@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:
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.
[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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Very impressed with the Lightzone image, just needed a bit of work on rover’s left eye (imo). I’ve not used Lightzone for some time so I might go and have a play
Here is my take on this in darktable. Most of the denoising is done by raw denoise here, which does a good job on this image, I think. I also added a litte bilateral filter denoising, but its impact is not that strong at all. Color noise has also been tackled using the low pass filter. I sharpened the image with the equalizer, which seems to do a better job than the normal sharpening in this case. In particular it seems to introduce less artifacts. (I also played with the high pass filter for sharpening… I think I forgot to turn it of).
Compared to the 2nd attempt, this version has even less noise in the background and far better details in the fur. The edge sharpness tool in wavelet is seriously impressive for sharpening details without reintroducing noises, though you have to play with the edge detection thresholds for a bit.
Hello all,
am I too late for this? If not, here’s my attempt, essentially using my standard RawTherapee profile for super-high ISO (I also have an a6000 camera). The background is a bit “grainy”, but I personally don’t dislike that. I’d like to hear other people feedback tough. Thanks for the picture, it was fun.
Actually I think this is pretty usable for an ISO 12800 shot from APS-C. Sensors and processing software are really impressive these days.
