Topaz Adjust 5 Review

Noise Reduction

Noise reduction is not the primary purpose of this plug-in, as Topaz has a separate plug-in for it (DeNoise). However, noise reduction is available as one of the global adjustments. There are two sliders to play with: strength and amount. Below is a crop of an image shot at night which illustrates the noise reduction capability. We had strength at 1.5. Increasing the slider would reduce noise even further but at the expense of resolution, so we settled on 1.5 for this image.

Noise reduction is very slow compared to most of the the other adjustments, which are almost instantaneous. If you often need to apply noise reduction we recommend you get the dedicated Topaz plugin-in, as it will give you much more control than the two sliders in Adjust provide. For occasional use, however, Topaz Adjust does a fine job of reducing noise.  One small bug we noticed was that the preview is too optimistic when showing the effect of noise reduction so you may have to go back into Topaz Adjust and redo your noise suppression.

If you have Topaz DeNoise installed on your system, it can be bridged with Adjust and be used for more-effective noise reduction. You can also supplement Adjust's corrections with the built-in noise reduction tools in Photoshop or Lightroom if you are running those.