Denoise challenge - raw, jpeg, tiff provided

Morris0 wrote:

Fun and probably educational challenge Martin.

Thank you Morris.

(image snipped)

I liked Eric's idea to use native noise removal I decided to do the noise removal the old way. I did two conversions. First I pulled down the whites and highlights to recover some detail. The I adjusted the white balance using the ACR sampling tool on the rabbit's white area.

It's much warmer than mine.

Next I darkened the image till all the white detail was visible and completed the conversion by bringing the image into photoshop. I created another layer making the first conversion the background layer. I named the new layer noise reduction. Then I opened the image in ACR again and adjusted noise removal to my liking which was a rather strong 80 and left everything else from the previous conversion and opened in Photoshop. I copied the image with noise removal into the noise removal layer of the first image. I selected the background layer and sharpened with Topaz AI Sharpen and then applied a bit more sharpening via USM. I selected the top layer and erased the areas I want to reveal the sharpening and then flattened the image. As I'd made the image darker to protect the whites I used shadow/highlights to taste and then checked in levels and brought up the white point. As there were a few bright and distracting spots I cleaned them up via cloning and or the burn tool.

This worked so well it makes me wonder if I should contuse to pay for the plugins. Will need to test more to see.

Morris

Thank you Morris. Also a really great result. You've also managed to recover plenty of detail in the hair. Quite some effort behind!

Regards,

Martin