ISO 12800 becomes useful demoed on a fruit bat

Morris0 wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

Morris0 wrote:

Sometimes we are faced with situations where the only option is to crank up the ISO. That was the case when I was photographing this fruit bat in an exabit where no flash or artificial light was permitted and for good reason. The photo was taken with my X-T3 and the Fuji 100-400. I brightened the entire image a touch and brought the shadows up even more. My original version from July of 2019 is processed as described in ACR and then converted to a JPEG in Photoshop. Back then anything I tried with regard to noise reduction produced mush.

Both of these files are full size. If you have a slow link expect to wait if you open original which will be the best way to view the images.

This second version was processed using Topaz Labs Denoise AI as the RAW converter to produce a DNG file. Next I opened the DNG in ACR and brightened as above through I had to use slightly different settings as the camera defaults are not the same in the two raw processors. Once in Photoshop, I launched Sharpen AI as a plugin. Last I added a touch of USM on the entire image and saved. The USM sharpening introduced a touch of artifacts yet added enough detail that I accept the tradeoff.

Morris

Hi Morris,

That's a mighty big fruit kebab for such a little fellow.

I can't say I've had much luck with Topaz DeNoise in RAW mode, I always get a better result sending a tiff over from Lightroom (DxO does a significantly better in RAW mode, IMO). I had a go using Lightroom with DeNoise on your original jpeg (with a bunch of tweaks) and still find the result to be preferable in most respects. There's more detail, but the unevenness of the NR, smearing of detail, and artifacts are pretty obvious (and unattractive) in the RAW version, to my eye, anyway,

Thank you Erik,

I can't imagen that little bat finishing all that before it goes bad.

What started me on this journey was a post in one of the recent noise reduction software comparison threads where someone used Denoise AI in RAW mode. The results were very good and as I had not tried it in a long time, decided to give it another go. About the same time I saw a YouTube video comparing Denoise AI and DxO. The results were very similar. I was curious how things had improved and gave it a try. I tried to do an evaluation of DxO after getting the X-H2s. I'd used one of there products it a while back with my D500 and got some very nice results. This resulted in there protection scheme preventing me from running an evaluation on my desktop. I contact support and asked for the ability to do a trial and was told, "you had your chance. We don't grand additional evaluations." I was shocked by the response and rather turned off. This was the first time I've had a company say we don't want you busyness. Later, I realized I could try it on my laptop and did only to discover that they did not support the X-H2s. I hear it now dose. What I like about DxO is you don't have to fiddle, just wait. So with DxO I'm left wondering if I should pay for it and ask for a refund if not happy.

As you point out, these software solutions result in trade offs in quality v noise. As RAW converters they introduce different color and brightness, sometimes good and sometimes no so good. They defiantly have gotten a lot better.

Morris

I like the idea of PureRAW2 (especially since the linear DNGs allow me to retain the same color/profiles I always use), but don't like that you don't get the same NR/sharpening fine-tuning capability that you do with Photolab 5/6. Hopefully they'll do something about that when PureRaw3 comes along. I'm currently between computers (still using Windows 7), so for the moment most of my software is a bit out of date - Lightroom and Topaz included, so there may be better results possible with the newest versions. I'm going to have a hard look at some different software options when I finally get everything else up to date, but I'm really pretty happy with Lightroom + Topaz via tiff now.