Using RawTherapee, struggled with the colour noise, and still not completely happy.
EDIT: Added pp3
DSC04028.jpg.out.pp3 (10.9 KB)
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Quite a noisy picture! Using Lightzone, Dfine and GIMP (noise reduction, colour balance (auto) and wavelet sharpen (luminance)).
Struggled with the colour cast and the noise. DFine is great at noise-reduction, and I added some more in GIMP. Colour cast caused by the sodium lamps!! I’m going to make the excuse that the limited spectrum of the sodium light (2 bands in the yellow part of the spectrum around 589nm) some colour information will be missing. (If all else fails - blind 'em with science!! 
)
A good challenge! Thanks.
Biff
IMO you did a terrific job mate, I’m impressed with how well you recovered the HLs =)
@PkmX what lens is mounted on the sony?
@james This is my favorite so far! You did a very nice job on removing almost all luna noise while keeping most of the detail on the fur. You also somehow managed to correct the extremely problematic narrow spectrum from sodium lamps and recovered the highlight detail in the name tag. I’d like to see the pp3 if you are willing to share.
Have you tried to setting the quality to “high” in the noise reduction tab? In my experience, it deals with the colorful blotches left with normal chroma denoise rather well.
@chroma_ghost See the first post, it is a Canon FD 85mm f/1.8 adapted to E-mount.
And yeah, I’d like to give her a bone, but she is getting a little heavy these days. 
@chroma_ghost Thanks
@PkmX Thanks. Of course, I have added pp3 to my original post. I discovered the high quality setting whilst playing with this image, it definitely made a big difference.
I used a lot of tools I don’t normally touch in RT. Some because others didn’t have a strong enough effect, others to counter unwanted effects from other tools/settings.
It’s interesting that you both mention highlight recovery, because I haven’t recovered any. Although HR is enabled (I always leave it enabled), exposure remains at 0, I don’t use the compression slider, but prefer to reduce exposure to bring in recovered details, and then use curves to compress them to give me control of the compression shape.
I have used a slight amount of tonemapping, maybe this has “recovered” the details in the tag.
Regarding colour. I used auto white balance, and then a slight reduction curve on the green channel (RGB curves). I boosted chromaticity with Lab CC curve, and then selectively reduced some colours with the CH curve (which ended up being all colours except red). I corrected the colour of the heart with HH curve.
Regarding detail. I normally leave luminance noise (I’ve learnt to accept and eventually like it), but here I used high settings and also the median filter (3x3 with 3 iterations) and also high impulse reduction. To combat the softness, I have used high micro contrast and some CBDL, and some mild tonemapping. Sharpened with RL deconvolution and post resize USM sharpening.
Sorry, that was longer than I meant.
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@james Your comment is exactly what I’m looking for in these PlayRaw threads that goes into detail about why/how you use each tool and what they achieve!
Here is my second attempt in RT that goes for a more neutral B&W look:
There are still some noise in the background but to my eyes the noise looks fairly non distracting already, so I will leave them there in favor of not erasing too many details from the fur. This is probably one of the image that I hope RT supports masked editing so I can apply stronger denoise on the background, as well as bring down the highlight from the tag without affecting the white part of the harness.
Here is another photo of “Volno”, aka the most majestic dog in our park:
(Sony a6000, Sony E 24mm f/1.8 ZA, ISO 6400)
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Here is my attempt:
RawTherapee with LMMSE demosaicing & some basic white balance then gimp. Nuked the color noise from orbit using a gausian blur. Processed the areas with more detail with an anisotropic filter which seems to preserve the structure of the fury bits quite well. I wanted a smoother look for the background so I used a bilateral filter there. I messed up the transition between the two a bit but I think the final result is quite good given how noisy the image was.
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With LightZone I am usually avoiding very noisy images. This is what I have got after quite some fiddling.
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Hey @Jonas_Wagner ,
as I think you did an awesome job…can you give some more details about your denoising?
More specifically:
- Demosaicing choice based on what? Knowledge or trial and error?
