P: AI Denoise output to TIFF option vs DNG

@F1XX 

ACR does that now. It's a "technology preview", so you have to enable it in ACR preferences. It'll come to Lightroom when it's ready.

To broaden topic a little, denoising should happen non-destructively, on-the-fly, like other LR operations. That way we still would have only the original RAW. I understand this denoising tech needs separate result file, but it is not desirable work flow.

At the moment I prepare images within LR as ready as I can, and when I generate delivery files I do > 16-bit TIF (without denoise) > Topaz Sharpen (sharpen INCLUDES denoise (which is actually very good)) > compress to 8-bit JPEG or compress to 8-bit LZW-TIF (as needed). 

Leaving sharpen/denoise as post work is in my case best scenario as it is rather painless, automatic and quick.

Hello ALL,

I have Topaz Photo AI 3.3.0 and took an unedited original 42MB RAW file in Lightroom Classic and used two options to compare the same photo from Topaz:

1) In Lightroom I used Plug in Manager to get photo into Topaz and applied the recommnended Sharpening and Denoise and then exported back into LRC as a DNG.

2) In Lightroom I used Edit it....Topaz which converted to TIFF, 16 bit, ProPhotoRGB and applied recommended Sharpening and Denoise then exported back into LRC as TIFF

The results were different when zomed in way close.  I tried this on several different photos....when zoomed in close the TIFF file was always of better quality.  However, when not zoomed in you can't ditinguish the difference.

Ok, I now feel better knowing I wasn't lossing my mind on this. Yes definitely a crop.  Even on a soccer field with a 400 ƒ2.8 + 1.4TC i.e. 560mm, shooting to the other end requires a fair amount of cropping. Luckily the Sony A1 creates a large enough file to make this possible and still provide decent results.  I did reset the crop, run everything and as everyone stated the resulting TIFF did not get reduced, i.e. it was still very large, over 200mb.

You're not doing anything wrong. You're just doing a very extreme crop (about a factor of 6 I am estimating from the video!) that we didn't take into account. The only way a tiff can be smaller than than the denoised dng is when you heavily crop like you are doing here so there are simply far fewer pixels in the tif than in the dng. I rarely crop as extremely as you are doing here except in some of my wldlife images so didn't think of that.

So, listening to all you fine folks it seems I'm doing something wrong.  Totally possible these days given my age.  Here is a poor video (sorry I'm not good at these things, first time actually) taking a raw file in LR, run thru denoise and then PS. Hopefully someone can point out what I'm doing incorrectly.  Thanks for your help.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/23b5etcqu922xe6/dngtotiff.m4v?dl=0

DeNoise AI may also be important if you need to crop just a small part of the total image.

"Sony A1 50mb photo run thru AI Denoise returns a ~200b DNG ... taking the DNG into Photoshop then saving as TIFF with no compression and the resulting files size was back to 57mb."

@mschlotz, to build on the other replies, what you're saying about TIFFs doesn't add up.

1. The A1 has 50 megapixels.  It's impossible for a 50-megapixel image to be saved as an uncompressed 16-bit TIFF taking only 57 MB. As explained by @Jao vdL, the TIFF has three channels (RGB), each channel using 16 bits (2 bytes) per pixel, for a total of 50e6 * 3 * 2 = 300 MB.

2. I ran your experiment on three Sony raws, from an a1, a7 II, and a7 III:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/isb12c6pijb5e4m/denoise-tiff.2023.07.06.zip?dl=0

For each, I ran Denoise producing a DNG, then edited the DNG in Photoshop and saved as a 16-bit TIFF with zip compression:

In all three examples, the TIFF was somewhat larger than the DNG (1.1x to 1.5x), even though the TIFF has three 16-bit channels and the DNG four (RGB plus mosaic data).  I think this is because the compression used in DNGs is superior to TIFF zip compression, but I can't find an authoritative reference for that right now.

3. Three very knowledgeable people all agree that saving the output from Denoise as a TIFF won't save any disk space, but you're insisting otherwise. To make progress on understanding what you're observing, please upload a sample ARW to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar and post the sharing link here.  

Just a small insertion here - LZW was made for 8 bit data, and doesn't work well on 16 bit data, where it will often increase file size.  This isn't from personal experience, just what I've been reading.

That's correct indeed and the reason why I only use zip on my tiffs. It's slower to save and compress out of Photoshop but far more efficient. Just had it here because these are the two options out of Lightroom.

Just a small insertion here - LZW was made for 8 bit data, and doesn't work well on 16 bit data, where it will often increase file size.  This isn't from personal experience, just what I've been reading.