@Nathan_Crabtree - go for it!
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Just tried it and itās still the same, the only option is export as a tiff file. Which I did, I think it looks good after diffuse or sharpen in DT.
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Its got a little bit of that fine salt and pepper that D&S can introduceā¦ I thinkā¦ sometimes dropping one iteration will make it disappearā¦ or maybe it grain you left??
I just applied the AA filter preset because thatās what I normally apply. So should be able to get better easy enough.
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Normally that is fineā¦ So it might just be the state of the image before that. I use that preset often and tweak the iterations up one at a time to see if I can get something sharper when I need itā¦ I usually find much beyond 3 and it starts to add that fine pepper to the image
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I think this is a very valid pointā¦
There are several good edits, here, and then comes this. It is simply amazing!
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I agreeā¦lots of really nice editsā¦ my winner to this point is @Popanz . Wonderful detail recovered esp on that blown area on the leading edge of the wing and the body of the bird nicely preserved and nice contrast against the background water color ā¦
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They are the denoising as a second layer in the dng. Which isnāt really standard I believe , and the denoised image may be in a non standard pixel layout or other funky encoding.
So the dng you end up with seems to open like a normal dng without any processing applied , because thatās the primary/first image in the file.
what would they know? 
you should push some HP5 to 1600 next time and see what they think of that.
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I donāt care what expectation others have, regarding noise in pictures. But Iām in advantage because I donāt participate in any contests. I take my photos for me, my family and friends. If I would take part on competitions, I would maybe think different.
But at the moment I hate the plastic looks and I prefer to leave some grain in. This makes a picture usually more lively and natural.
I have bought in the past for my vbox a licence of DXO Pure Raw, and now I donāt use it, because it always generates this plastic look and I have no chance to soften the strength of smoothing, because there is no option to set the strength of NR. So nowadays I regret, spending money on it. Of course, I could work with a layer of a non DXO processed version on top. But that makes the whole process to complex.
I still wasnāt really happy with detail conservation of my first edit. So I played a little bit more. I switched to LMMSE for demosaicing. And changed some parameters on the diffuse and sharpen module. The result has a little bit more but finer and more regular grain. In my opinion, I was rewarded with finer details and all in all a more pleasant look:
0P9A0410_02.CR2.xmp (22.2 KB)
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Thats a great pic, thanks for sharing. Playing was a lot of fun.
After applying the dcp-profile for this camera, I started to find a good setting for CA, the histogram is telling me, that blue should be lifted, but i left it like it was. For denoising i was playing with LA, but at the end i decided to keep it simple with the denoising in the details tab.
Here my try in RT dev:
0P9A0410.jpg.out.pp3 (18,4 KB)
Martin
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denoise-comparison-0P9A0410_02.CR2.xmp (23.1 KB)
dt 4.5
That ON1 result is extremely good. What impresses me most is not just the noise reduction, but how well it retains feather detail. Many darktable edits that do a similar amount of noise removal also remove quite a bit of feather detail. Probably not an issue for the casual observer, but as an exercise, I have tried to improve upon the ON1 detail whilst retaining an acceptable level of noise - even adding a tiny bit of grain to mimic film. (The alternate approach would have been to reduce noise further in the background and mask it off the duck, but I wanted to see what could be achieved without masks).
Also kept basically the same tone and crop for easy comparison.
I think ON1 has done the best of the other external NR routines that Iāve tried. It has controls to adjust luma and chroma noise separately and then other controls for details and sharpening. Plus, the program integrates NR in its workflow and doesnāt create a separate DNGā¦ as long as you do all editing inside ON1. But I have to create a huge DNG or TIFF file to use it with DT, but at least it has the option to reopen the file in DT automatically upon export.
Unfortunately, Iām less than impressed with the rest of the program. I was a beta tester for the latest release and they have too much emphasis on AI in the wrong areas, and their core modules have a tendency to create heavy halos and other artifacts. So, Iām not hawking ON1, I just find it better for NR if I feel the need for help outside of DT.
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