Let me introduce to you our Schipperke Daan. I made this technically not very sound picture without flash. It’s my first ‘play raw’ attempt. Being curious what results others will accomplish and even more how that’s done.
Being not too experienced in darktable I came to this result. The base picture was grayish, had little contrast and lots of color and luma noise. There was a little moire as well because of interaction between sensor and the fine hair.
Daan is very cute - looks comfortable
I’m also new to darktable (and post processing in general).
Here is my attempt!
I opted for a monochrome image, due to the noise.
I’m not at an editing computer but I think the old bilateral filter which is now the surface blur module was reasonably good at removing or mitigating moire…
For me the challenge was denoising reduces the texture of the fur, so it all becomes a balancing act. I finished my attempt focusing on noise. I then read @priort comment about surface blur module. While I didn’t personally see any moire I added the module and it helped reduce the noise without to much detail loss. _K541810.DNG.xmp (16.5 KB)
The framing is just right, no room for cropping . At least I get to test dt-nind-denoise on ISO20,000 I went with RCD instead of PPG or AMaZE, a little less details but also less artifacts.
The bright skin on the right is a little distracting, I used tone-equalizer to tone it down a bit, but nice to have a hint of warm color. Since the file is just 1.8MB, uploading full-size for pixel-peeping on the denoise artifacts.
I hope you forgive the slightly sentimental soft-focus. I was trying to pull attention to the eyes. I did two runs. First with just DT5.2 and the second is the same again but after a DxO PureRaw pass to remove the noise.
Other than that I didn’t do much. Pulled up the reds a bit to bring out the brown and pulled down the highlights to mute the background contrast a little.
. At least I get to test 
I went with RCD instead of PPG or AMaZE, a little less details but also less artifacts.
