons in the video I had the default sharpening in On1 turned off but it was still sharper. I finally tracked it down to the Detail slider which is supposed to be detail recovery as part of the noise reduction. It does appear to be applying sharpening when this is used. I also couldn;t test above the ISO level I used as that's the limit of my camera. Although the camera ISO can be extended above this limit, noise reduction is then applied in the camera before writing the RAW file. At the end of the day, they both perform very well.
@@RobinWhalley I found by error because I loaded these photos into FB that high MB photos are degraded and the DXO file I loaded was considerably softer than the original. The ON1 photo was only 2 MB because I had resized it to 2000 on long side. The DXO photo was 18000Mb and made a lot worse because to identify it I added some text at the bottom which increased it to 27000 MB which I reduced to 9 MB in Affinity photo. I did not realise that I could resize it in DXO and found by making the long side 2000 it reduced to a similar size to ON1 without losing detail.
I think that adding the lens sharpness and chromatic aberration controls to DXO would have been a fairer comparison. I understand turning off sharpness controls but ON1 does add sharpness anyway and DXO really isn't supposed to be used without the lens and chromatic aberration controls. Chromatic aberration, like DeepPrime/PRIME noise reduction, is performed before demosaicing and can influence the results of DeepPrime.
Possiblt Ian but I wanted to keep things simple. In my comparisons I removed the default sharpening from On1 that you mention but the result was still sharper. I did subsequently confirm that the Detail slider used to recover detail is applying some form of sharpening. When I removed that, the image sharpness was slightly less than DeepPRIME.
1:58 It's really small...even when working on 32" monitor... any solutions?
Not really. The only thing you might want to try is using the mouse pointer Magnifier that's built into your computer. Both Mac OS and Windows have this feature. It's best to Google your how to turn it on for your particular operating system.
An excellent review; thank you! 😁
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you