When we travel I like to document the rooms in which we stay. This shot was taken in Victoria BC and I was interested to try and retain the details in the lace curtains that were backlit by strong sunlight and in an unlit and rather dark room. I am concerned that the noise is quite high, especially on the yellow walls.
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20230811_0008.RAF (52.9 MB)
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20230811_0008.RAF.xmp (14.6 KB)
Hi @davidvj,
Surprisingly high amount of noise from a Fuji ISO500 image???
Try to tweak raw denoise in blue channel only and set
a very low noise threshold.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I’d say not surprising given the fact that the interior needs pushing at least 5EV… (edit: just worked out - 500iso pushed 5 stops is iso 16 000! not accurate but still…) ideally one could have exposed quite a bit higher, while still retaining the window detail.
But it’s easy to be smart from a keyboard 
and I have plenty of shots like this…
My attempt below. I tried to go for a more natural look, partly to avoid pushing those shadows more then I had to.
edit no.2 - a different take. By accident I left the same slight colour grading in color balance rgb that I did on the colour version, and it gives a subtle two-tone effect which I though rather nice.
20230811_0008.RAF.xmp (14.9 KB)
Thanks for sharing this challenge. Probably a good case for multiple exposures and blending, but it is easy to be wise after the event!
I made exposures of +1, +3 and +5 (via Filmulator), blended with Enfuse, slight tweak with Curves in GIMP. Then I used Iain Ferguson’s MS NL-Means C Noise2.
@davidvj wrote
I was interested to try and retain the details in the lace curtains
This was a tricky one 
How about this attempt?
Or perhaps this approach?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
O o … noise is a problem here. On the first preview the image is almost black. Only the window is bright.
Despite boosting saturation I tried to keep it somewhat natural looking.
Here is my rendition. Probably a little less colorful and a bit darker.
Nice image to play with.
darktable edit:
Curious what I could do using RawTherapee, so gave that one a try too:
As suggested I revised my version using only the blue channel de-noise and that made quite an improvement. Thanks Claes … I learned something new again!
The exposure was -3.0 (camera compensation) which totally avoided signs of flooding the sensor. I use a +1.0 as standard with Fuji during development. As a result I did not touch the base exposure setting with dt, I find that this works for 90% of my shots … all based on AP concept.
That really shines a bright light. Noise looks good.
Interesting that the blues are quite dark
