This is a night shot of the Duomo di Lecce in southern Italy, using a compact camera (Ricoh GRIIIx, APS-C sensor), keeping average ISO and then increasing the exposure quite a bit (+2.8EV).
Why are you reducing fine-grained noise reduction in denoise (profiled)?
You can try increasing chroma (U0V0) noise redution there, by a lot – it can also work to smoothen skies.
If you leave the auto mode, you can play with details in shadows (so you reduce noise there more aggressively), or even mask the module for shadows and add a mask refinement based on detail (drag to the left so smoother surfaces are affected more than edges).
the reason why I reduce the fine-grained details is to avoid oversmoothing; I like to keep a bit of ‘structure’ (maybe it’s just noise but it looks to me more realistic than the overly “flat” and smooth look of digital denoise). I hope you can see the difference in the screenshot below: upper half is my original setting with the denoise curve dropping down towards “fine”, lower half is what you’re suggesting, i.e. increasing towards fine. I can’t see any improvement in the sky but I do see the “digital smoothness” creeping in on the building.
Thanks for the suggestion to try wavelet not-auto, decreasing “preserve shadows” does improve dramatically the dark sky rendering; i’ve once again decreased the fine details weight .
I wasnt able to make an effective mask; the details threshold doesnt work here maybe because there’s too much noise, I played with masking the dark areas in the Jz channel but again, doesn’t do much.
I didn’t find the level of noise upsetting to me in this image. Maybe I am just tolerant because i remember how grainy 1600 ISO film was . 20260422_G002997.DNG.xmp (19.3 KB)
I found a play raw from a year ago that was very similar in scope. I’ve made two attempts at that one, and I’ve used some module settings from that second attempt as a starting point here.
Part of it is incorporating some tricks from an older video that was recently linked on this forum, but I’m not sure if surface blur is really that helpful in comparison to other things?
Profiled denoise is quite low here because on the other picture, higher settings would make parts of the building the same colour as the sky.
I always have trouble with single-pixel noise bits too. They won’t show up in this jpg because it’s 50% scale.
I have not used dt in quite some time, but I recall that the straightening algorithm is sensitive to a bunch of factors including demosaicing and noise properties and choices. Your take is okay; it does not bother me one bit (after your efforts).
Went with a bit of a warm illuminated look…just experimenting again with Christian’s base curve module…I guess I should have added in his contrast module to see if I could work the building textures…
As for denoise I just used default profiled and dropped the protect shadows considerably…I find this to be a key slider when it appears that PDN is not doing enough rather than cranking up the strength…
Inspired by other takes here I revisited my edit. For better or worse I played with tone equalizer to try and bring out more shadow/highlight detail. I am not convinced that this help. I also reviewed my denoising and saw no problems of parts of the building changing color as suggested by @gwbarn. But I had been using details threshold masking on my denoise profiled modules.
Too many efforts haha. Trying to work out if the buildings were on a hill, which way the slope was going, whether the background building was on a different angle, handheld tilt, etc… Good enough, I guess.
This is a nice photo. But, for my taste, the light collection is on the low side - instead of 1/125 s at ISO 1600, maybe something like 1/30 s at lower ISO (400 or 800?). I think the GR III has some stabilization, which helps considerably. I’m assuming that the person was momentarily stationary.
Most of the noise in the image is at the low end (which is typical), and boosting the low end shows noise.
I gave this a go, but the boosted darker regions either show noise or have that “plastic” look. See e.g. the upper right section of the Duomo. A bit of a surprise to me the the noise around the bell tower on the right. I’m not sure what to think about that.
FYI Here is a photo I took in Rome last September with an MFT camera (Panasonic G9). I think that the illumination was similar to that in your photo, but that is just a guess. In any case, the exposure was 1/13 s at f/2.8 (27 mm fl, equiv to 54 mm FF), with the same ISO of 1600. I used denoise (profiled) with no adjustments.
The G9 has awesome image stabilization. I’ve seen sharp images at up to 1 s exposure. But in your case I would expect 1/30 s should be ok with good technique.
