Worse still, some areas like the eyes are often treated to high noise reduction and thus lose a lot of detail that was originally captured. My subjects are often hairy (butterflies, spiders, bees, other insects, animals) and there I have seen failure after failure through those AI driven noise reduction because they often fail to provide a decent translation from background to subject (so whiskers, hairs, leg protrusions are often either obliterated or surrounded by remnants of the noise - both equally destructive). The other problem is one of consistency across the subject. For one I the printing services and my own prints come out nicer if I don't remove noise in the first place, I just need to make sure I don't sharpen the noise (which the mask in LR does perfectly nice, assisted by pressing the option/ALT key while configuring the mask you can see where the sharpening will be applied, limit it to the subject and you often don't need additional noise reduction. I have tried to like these AI functions - but for me noise isn't the issue others make it out to be. The masks and heal tools were similar paths where the final release was much better.

Since it was just released one day ago, I'm sure it will improve drastically over the next few releases. However, I'm beta testing LR Classic and they have put in a AI Denoise to test and it's better than the traditional LR IMO. But I only use Topaz for touch photos, otherwise I use LR as I find it's good enough to fix most of my shots. HI, I tried several times to do what Topaz does in LR NR and Topaz is better for me. Have people generally found the cost of the Topaz plugin worthwhile? Is Topaz DeNoise AI really much better than the standard noise reduction slider in Lightroom? I've been playing with the trial version, and it seems to me that with careful manipulation of the settings with both programmes you end up with pretty much the same result - certainly close enough that the difference would not be obvious on a screen or in a pretty large print.

Dxo pureraw lightroom plugin