I don’t like to call myself a “photographer”, as my friends sometimes do when they are enthusiastic about one of my pictures, but rather a “photo enthusiast”, because I know that I have no idea about real photography and am simply too lazy to take the perfect photo.
My current gear is a Nikon D500 and the incredible Tamron 18-400mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC HLD, which allows me to capture everything reasonably well from very close up to far away. When traveling, where I take most of my pictures, I usually also have my Nikkor 35mm Ff/1.8 and a fisheye lens with me, but a change of lens is often not appropriate. Not that my wife doesn’t understand that I often fiddle with my camera for minutes on end to then make the strangest contortions for the best shooting angle while she simply enjoys the beautiful view, but I don’t want to overtax her patience either. So I usually leave the Tamron on and live with “ISO Auto” to compensate for the lack of luminous intensity of this lens monster in low light conditions.
The problem that naturally arises from this is considerable grain and often also motion blur. If, like me, you usually take photos according to the motto “Point & Shoot”, some of the best photos, in terms of the scenic representation, are simply a mess afterwards, even with massive use of my favorite image editing tool Lightroom Classic.
To address this problem when post-processing photos, it was a step forward when Adobe added an AI-supported denoise function to Lightroom Classic in one of the latest versions. However, this has often not satisfied me, as the setting options are limited and the results often overshoot the mark.
Yesterday, Stefan Münz drew my attention to the “Topaz Photo AI” tool and I used the morning to find out whether the additional around 150 USD required for a license would make sense … as a Christmas present to myself.
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