- Gaussian blur, anisotropic filter and bilateral filter used how and in what programm?
Thanks
Stephan
[quote=“McCap, post:17, topic:2778”]
Demosaicing choice based on what? Knowledge or trial and error?
[/quote]Based on knowledge that lmmse is quite robust in the presence of noise. It’s also quite good when you have problems with moire. Definitely something I miss in darktable. Might be worth porting one of these days. I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes in an image that’s that noisy.
Gaussian blur, anisotropic filter and bilateral filter used how and in what programm?
Sorry forgot to mention that. I used gimp & g’mic for the second step.
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That’s very good. I would be interested in seeing your ‘style’.
Biff
I’m afraid there is no style in my ‘style’, I was actually just throwing tools at the image, trying different things. (Something like Hegel’s drunken arrows of spirit …) It is a mess.
You should be able to open the text-only sidecar file.
DSC04028_jac.7z (2.9 KB)
I’m a bit late in this party, but here is my first attempt with photoflow:
- LMMSE demosaicing and manual WB with a temperature of 2155 kelvin
- noise reduction in Lab colorspace, using G’MIC’s bilateral blur filter with spatial_variance=40 and value_variance=30, and then the L channel blended back with 100% opacity. This gets rid of the large color noise blotches without flattening the texture in the luminance channel. The result is a rather “grainy” luminance noise
- conversion to sRGB and a brightening curve limited to the dog’s face
- final sharpening with G’MIC’s “texture sharpening” filter at 50% opacity
Here is the result:
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Very interesting thread, thanks for all the contributions! There’s a similar one on Darktable mailing list that I follow carefully as well.
The context (well, my context…) is that I struggle with noise removal in DT, and I find RawTherapee (and its high ISO profile) much more efficient and quick for such noisy images. I always have to try different options in DT for a result that is never satisfying. For what it’s worth, I tried DxO 9 on this image for comparison. Please note that I never use it so I didn’t play with the sliders much, only:
- highlight recovering
- white balance
- PRIME noise removal (default parameters)
So consider this image as a “one click away” result in DxO:
@denis Your image isn’t working, perhaps try uploading it again?
Yeah, there are some follow-up discussion of this image on darktable-user that I should link for completeness here,. @hanatos then used the equalizer module to achieve a very good result here.
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Thanks @PkmX , I indeed noticed that I was stuck at the “uploading” stage but tried anyway, like I’m stupid! 
For some reasons it doesn’t work under Firefox, now I nailed it with Chromium. I can upload a full resolution image if needed.
I think @Jonas_Wagner version is slightly even better, but this DxO PRIME thing is just one click (and a lot of export time).
@denis Even though DxO is not open source software, I have to admit it has done a fantastic job at eliminating background noise while keeping the details. Especially when you consider it is a one click solution.
I tried to emulate it in RawTherapee:
Ignoring the color differences I think it is pretty close. DxO applies really heavy noise reduction on the background that even turning RawTherapee’s luminance denoise to 100 cannot match it. Perhaps it performs some sort of subject detection so it can apply extremely heavy denoise with confidence? Anyway, this level of noise looks very acceptable to me already, so I wouldn’t mind opting for a bit more detail.
Thanks @PkmX. If useful, for the purpose of comparing the level of details with the different softwares, I uploaded the full definition version from DxO. I must say you did a fantastic job as well. Would you mind sharing the recipe?
Thanks.
d
@denis Sure. I changed a couple more settings and ended up with this:
DSC04028.ARW.pp3 (4.8 KB)
You will need Kodak Portra 400 NC 2 from @patdavid’s film emulation CLUTs and the latest RawTherapee which contains A6000-specific DCP (“auto-matched camera profile” in color management) for this preset to work.
For comparison this is the SOOC JPEG, so you can see how awful it is.
After processing how it looks much better, and this is exactly why we shoot RAW. 
Actually I think this is pretty usable for an ISO 12800 shot from APS-C. Sensors and processing software are really impressive these days.