Denoise challenge - raw, jpeg, tiff provided

sluggy_warrior wrote:

Rightsaidfred wrote:

What was still missing, a darktable take.

12800 ISO, darktable, denoise profiled + raw denoise

IMO it cannot compete against professional denoising tools. Maybe others can get better result with darktable.

Agreed, the "profiled denoise" in darktable is just generic, while it's not bad, it cannot compete with the "smart" AI/neural-network tools. That's why the nind-denoise's author is looking into having the tool integrated into darktable workflow, too.

For high-ISO shots, I prefer leaving the fine grains in. They not only help with retaining details, they keep the perceived sharpness, as well as simulating the old film grain (addressing only chroma noise, not luma noise). Also, when you resize the image to a smaller size, the grains will be gone while the detail and sharpness contribute to the sharpness of the smaller image.

darktable, profiled denoise in wavelets mode

The detail looks good here, but I don't really see a lot of noise reduction going on.

Also, just curious, can anything be done in Darkatable to recover any more detail in the white fur? Yours is significantly better than Martin's on that score, but it falls a bit short of what I managed with Lightroom. The green channel is good and blown, but the other two channels are intact and still retain a bit of detail to exploit. Lightroom, despite some other shortcomings, tends to be quite capable in that department.