Lightroom : noise reduction AI

[ALAIN]

Good morning,
Many of us are testing LR's new option to reduce iso noise by AI.
For the best efficiency, is it better to perform this operation at the very beginning of the development flow or to develop the photo (masks...) before moving on to AI noise reduction?
best regards,
Alain (from France)

[SrMi]

Good morning,
Many of us are testing LR's new option to reduce iso noise by AI.
For the best efficiency, is it better to perform this operation at the very beginning of the development flow or to develop the photo (masks...) before moving on to AI noise reduction?
best regards,
Alain (from France)

Adobe recommends doing it in the beginning, as you may need to adjust some sliders after NR. However, it works at any time as it copies all changes.

From https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/04/18/denoise-demystified

Order matters. I recommend applying Denoise early in the workflow, before healing and masking. AI-driven, image-based features such as Content-Aware Remove and Select Subject can be affected by noise, so it's best to use those features on a clean starting point. If you do run Denoise on an image that already has Content-Aware Remove settings or AI masks, Denoise will automatically update those spots and masks. This is handy, but be aware that the content of those spots and masks may change unexpectedly, so it's best to review the results carefully.