Noisy? It's all about processing.

Alastair Norcross wrote:

Ed Rizk wrote:

It’s interesting how everything in processing affects everything else.

yes, it certainly does.

If you are pushing the ISO, I have found DPP noise reduction to be superior. If the picture has some texture to it, you can reduce luminous noise more than chromatic noise, preserving detail and sharpness.

I have found LR NR to better for high ISO than DPP. But I haven't tried DPP for a couple of years now. The NR in LR is fairly sophisticated, and uses multiple sliders. The detail and contrast sliders for luminance NR function a little like the masking slider in sharpening. That is, you can apply a fairly high level of luminance NR, and use the detail and contrast sliders to back off the NR for those parts of the image where you don't want to lose detail. As for chrominance (color) noise, this is pretty much a non-issue. The standard settings in LR remove all the color noise, without destroying detail. One thing that annoys me about DPR's comparison tool is that it applies no color NR. I have read over the years that some manufacturers bake in color NR to their RAW files. If you see a lot of color noise in the high (IS0 6400+) images, you should be aware that the fairly low default setting in LR will remove that, without losing detail.

I haven’t tried LR for a few years, so I have to check it out again.

I never tried DPP, after looking at its primitive interface in 2011.   Then I was an early adopter of the R, and had no choice.   As I said, the interface is terrible and it lacks features, but I was surprised at how well it does what it o.