I am posing this question to those of you who have added denoise software to your workflow outside of Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One etc. The ones that come to mind are the big three 1) Topaz Denoise AI, DXO Pure Raw 2 and On1 No Noise AI. I have demo-ed all three and find the results can be somewhat disappointing in some cases and just OK in others. It seems to remove noise at the expense of smearing or blurring detail.
I am mainly asking this question to those who print at least 11 x 14 or A3. Are you happy you purchased?
Thanks for any constructive info....
It depends a lot on what you shoot, how little light you have to work with, and what your expectations are.
First, a level-set: Good noise reduction doesn't remove detail, because, especially with high-ISO images, that detail was never in the file in the first place. Not even the Platonic ideal of noise reduction could make a high-ISO image yield the same level of detail as a low-ISO version. That said, I find DxO's DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD remarkably good at mining detail from high-ISO images that would otherwise look like mush covered with rainbow sprinkles if processed with Lightroom.
Noise reduction can be useful at all exposure (ISO) levels. At base ISO, DeepPRIME nicely removes the subtle noise that can appear in a blue sky. But, it's especially useful at the threshold where a camera begins to give up noticeable amounts of detail - around ISO 3200 with Micro Four Thirds and ISO 6400 with 35mm format. I find that DeepPRIME gives me about two more stops, which lets me shoot event work with my a7RIII at ISO 25,600 and still get images that'll look good in a 24" print. If you shoot high-ISO a lot, this is a game-changer.
As an event pro, I consider DxO PhotoLab the single most cost-effective investment I can make in improving the image quality of my work. $200 to gain two more usable stops from all of my cameras and lenses? Take my money!
As an aside, since you mentioned print sizes as well as noise reduction, DxO's lens profiles yield superior detail from all my RAWs, regardless of ISO, than what I get from Lightroom defaults. Often, I can get similar detail from Lightroom by manually applying fine USM, but that's extra work I don't have to do with PhotoLab, and the latter's automatic geometry corrections are better, too. In short, PhotoLab gets me a crisp, clean, well-corrected image that's ready for print prep with less work.
