That is precisely why the way this was executed is pointless. There is no detail in the tiny LR crop to begin with. The location of this sample in the raw file is unknown. The latest version of RawTherapee was not used, the version of Lightroom is unknown. If you’re going to stir the pot, do it properly. A proper comparison would compare latest versions of both programs, provide full settings used (PP3, XMP, etc), isolate the processing to only denoising and nothing else, use several samples which contain areas of fine detail as well as low detail, luminance and chrominance noise as well as luminance and chrominance detail, compare the effects of denoising on an image which has both light and dark areas to see whether denoising is uniform or whether it improves one at the cost of the other. Then only can we begin to draw conclusions.
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