It seems that you have your solution already. Congrats!
But I can’t help myself and I have to tell there another option within RT: it’s a really really powerful denoising option, though it’s not a single slider, nor semi-automatic. On the other hand, not being a single slider is really its strong point.
I’m talking about the Denoise and Refine module (sub-tool) inside the Wavelet Levels tool: it allows to perform luminance denoising on a per detail size way. You can remove noise and increase local contrast of the remaining details on a per level basis, and it gives way much better results than a simple luminance denoising.
If you’re curious on how to use it, read: Wavelets/es - RawPedia using a good translator
If you don’t understand it yet, I can write a summary with the most important steps.
@maboleth Don’t know if you already tried this but I found I got better results in RT with luminance noise reduction by setting strength to 100 then moving the details slider to a level with an acceptable level of noise and detail. I’m happy with the results, but might not be good enough for you?
Yes, I do the same. Generally my goal in removing noise is making it less prominent, but also having it uniform across the whole image.
That means I do not opt for selective noise removal, like 100% noise-free sky then 50% noise building. That looks artificial and overprocessed as hell. Or aggressive noise removal with severe artifacts - that looks like a badly compressed JPG phone image quality.
Sure, I use NeatImage for Linux - awesome results and really nice upgrade policy too. It is the only non-opensource software I actually use and paid for.
OK I did not read the whole thread BUT noise reduction in both RT and dt is far superior to Adobe and many other commercial noise reduction. You need to know how to use them, but it is not so difficult.
Just a little info: Two days ago, I added a new denoising filter in G’MIC, based on convolutional neural networks, which works quite well.
It’s only available in the development version (3.0.0_pre) for the moment, but you can already test it because binaries are available.
For me profiled Denoise in DT is far better than RT basic tool for keeping details and it can be adjusted but rarely needs to…also from how you handle noise you might like the new diffuse model as you can manage and incorporate grain. There are an excellent series of videos made by rawfiner the author on the various ways to use numerous denoising tools in DT…
You don’t say much about what file type you are using, but you might want to play around with the demosaic algorithms. Particularly try dual demosaic options. They can affect how noise is able to be handled later in the pipeline.
with command line API. This is easy to use, but you have to convert the images to pfm graphics format and little endian.
E.g. ‘convert input.jpg -endian lsb output.pfm’ or with GIMP.
The call then:
$ oidnDenoise --hdr Noisy.pfm -o Denoise.pfm
Thanks for the infomation. But noise reduction by multiple exposures has been a common practice for a long time.
This can be done with ImageMagick [https://patdavid.net/2013/05/noise-removal-in-photos-with-median_6/] or Enfuse. There are also some astro programs that work with this method.