Digital Light & Color

Yesterday's shoot was mixed 8,000 and 10,000 ISO with my Ricoh GRiii

I think you are recommending using Denoise before Multipass Sharpening as it gives the MS a better file to work on.

I am using the Denoise at the default setting and increasing the Blur Threshold on the MS as much as I dare.

Do you have any tips?

Tony

For state of the art AI-based denoising, use DxO or Topaz Photo AI. Lightroom is also not bad. Photo AI has the advantage that it can work on any file while DxO and Lightroom only work on RAW files. Photo AI also does a remarkable job of sharpening. I use it for most images that I plan to print or keep in my portfolio. Definitely worth the money as there is nothing else like it.

I have been using NeatImage for a long time and find it very good at dealing with noisy images.

https://ni.neatvideo.com/

NeatImage is good, but IMHO Photo AI is an order of magnitude better.

Thanks folks.

Having just re-taught myself so I can run PWP8 at a decent speed I am reluctant to move again.

I have DXO5 from a previous era and always felt Topaz was a bit 'flash'.

I won't be doing any more high ISO sessions until the end of the summer so I can revise my armory then.

Tony

Here is an example of what I was able to get using Photo AI to denoise and sharpen very high ISO image of spanish moss and some leaves (100% crop 600x600 pixels). I was unable to get anything nearly as good out of NeatImage, but maybe I am not familiar enough with it.

I gave a try, using the tools at my disposal, using Nik Collection's Dfine, Pre-Sharpener, and Color Efex details extractor,
then followed with PWP Advanced Sharpening NR and Sharpening.

Quick job with the old Neatimage. I'm out of practice with it, but I know this: it works best if there are flat training areas - i.e. all noise and no moss. If that's not possible, another image with the same settings/noise profile could do.

This is personal, but I like some noise/grain. What I find most objectionable is the chroma noise. With the Canon camera, I was fighting chroma noise all the time, but Fuji-X produces mostly luminance noise in my experience and has not been that much of a problem even at relatively high ISO.

So I tried the trial version of Photo Ai 3.5.2, which does not allow for file saving. But based on the preview, I thought it was interesting that when TIFF files (generated from NEF files in Nikon NX Studio with no NR) were used in Photo Ai, they made the noise, especially chroma noise, worse. When the original NEF file is processed in Photo Ai it does an amazing job of cleaning up the noise and enhancing the image details.


Not sure why the difference, but it seems Topaz prefers to work from raw data.

PhotoAI has a separate denoising algorithm for RAW files which I assume can work better since it has access to the image before it is demosaiced. This raw denoise method is applied whenever you open raw files.

I was still able to improve the image somewhat with the regular denoise algorithm however:
I think their denoise algorithm doea not work as well near the edges of the image, so the noise on the left hand side might be processed better if more of the image was available.