noise reduction compared to rawtherapee

afre · December 24, 2018, 12:42am

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 · December 24, 2018, 1:34pm

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.
IMG_1652_01

sankos · December 24, 2018, 1:42pm

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

IMG_1652_DxO-1

betazoid · December 24, 2018, 3:04pm

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

agriggio · December 24, 2018, 4:12pm

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:
IMG_1652-4

DxO-user · December 24, 2018, 4:41pm

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 · December 24, 2018, 4:48pm

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 · December 24, 2018, 4:59pm

Here is my try with the Brazilian players

IMG_16523c5DxOb3c

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

Claes · December 24, 2018, 6:46pm

Thank you.

DxO-user · December 24, 2018, 7:28pm

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 · December 24, 2018, 7:49pm

Thank you very much!

sguyader · December 25, 2018, 8:18am

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

mabod · December 25, 2018, 10:16am

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 · December 25, 2018, 12:07pm

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.

betazoid · December 25, 2018, 12:21pm

I totally agree
DT is an excellent program, but noise reduction can still be improved

afre · December 25, 2018, 1:00pm

I used to be all about denoising. Nowadays, I embrace the noise. Even though I am more proficient at using RT, I have seen stellar results from talented dt users.

Morgan_Hardwood · December 25, 2018, 1:06pm

A long time ago I used Noise Ninja, a great Windows program for denoising. You would select an area of the image for analysis, and based on that area the program would tune its denoising settings to best denoise the whole image. I wanted to give it a try now, but it seems Noise Ninja is superseded by Photo Ninja, so I tried that instead. It ran fine in Linux through wine without needing to install any extra dependencies (no .Net requirements). It uses Qt.

I can’t save the JPEG as it’s a trial version, so here’s a screenshot:
screenshot_20181225_140454

mabod · December 25, 2018, 1:11pm

No matter how you call it, in the end DT does not reach the quality of RT or LR when it comes to denoising. I think the pictures posted here in this thread support that statement.

Morgan_Hardwood · December 25, 2018, 1:58pm

And here is a comparison of Photo Ninja vs RawTherapee:
screenshot_20181225_145613
screenshot_20181225_145635
IMG_1652.CR2.pp3 (11.4 KB)

afre · December 25, 2018, 8:44pm

At one point DxO was quite good compared to what little was out there. I played with the trial version whenever it got updated. It was widely received because of its one-click presets and plugin nature. It had a foothold for a while, esp. when a standalone version finally came out.

RT’s looks better.