Yesterday I returned to a location I had not visited since January 2018. Though there is abundant birdlife, much of it is in heavily shaded rainforest. I chose to abandon my regular max ISO of 6400 and this one came in at ISO 25600.
“Diffuse and Sharpen” seems too blunt a tool (at least with my small experience of it) for this image. I fiddled with the profiled denoise options and ended up settling for the match found.
I’d love to see some expertise/experience-driven renditions.
My attempt. I used two instances of Profiled Denoise and a third of Diffuse and Sharpen with the Denoise - medium preset. I did not try to sharpen the image after denoising.
With noisy images I tend to use the details threshold slider to control what is sharpened and what is denoised. A positive value restricts sharpening to the detail edges while a negative value protects the details and denoises the smoother areas.
i usually used darktable but did this in rawtherapee. ideally i would mask the bird to use less noise reduction there and more on the darker background where details is not so important, but i didn’t
didn’t do much else with colours or adjusting the bird exposure to bring out the background a little but just went for a quick compormise
I found it interesting how you leveraged the detail threshold and recovery with a setting of 100 luma noise correction…you got very nice results…I don’t use ART as much as DT but when I do I would sort of keep that correction at 15-20 to try to keep the detail but I never really used such extreme settings which in this case for sure worked well.
Your denoising work is amazing.
