Maybe I need to try it more often , to see what i can get out of it . I don’t do it that much , and it makes my darktable run slow as …
Thanks for the tips , might play around with it a bit more to get the hang of it. Maybe going for the tra smooth look and then using the blending options to reduce the effect is also a good idea (make sure the denoising doesn’t cause artifacts, then control the amount of denoising with blend opacity ) .
They being said,this is an extreme case. Not only the smaller sensor and higher iso , but there is a lot or smooth background in there, so it really stands out.
I’d you look at the parts of the bread with fine detail, the noise is way less an issue there . So on pictures that are just a bit less challenging , denoise-profiled might just be all you need to get good results .
I did an edit above a few months ago I remember I wanted to focus as much on the bread and not worry about the knife…I would have to go back and load that edit to see what I did…i was pretty happy with it…I could likely improve it today for sure
So you could do something similar…just do your denoise blend in difference mode to confirm what you are impacting and then turn it off…do your edit and then turn it back on again…or you could even use raw denoise initially and you would not have to be too concerned with tweaking the setting for softness with your approach as you over denoise…then in the end turn off the raw denoise and apply your choice of noise reduction…
yeah that’s mostly how I work now, if the files aren’t preprocessed by DxO or something.
Crank up raw-denoising to get a (way to) smooth of an image, but it helps in setting things like exposure and filmic without getting too distracted on little peaks of data, and it makes the filmic auto-button work better.
Then when it’s set to a good start point I turn off raw-denoising, use a chroma-only denoise setting and leave it at that.
A while ago I was thinking about how to improve the darktable auto min / max color pickers, so they wouldn’t always pick an outlier pixel, mainly because I was having trouble with the negadoctor pickers (More robust color picker in Darktable). Probably the simplest solution would be to have the picker pick the min/max from a blurred version of the preview image, maybe with something like a median filter applied.
The posted jpeg is what you get with denoise on. If you turn off denoise and export, there is not much difference in noise. I have tested turning all other modules, except exposure, and they don’t change the increase in noise.
I’m trying to say that I see more noise between the image I see in dt versus the exported jpeg when I am using denoise than when I am not. There is a lot more noise in the image in dt with denoise turned off then when it is on, but that is not the issue. It is between the image and the exported result.
Now, I might not be able to see the difference between the dt image with denoise turned off and the jpeg because there is so much noise to begin with. Therefore, the problem might not be with denoise and just with export.
After looking more at the actual images, I think it is not a denoise issue, just a jpeg issue. I think I need to take this off this thread, so as not to hijack it.
Can you export tiff and compare noise to darktable?
Then, can you export from that tiff to jpeg in another program, at 100% jpeg quality, and compare that to a jpeg export from dt at 100% quality?
Try 95 or 100 but not 99…Strangely I feel I recall some other issue in the past with JPG artifact if someone tried 99%?? I just can’t recall the exact issue…
I exported your edit and then in DT I scrolled to 100% and took a snapshot of the raw and then I advance to the jpg and compare …I really don’t see a lot of difference and what I do see is actually very marginally but less noise in the jpg…at least zoomed in and looking at the face of the bald gentleman??? I uploaded by exported jpg from your edit…
