Originally posted by The Squirrel Mafia ^ Nice images.
I still can't seem to grasp a lot of the modules in darktable. I can get some very usable ISO 12800 photos from my K-50 RAW files in RawTherapee & PDCU5 with very minimal ease, but I can't anything remotely good from darktable at that ISO. I really do wish that someone would take their time to make some Pentax specific presets that would make darktable easier to use, like I've done with the PP3 files for RawTherapee. I've seen & have gone through some d.styles online, but none of them make the higher ISO photos usable. It's more of how they look, versus how to control noise. I'm pretty sure that darktable is quite capable, but I do have a very hard time with it.
*Le sigh....*
Have you used the "denoised (profiled)" module? I have been using some noise reduction profiles made for the K-S1 with good results. But my files were ISO 1600...
Now I'm processing some K-3 files but haven't had to use denoise yet.
Here is an image from the K-3. ISO 2500, no noise reduction.
I'm using a trick I learned here at the forum... setting the sharpness to Extra Sharpness and then setting the sharpness to -4 (no sharpness at all). According to other users, this causes no noise reduction to be "baked into the RAW file". And AMaZE then does a great job when demosaic'ing the image. My ISO 3200 files look just as good with no noise reduction.