Before AI, Franzis Denoise projects was in the top 2 or 3 denoise apps available. Now, compared to AI-based tools it’s kinda quaint. That’s Not to say don’t grab today’s GOTD – it still helps if you don’t want to pay for apps like Photoshop, Topaz DeNoise AI, Luminar Neo etc.
A noisy photo or image generally does not show pure colors, though you may have to zoom in to see the noise. Some camera sensors capture photos with random pixels that are the wrong colors. Film negatives & prints have sort of dabs of color or black [with B&W]. If you imagine static on an old analog TV that’s not tuned to a channel, that’s similar to the noise in digital photos when the ISO [sensitivity] is turned up – different cameras have different thresholds, so 500 on one might equal 1-2000 on another. Denoise projects gets rid of some of the small, wrong color pixels or dots. AI denoise can go further, in some cases recognizing the objects in a photo, determining where the edges should be, and making the pixels on both sides of those edges solid colors. In fact, you have to be a little careful – turn it up too high and it starts to look more like an illustration than a photo.
Denoise projects 2 Pro works best as a plugin in your image editing app – it’s a bit ungainly &/or inefficient as a standalone app. I have had a few cases in the past where Franzis plugins would not work copied to the plugin folder of a photo editing app – putting the plugins in the Franzis program’s folder, then putting a shortcut to the plugin in the editing app’s plugin folder worked. Plugins are sometimes separate in the downloaded ZIP file, and sometimes included in the setup file. I have had Franzis apps not see any photo editing software, and so not install any plugins during installation. I use Universal Extractor when that happens – it puts all of the included files/folders in a new folder.
I first install Franzis apps in a VM, then copy the program’s folder to my regular copies of Windows to avoid the redundant, and sometimes rather old Microsoft C/C++ runtimes. They don’t really depend on Windows registry, and the needed files & folders are added to the User folder on 1st run. Franzis giveaways sometimes use a Franzis wrapper – the real setup file can be copied from the user temp folder, before you click finish on the setup dialog, to use afterward.