Yeah… I never managed to achieve significant results with PhF NR module.
If it were just luminance noise, I’d be satisfied, I kinda liked the grainy shadows in this rendering.
EDIT: Your comment about noise made me try another attempt, unsuccessful though. But I gladly found out that module tonemappingv3 behaves better and seems to be more flexible than the later one. I could render a more colourful sky, and less pissy-yellow as Aurélien uses to mention it. So here it goes.
this is a vkdt render. hard to strike a good balance in this one… tried to bring out the foreground without loosing the hazy look. could probably use some more contrast/sharpening, but i think that’d probably not be what it looked like. if you don’t like the haze, this might be a candidate for @heckflosse’s rt haze removal.
this image: combination of curve + local contrast:
@gadolf When I say G’MIC, I mean my custom code. I tend to use it like a paintbrush on a canvas rather than a set of modules. Sort of a live coding session, if you know what that is.
No, but if I were to replace the builtin denoiser with mine in Iain’s algorithm, the output would be even better.
On my last attempt I figured the easiest way to deal with the noise is to keep everything very dark but some other edits inspired me to take another stab at it and see how far I can get with some more aggessive denoising. There’s some really nasty chroma noise that’s hard to get rid of.
There is really a lot of color noise in the picture. I don’t even know why that’s gotten so much out of ISO 500. It’s so difficult to get to grips with.