I am very interested in how you clean up the noise using Darktable. If there is a free tool that works better, I am all for trying it. The license is fine by me.
As a side note, it looks to be noise related to the Bayer pattern. Just a guess.
20260906_0055.CR2 (22.7 MB)
20260906_0055.CR2.xmp (12.2 KB)
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
Bill, I’m not good in noise removal. I do not mind a lot of noise often either. So others will do probably lots better!
What I did here is use two instances of ‘denoise’. The first a preset directed at color noise and the second one with a bit tweaked settings.
As DorS, local contrast, contrast equalizer and sharpen all bring back noise you’ll have to be careful with them. I usually protect highlights in those modules and in noisy pictures - and pictures with deep shades where I want to protect details - the shadows as well.
Used a bit of warming up the color - color balance rgb - as the picture tended to blue because of shade.
I brought down the sky a lot with tone equalizer, but later cropped it away altogether.
Straightening, vignette, crop, frame…
Hope you like it!
Yes, you can create a duplicate in lighttable view then use ‘load sidecar file’ to open our xmps. Some people are using the new denoise tools that aren’t included in the xmp but they say when that’s the case.
I’ve done a similar thing as last picture but with added Diffuse or Sharpen for denoising. It’s not a beginner friendly module but it has some handy presets. Alternatively you could turn up the hot pixels module settings even more.
I tried to keep the colours a bit less saturated like you mentioned in the last thread.
Thank you for the explanation. I normally use graduated filter to darken the sky. I also like the crop. I happen to like the 1:3 ratio. On canvas it looks really good. I have a couple hanging of our trips to San Antonio.
Man so much to learn all over again. Even while I’m having to learn a new programming language I absolutely loathe. I really only like compiled languages but so much $hit is in python, I’m being forced to learn it.
I like the color tone here. What did you do?
I somehow made a mistake by uploading the xmp. Here is it again.
20260906_0055_raw-denoise.dng.xmp (19,1 KB)
I made the edit with the latest development version of dt. I hope you can open the xmp. I haven’t used any new modules. If not this seems to be a persistent problem and I have to decide to go back to an earlier development version or give up temporarily on Play Raw until the next stable version is here. Actual Stable runs to slow on my device.
I’m running 5.6.1 - what are you running. Sad to say, but their dev environments doesnt like Debian based Linux.
With really noisy pictures I would start with raw denoise in neural restore. I would recommend trying various strengths and comparing the outputs to determine what works best for your images. I tend to keep the values fairly low and certainly not 100%. However, this image wasn’t noisy enough for me to reach for the AI tool box.
I usually start with hot pixels module set to detect by 3 neigbors. I have created a raw denoise preset with a threshold of 0.004 which denoises without too much softness. I set capture sharpening in the demosaic module. I activate the denoise profiled module to default values. If noise is still obvious I create a second instance of denoise profiled module but use a preset I created to set it to non-local means with a strength of 0.250. This further softens the noise but will soften the image if not required so use sparingly.
I find the sharpen module the best module for sharpening without enhancing noise. I have created a preset with radius 2.000, amount 2.000 but importantly threshold 14.5. The threshold prevents enhancement of noise.
I also often use the details threshold slider found in the drawn masks option to only sharpen edges by setting the slider to a positive value. If I set the slider to a negative value then I can protect edges from the softening that occurs through denoising. While I didn’t feel this extra step was necessary on this image but I have used this technique here so if my xmp file is applied to the image people can see what I do.
20260906_0055.CR2.xmp (14.4 KB)
Nice edit Tim. I like your colors. I didn’t touch the colors in my edit as I focused on noise only.
I’m running darktable-5.7.0+758 on Debian unstable.
You can get the appimage from here:
Made 2nd version, using ‘hot pixels’ module, and some slight changes like desaturating the surroundings, lighten it up generally, lighter left part of the image and a slight dark gradient coming in from top and bottom.
Thank you very much.
Sorry for the delay. Work & life were eating up my spare cpu cycles. 
It was sun down. That’s why I had to push the ISO up so high, but I also knew what kind of noise I was going to get.
