Ancestors

Toot

Written by Tim Bray on 2025-01-11 at 22:00

In which I de-noise a photo of the moon with old-school algorithms and whizzy new AI and show you the difference: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/01/10/Photo-Noise-Reduction

Have attached three close-ups to this post, have a glance and see what you think.

[Haha, the early commenters like the noisy version better.]

[#]photography #astronomy

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Descendants

Written by Adrian Cockcroft on 2025-01-11 at 22:05

@timbray I just took a picture of the moon myself, but some clouds got in the way.

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Written by Tim Bray on 2025-01-11 at 22:07

@adrianco Somebody wrote a song about that…

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Written by oleschri@chaos.social on 2025-01-11 at 22:08

@timbray Go! Make some noise!

+1 noisy

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Written by th0ma5 on 2025-01-11 at 22:09

@timbray There's a ton of information in noise

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Written by Jeff Moore on 2025-01-11 at 22:14

@timbray Yeah... I think I'm with those commenters.

The final noise-reduced versions look smeary to me; when that much NR is applied to my photos of people, I start thinking either that my glasses need cleaning or that the people are looking like they have skin made of plastic.

I sometimes end up using the newfangled "AI" NR, but only cranked up high enough to remove the biggest BOULDERS of noise... after I go through that exercise, I prefer the noise-reduced version maybe 60% of the time.

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Written by Marko Vujnovic on 2025-01-11 at 22:56

@timbray I am not terribly good with visual details, but it seems to me that AI assumes there exists a slight texture which can't really be justified. It probably takes some of the noise as actual data.

Either way, I would be interested to learn what the real cost difference in processing between the two is.

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Written by Tim Bray on 2025-01-11 at 23:35

@dawngreeter The difference is huge. When you move the Luminance slider, the picture updates in real time, no noticeable latency. When you do the AI thing, you get a spinner spinning for many seconds.

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Written by tripleman, a 🇨🇦 in 🇩🇪 on 2025-01-12 at 01:05

@timbray ai just makes everything look like plastic. Grain is so much better.

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Written by Christian Kent on 2025-01-13 at 01:14

@timbray My favourite rule of thumb in both audio and vision is “am I noticing new details for the first time?” The AI tools are a massive addition to the toolbelt (just in number alone), more powerful and more able to overdo.

But for that reason, #1. The noisy picture is masking features, and if you only look on a very small display, it probably won’t matter.

That said, my gut feels that #1 can be done better.

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