noise reduction compared to rawtherapee

[heckflosse (Ingo Weyrich)]

That looks really good imho!!!

[afre (Alan)]

Yes, it is quite good. Looks like their raw processing capabilities have improved.

[mabod]

I gave it a try in RT as well. With just one slider “Luminace noise = 40” I already get a decent result similar to Bill’s Nr. 3 - High ISO. This is really amazing.

[agriggio (Alberto)]

@afre

Yes, it is quite good. Looks like their raw processing capabilities have improved.

I’ve never used lightroom myself, but I have a hard time believing it is very far from the state of the art. Sure, there might be specific things that some other tool does better, but on average I would assume that Lr is pretty good. And, in this specific case, it does show indeed.

Here’s the best I could do to emulate Lr’s rendering:

Still not quite as good, but reasonably close IMHO. Though I personally prefer a “grittier” look:

[age]

Could you share the .pp3?

[agriggio (Alberto)]

Hi,

I’m afraid not, sorry. But here’s one way to do it:

• open in RT, apply neutral + auto lens correction + noise reduction like this: RGB mode aggressive, auto chroma, 50 luminance and 50 detail

• go to GIMP (I exported in linear gamma, ACESp0), apply G’MIC guided smoothing with default settings, but only to chroma (I used YIQ chroma IIRC)

• now G’MIC guided smoothing again, radius 1, smoothness around 75, luminance only

• a gentle S-curve

• and finally a bit of G’MIC grain (kodak T-MAX 400, scale 0.8)

Not exactly identical, but in the same ballpark:

[afre (Alan)]

@afre

Yes, it is quite good. Looks like their raw processing capabilities have improved.

@agriggio

I’ve never used lightroom myself, but I have a hard time believing it is very far from the state of the art. Sure, there might be specific things that some other tool does better, but on average I would assume that Lr is pretty good. And, in this specific case, it does show indeed.

I say that because the LR result looks nicer than I remember it to be. That might be due to the sharpening it does by default but it is still better than before. FLOSS isn’t doing bad either. Thanks to you and countless others.

[rawfiner]

Here is a quick attempt using darktable 2.4.4.
I used denoise bilateral filter (which is very powerful on high ISO picture, if you set the red green and blue values while looking at the red blue and green channels separately using the channel mixer), and a little bit of equalizer and that’s all.

[sankos]

Here’s what the commercial DxO PhotoLab2 (with PRIME NR on) did with this:

[betazoid (Anna)]

Well, I have Lr/ACR too and I am sure that they are not better than RT or DxO.

[agriggio (Alberto)]

I can’t understand why DxO gets so much praise, honestly. I can see that the result is pretty clean, but it also seems very “fake” to me, with over-sharpened edges and a lot of very flat regions, if you look at 1:1. (and if you don’t, then I must be missing the point…). Just for fun, here’s an attempt that tries to go in DxO’s direction:

[DxO-user (JegMeg)]

@betazoid

I agree that RT’s noise reduction is better than any noise reduction filter in dt. I think RT has the best noise reduction I know, but I am not claiming that I know every program that can do noise reduction. Actually I think that dt is only nr 3 - 2 is Lr/ACR. At least in terms of noise reduction.

My first post here.
Have been a Lightroom user for many years , but have converted to DxO Photo Lab.
PRIME Noise reduction is the reason i left Lightroom.

Here is my attempt with DxO

[Claes]

Hi @DxO-user and welcome!

I would be very interesting to see what you can do with the Brazilian players from post 18, I think it was, in this thread. [Personally, I failed terribly ]

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

[DxO-user (JegMeg)]

Here is my try with the Brazilian players

I did not spend much time with the editing,
Did only focus on NR

[Claes]

Thank you.

[DxO-user (JegMeg)]

I downloaded RT 5.5 and played with it for a while.
The UI is very different from LR/DxO. I guess it will take a lot of time getting familiar with RT.

Tried to edit those 2 pictures.
Highlight/Shadow is ok , but I’m unable to reduce noise - at least compared to DxO. No matter what I tried , the noise is still there.

I guess it has to do with my lack of skill in RT

[rgo (Rafa García)]

Thank you very much!

[sguyader (Sébastien Guyader)]

@DxO-user You need to set the zoom >=100% to see the effect of noise reduction in the preview.

[mabod]

Hi guys,

I opened this thread to see resp. show how DT is doing with regard to noise reduction. Specifically without camera profiles. Now this thread has evolved to an overall noise reduction comparison DT, RT, LR, DxO etc. This is good.

And I think this thread now underlines my impression that DT has room for improvement when it comes to noise reduction. It is not leading the pack. In fact I think it is not as good as RT, LR or DxO.
I can achieve very good results with RT or LR with just one or two sliders whereas I need a combination of multiple modules with multiple settings and blend modes in DT.

Although I understand all the explanation given by Bill Ferguson in this thread I still do feel that DT is overly complex when it comes to noise reduction and then not even achieving best quality with all this complexity.

Is this a summary that can be agreed upon?

[gadolf (Gustavo Adolfo)]

@mabod

I can achieve very good results with RT or LR with just one or two sliders whereas I need a combination of multiple modules with multiple settings and blend modes in DT.

What you call complexity (because of the need to combine the same tool with multiple settings and blend modes) I see it as a lean quality: minimalistic, but powerful enough tools, so that you can combine them in different ways, with multiple instances.

I think it’s more of a design paradigm, where DT capability of creating multiple instances of the same tool points to the building of simpler tools. This seems to me a positive quality towards an elegant UI.