[BigMackCam]

In the interest of completeness (not really!), I tried your challenge with ACDSee Photo Studio V4 since my goto apps are being covered by others. I did some beta testing on the app and I think it'll be a while before they achieve the level of capabilities seen in the others. That being said, here is a 100% crop sample with a screenshot of the settings used in the detail panel of the Develop module. I did a little sharpening prior to the noise reduction. Hope it helps.

Excellent, Mark - many thanks for contributing this!

Mike - The way to approach separate colour and luminance NR in darktable is to simply create another instance of whichever NR module you are working with and enabling the type of NR you wish to use. It is the rightmost of the 4 radio buttons next to the module name. I usually use the equalizer rather than profiled denoise but that is more a matter of taste. Equalizer is computationally intendive but then so is any NR reduction.

BTW, the module placement in the darktable pipeline is fixed by the developers so it does not matter in what order you enable any specific module. You can see the processing order by clicking on the leftmost radio button under the histogram. The processing pipeline is read from bottom to top of the graphic.

Thanks, Jack, that's very helpful. I'm now working with two instances of profiled denoise, one blended for "color" and the other for luminance. I'm still playing with it at the moment, and I suspect there are far more qualified people than me who could get much better results, but if we've had no Darktable wizards offering their results by tomorrow, I'll post what I've managed to achieve thus far

[demondata]

Here's a look at what RawTherapee 5.0 does with the settings to the right.

[BigMackCam]

Here's a look at what RawTherapee 5.0 does with the settings to the right.

Nice It's a while since I used RawTherapee (though I still have it installed on my PC). I recall it was very good with colour noise, and this confirms it. Thanks for posting!

[Tas]

...well she would if she realised I thought I'd provided an accurate example of On1 NR when I'd completely forgotten about the NR tool in the Effects module.

Anyhoo, I was in the time toilet (You Tube) and an On1 recommendation popped up that I'd seen before where NR was applied via Effects instead of the Develop module that I'd used previously. Doing NR in Effects gives you access to some powerful control options via blending, tone protection and masking. This is the video if you're interested:

You Tube

You Tube

it's using Photo RAW 2017 which has less masking control options than the 2018 version.

Before i post some examples for comparison I must also mention something else I'd forgotten and that is the local adjustments tool. It's available in both Develop and Effects. The tool is designed to work with masks and gradient filters to apply adjustments, one of which is a noise slider. This would be handy to target specific areas like a sky or a person's skin for NR without impacting upon other parts of the scene where you want the detail.

Instead of trying this approach though I went into Effects with a new version to try it out as the NR tool controls are different than those in Effects. Here's the default output and settings (Note: under the 'More' drop down menu there are 7 default options that can be selected including colour noise only):


I then used the masking tools that enabled me to apply a luminosity mask then set the window and levels to target the darker parts of the image and minimise the NR on lighter parts:


The final approach was to use two separate NR tools that would give me control on colour separate to luminance via blending options (Note I could only show part of the top NR tool but the settings for colour can be seen above the tool for luminance, these should have been applied the other way around (doh!) :


Well, now that I've been reminded of the NR tool in Effects I'll definitely be changing my workflow to jump into Effects NR before going back into Develop to set up the image.

Uh oh, I've got to go, I can hear mum yelling from the top of the basement stairs.

Tas

[jbinpg]

OK, here is one using darktable 2.2.5, the latest stable release. This uses two instances of profiled denoise, one using non-local means routines (better for luminance nr) and one using wavelets (most useful for chroma nr). I also used a parametric mask to limit the nr to midtones and darker on the luminance scale since the highlights were fine as is. This image really needs some sharpening after the nr but I did not add any to try to keep a level playing field. - Jack

[rawr]

Could you show how it fare in practice using the sample DNG ?

A quick run of the DNG through PDCU 5.72:



Settings in the NR panel were:

Random Noise Reduction: 33
Multilevel NR: 60
Spurious Color Signal reduction: 86
Fringe removal: un-ticked.

(I was just playing around with the sliders, not being systematic).

Plus some sharpening and shadow boosting.

Normally I don't use PDCU, but it can do a creditable job with NR.

[Class A]

Attached is the result from Capture One Pro 10 with my default settings.
Noise Reduction
Luminance: 50
Detail: 50
Color: 50
Single Pixel: 30

Sharpening
Amount: 160
Radius: 0.8
Threshold: 1

[Nicolas06]

It seems to me that both lightroom, capture One and DxO offer great noise reduction feature with not only lot of possibility to play with the setting but results that are of high quality.

[Larrymc]

Here are my results using DXO PhotoLab. PhotoLab downloaded the lens correction module for your and I shut down any applied corrections PhotoLab applies upon opening a DNG file. I did not change any sliders in the RAW noise reduction module since that's the way I tend to apply noise reduction (works best for me). I find it hard to do any better than the N/R defaults.

First is a crop with the standard N/R called HQ(Fast)

Next is a crop with the Prime N/R again I did not change any of the advanced slider all are set to default

I am really pleased with what I get now with DXO photoLab with minimal fussing with controls. Combined with the other features of PhotoLab its quite a deal for the current price and the best part it has no "rental" fee.

[audiobomber]

Here's something a little different. I've used Noiseware exclusively for about tenl years. I have Standard Edition, which has the same controls as the freebie Community Edition. You pay a few dollars for Standard but it allows batch processing for jpegs and it is brain-dead easy to use, perfect for me. There's a plug-in version for LR but I have the standalone version. I believe there is also a Pro version that allows processing in raw mode.

I opened the image in LR 5.7.1 and reset all settings for export, no sharpening, opened in Noiseware with default noise suppression settings and cropped in Picasa. Noiseware provides a lot of presets for NR, or you can customize your own. I find the one-click default settings mostly sufficient. I really like the result, and nothing could be simpler to use. Obviously this would look better after sharpening.

[Madaboutpix]

Below my own quick-and-dirty try with DxO PhotoLab.

Applied my own standard workflow K-3 preset, with Prime NR values considerably dialled back (to 1/3 of default levels, as far as I recall):

• Luminance: 13
• Colour: 33
• Low-frequency: 25
• Dead pixels: 8
• Grid: 10

Smart lighting: Auto; Contrast: -10, Microcontrast: "magic wand" Auto setting (+3); Unsharp masking and Chromatic aberration: "magic wand" Auto settings; Colour calibration using K-3 profile.

The processing result may not be to everyone's liking, and it sure reflects my predilection for crisp detail, for which I'm usually happy to accept residual noise, just as I would have put up with some high-ISO grain back in the film days.

As far as I can tell, it is a tad less blotchy than the crop posted by someone else above with HQ (fast) NR applied, but predictably retains a little more detail (or at least the perception of it). This does seem to come at the price of what I take to be (sharpening/microcontrast?) artefacts, but not to the extent that I would be particularly bothered by them. Tastes vary, I suppose.

[BigMackCam]

All, thank you so for much for your contributions to the thread. Please accept my apologies for not replying individually and sooner - I haven't had much opportunity to be on the forums today, but I appreciate the crops you've posted. It's making very interesting viewing.

One thing I find particularly interesting is that we seem to fall (very broadly) into two groups - those that go for quite strong noise reduction with a smoother look, and those who aim for noise reduction with some remaining noise as a necessary compromise for detail. Both approaches are valid, of course - it's just personal preference. In most cases, I tend to go with the latter... As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, I almost always resize my photos, so the effects of luminance noise especially are significantly reduced just by that resizing step. In fact, if absolute detail is my priority, I may only reduce the colour noise and simply accept the luminance "grain".

Thanks again