[PlayRaw] High ISO Challenge

That’s very good. I would be interested in seeing your ‘style’.

:slight_smile:
Biff

I’m afraid there is no style in my ‘style’, I was actually just throwing tools at the image, trying different things. (Something like Hegel’s drunken arrows of spirit …) It is a mess.

You should be able to open the text-only sidecar file.

DSC04028_jac.7z (2.9 KB)


(rt then topaz denoise at lightest raw preset then nik-cfx in gimp)

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I’m a bit late in this party, but here is my first attempt with photoflow:

  • LMMSE demosaicing and manual WB with a temperature of 2155 kelvin
  • noise reduction in Lab colorspace, using G’MIC’s bilateral blur filter with spatial_variance=40 and value_variance=30, and then the L channel blended back with 100% opacity. This gets rid of the large color noise blotches without flattening the texture in the luminance channel. The result is a rather “grainy” luminance noise
  • conversion to sRGB and a brightening curve limited to the dog’s face
  • final sharpening with G’MIC’s “texture sharpening” filter at 50% opacity

Here is the result:

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Very interesting thread, thanks for all the contributions! There’s a similar one on Darktable mailing list that I follow carefully as well.
The context (well, my context…) is that I struggle with noise removal in DT, and I find RawTherapee (and its high ISO profile) much more efficient and quick for such noisy images. I always have to try different options in DT for a result that is never satisfying. For what it’s worth, I tried DxO 9 on this image for comparison. Please note that I never use it so I didn’t play with the sliders much, only:

  • highlight recovering
  • white balance
  • PRIME noise removal (default parameters)

So consider this image as a “one click away” result in DxO:

Uploading…

@denis Your image isn’t working, perhaps try uploading it again?

Yeah, there are some follow-up discussion of this image on darktable-user that I should link for completeness here,. @hanatos then used the equalizer module to achieve a very good result here.

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Thanks @PkmX , I indeed noticed that I was stuck at the “uploading” stage but tried anyway, like I’m stupid! :sunglasses:
For some reasons it doesn’t work under Firefox, now I nailed it with Chromium. I can upload a full resolution image if needed.
I think @Jonas_Wagner version is slightly even better, but this DxO PRIME thing is just one click (and a lot of export time).

@denis Even though DxO is not open source software, I have to admit it has done a fantastic job at eliminating background noise while keeping the details. Especially when you consider it is a one click solution.

I tried to emulate it in RawTherapee:

Ignoring the color differences I think it is pretty close. DxO applies really heavy noise reduction on the background that even turning RawTherapee’s luminance denoise to 100 cannot match it. Perhaps it performs some sort of subject detection so it can apply extremely heavy denoise with confidence? Anyway, this level of noise looks very acceptable to me already, so I wouldn’t mind opting for a bit more detail.

Thanks @PkmX. If useful, for the purpose of comparing the level of details with the different softwares, I uploaded the full definition version from DxO. I must say you did a fantastic job as well. Would you mind sharing the recipe?
Thanks.
d

@denis Sure. I changed a couple more settings and ended up with this:


DSC04028.ARW.pp3 (4.8 KB)

You will need Kodak Portra 400 NC 2 from @patdavid’s film emulation CLUTs and the latest RawTherapee which contains A6000-specific DCP (“auto-matched camera profile” in color management) for this preset to work.

For comparison this is the SOOC JPEG, so you can see how awful it is.

After processing how it looks much better, and this is exactly why we shoot RAW. :slight_smile: Actually I think this is pretty usable for an ISO 12800 shot from APS-C. Sensors and processing software are really impressive these days.

Very impressed with the Lightzone image, just needed a bit of work on rover’s left eye (imo). I’ve not used Lightzone for some time so I might go and have a play

Here is my take on this in darktable. Most of the denoising is done by raw denoise here, which does a good job on this image, I think. I also added a litte bilateral filter denoising, but its impact is not that strong at all. Color noise has also been tackled using the low pass filter. I sharpened the image with the equalizer, which seems to do a better job than the normal sharpening in this case. In particular it seems to introduce less artifacts. (I also played with the high pass filter for sharpening… I think I forgot to turn it of).

The DxO denoising is impressive, but it doesen’t look that pleasing to me. Maybe, it is simply a little bit too much.

Here is my 3rd attempt in B&W:

Compared to the 2nd attempt, this version has even less noise in the background and far better details in the fur. The edge sharpness tool in wavelet is seriously impressive for sharpening details without reintroducing noises, though you have to play with the edge detection thresholds for a bit.

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Hello all,
am I too late for this? If not, here’s my attempt, essentially using my standard RawTherapee profile for super-high ISO (I also have an a6000 camera). The background is a bit “grainy”, but I personally don’t dislike that. I’d like to hear other people feedback tough. Thanks for the picture, it was fun.

First post and a little late on this post :slight_smile:

I just went with a bunch of denoising in darktable:

denoise (profiled)
Wavelets
Low-Med Strength
uniformly
color

denoise (profiled) 1
non-local means
patch-size 0
Med Strength
uniformly
lightness

denoise (profiled) 2
wavelets
Low-Med Strength
uniformly
overlay
~90% opacity

Finally, bumped up exposure just a bit, ran hot pixels (didn’t seem to catch anything), and did some color correction to make reduce some yellow.

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This thread got some attention lately, so I’d like to share my 4th B&W attempt at this image:

DSC04028.ARW.pp3 (4.8 KB)

Compared to the 3rd version, there is now barely any noise visible in the background, and I sharpened the fur using the microcontrast tool and USM as well. I also increased the contrast by a bit and added a little bit of vignetting to draw the eyes toward the center of the photo.

I have to admit RT is doing an extremely great job at dealing with this very noisy image here: eliminating nearly all noises while preserving the details.

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My second PlayRaw. Definitely a good way to learn about post-processing. It would be great to get some feedback and tips. This thread piqued my interest because of the subject (I like dogs) and also the fact that most of my photos tend to have a lot of noise, among other problems :persevere:. All of the photos I see on this forum are much cleaner and therefore easier to process than mine :smile_cat:. My workflow:

  1. dcraw: It took sheer determination to figure out the WB. Basically, I changed the multipliers until it looked okay. There is still a tint in the image but my system isn’t color-managed anyway. I accidentally opened the RAW file with GIMP and out popped the PhotoFlow plugin. I wasn’t satisfied with the interpolation but found that the WB color spot tool closely matched my choice of multipliers, which helped dispel my uncertainty.

  2. gmic: I made up stuff as I went, mostly focusing on taming the noise and brightening the image. I ended up doing something completely unexpected, part of the benefits of being a complete novice yet adventurous. Basically, I tried @Iain’s [filter] (New Demosaicing filter) and discovered that I liked the noise pattern that it gave. Since I hadn’t figured out how to manually apply the multipliers prior to demosaicing, I used the IID filter’s result to guide the texture of the dcraw output instead.

That is about it, I think. Sounds as though I know a thing or two about photography, image processing, science and programming, etc. But I don’t. I just did a lot of reading, learning from the smart people in this forum and other fine places of the web :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:.

Do you remember the settings you used?

I choose Red-Green, the CFA pattern of the RAW.
-iain_iid_demosaic 0,1,1,0,0