Just recognized some flaws I often recognize with profiled denoise on sharp edges. colour is at some points bleeding to an area which it doesn’t belong to:
Maybe I should give you also a lower ISO RAW of this setup as a reference. 400 ISO is the lowest I took back then. It shows some details that disappeared in the 6400 ISO image.
Which is quite natural when you shoot with high ISO. The information is lost and can’t be brought back. Not even with a KI denoiser. It just brings back, what could have been.
If that’s maximum ISO I would say the results are pretty nice. I compared with the later offered 400 ISO file and even on 100% the loss isn’t substantial.
The idea was to use chroma noise reduction (lower denoise (profiled) instance), which is my standard preset, trying to avoid chroma bleeding.
Then a heavy-handed instance, luma and chroma noise reduction for higher frequencies (finer details), but with some masking to only act on blurred details (not that the mask did much, in this case):
then, a diffuse or sharpen instance based on the sharpen demosaicing: AA filter preset, masked to exclude the darkest regions, and only to act on areas with detail (to avoid increasing the noise):
Please take a look at the transition from the pink square to the light blue square and also to the dark green one. Those are straight seperations in reality.
Well, I also tend to leave some noise in the photo to avoid losing too many details.
Here I turned off Capture Sharpening which always is on in my default profile. Also I did not add any sharpening, because the raise of noise will be more visible than gained fine details.
To add, my result does not look better than yours.
@kofa, absolutely this looks great. I will have a dive in your xmp. While you did your edit i tried it as well again. Tried to find a good balance between noise and keeping details.
I compared our both edits and I’m torn between yours and mine:
Yours out of question less noisy. Mine is a little bit sharper but not much. In yours are some hotpixels which my edit don’t has. Up to here it’s a draw or maybe a tight win for you. On the other hand mine is easier to achieve, because I don’t need masks.
In any case: Great edit! Learned some things again- Thanx.
I’m not at my computer at the moment but I think it was in ART (not sure if that is 1:1 these days with RT) and it was one of these noise edit requests and the results were quite good. The the approach I would never have landed on and that was the luma noise slider was set to 100% …blurry of course but then the recover details slider was increased to the “right” point to create the final edit… It worked quite well in this case anyway… I was always just keeping the slider low and backing it off when the detail loss was too much but I hadn’t thougth of using it that way…
Good point. I was just talking about the strait denoising but these could be powerful controls as well. I know that @agriggio Alberto was talking about them in the context of working with the agx-film simulations and adding grain and texture… I think I might have to go back and play around in ART again just for some fun…