Stacking is crazy!

Great idea. It takes less work than the other HDR approaches (Photoshop HDR merge or Nik HDR Pro). Unfortunately, the results are no better or worse than those from Photoshop HDR processing.

For my taste, image stacking as a noise reduction tool is a waste of time and bytes. That Mamiya example was fine, but noise reduction on ISO 100 images seems pretty uninteresting. Try it on high ISO (e.g., ISO 1600 on an LX7) and you'll see that chroma noise is largely or totally untouched.

Luminance noise is considerably reduced because it's the result of pixel-by-pixel randomness. But chroma noise, for reasons I don't understand, seems to occur in "blobs" on the order of 100 pixel diameter (in the blue channel, I believe). I don't know, but I suppose, that this component of noise is not random -- at least not in the same sense that luminance noise is.

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David
www.pbase.com/morepix