Processing RAW using DxO - post your samples and tips - Part II

I've recently gotten the Laowa 9mm f2.8 manual focus lens. Images from this lens are somewhat challenging to process, due to the lens' known corner vignetting of some 4 stops wide open, and some corner softness wide open.

Correcting the corner vignetting 3-4 EV, plus bringing out shadow detail, can bring the corner image noise of an ISO 100 shot already to ISO 1600 and beyond! In lower light, shooting at even higher ISO's, the need for good de-noising would only increase.

I've found DxO Deep Prime de-noise, custom sharpness settings, and other features great for getting the most out of images from this lens.

Here's a shot taken at f2.8 and ISO 100 using the Laowa 9mm lens at its maximum aperture of f2.8. The lens has its shallowest depth of field at that aperture, and the corners are noticeably less sharp, even at a 4k image resolution which I normally downsample to for posting on dpreview and for camera club competitions, and most other uses.

The first image has color, exposure, contrast, and microcontrast applied, as you might apply in a standard post-processing workflow. The overall shadow boost is about +1 EV so the shadow noise is already going to be around an ISO 200 level. It has no chromatic aberration, vignetting, or sharpening applied. The image was converted from RAW to JPG at 2160 pixel high resolution.

The second image is from the same RAW file, but has a +50 manual vignetting correction, unsharp mask of intensity 150, Radius 1.2, Threshold 0, Edge Offset (additional corner sharpening intensity) 100, chromatic aberration settings maxed out plus purple fringing applied, but no de-noising applied so you can see the increase in noise caused by the vignetting correction.

The third image is also from the same RAW file, and has Deep Prime De-noise enabled with Luminance +60, and sharpness Intensity bumped up from 150 to 175, to match the sharpness of the second image that did not have denoise. (I've found that sharpness needs to be adjusted along with Deep prime de-noise for optimal results.)

1. Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8 at f2.8: no vignetting, sharpness, or de-noise

2. Same image with vignetting +50, unsharp Mask with extra corner sharpening, CA correction, but no de-noise. Note the noise in the lower left and right corners especially

3. Same image with Deep Prime de-noise, and slight bump in sharpening over image #2