Capture One Just Added AI Denoise – Is It Better Than DXO’s?

F
or many years now, the French company DXO have dominated the AI denoising landscape with their DeepPrime algorithms available in Photolab and PureRAW. Their machine learning model cleverly removes high ISO noise, hot pixels, compression artefacts and sensor-pattern noise that other models either miss entirely or degrade into blurry mush.

Adobe have closed the gap with DXO over recent years with their noise removal model in Lightroom, but that other top tier RAW editor – Capture One – clung to its 30 year old denoise technology like a toddler with a security blanket.

Given the popularity of AI denoising across all niches of photography, their stubborn unwillingness to move with the times was perplexing and I have no doubt at all that they lost customers to DXO as a result. Clearly, however, the pressure from Capture One’s ‘enthusiastic’ user-base finally got too much, because they have just rolled out a beta version with a brand new AI denoising model built-in.

I decided to compare it against the latest DeepPrime model in DXO PureRAW 6.