I've more or less put my attempts to find good denoising photo processing software on hold.
None of them did close to what I wanted.
But there are still issues that I can address. One is a free set of “presets” from
ON1 that I haven't got round to looking at yet.
More and more it seems that presets are the way through the maze of settings, but it's also
a matter of searching, something that I don't like to do.
Another is what I already have: DxO
PhotoLab. I'm sticking to release 5 because there don't seem to be any improvements
in newer versions significant enough to pay the full price to upgrade. And release 5 also
has good denoising, which I use for higher ISO sensitivities.
But is that the only use? Nearly 12 years ago I took a sequence of photos of a kangaroo rescue. They didn't
come out well: flash in the open at night. Here one with particularly large background:
DxO improved the background at the cost of lots of spots which must have been on the lens.
It also produced noise where there was none before, not its fault: the noise was there, just
not visible. Can their “DeepPrime” noise reduction help? Yes. Here without and then with
noise reduction (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
And as expected, there was no obvious change in the correctly exposed foreground.
In passing, ImageMagick is
getting rid of its name-space polluting command names like convert. But it's not
clear that it's well thought out:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~/Photos/20140618 1628 -> magick -geometry 600x450 Trapped-kangaroo-7-DeepPrime.jpeg Trapped-kangaroo-7-DeepPrime-detail.jpeg magick: no images found for operation `-geometry' at CLI arg 1 @ error/operation.c/CLIOption/5481.
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~/Photos/20140618 1629 -> magick convert -geometry 600x450 Trapped-kangaroo-7-DeepPrime.jpeg Trapped-kangaroo-7-DeepPrime-detail.jpeg WARNING: The convert command is deprecated in IMv7, use "magick" instead of "convert" or "magick convert"
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/24) ~/Photos/20140618 1630 ->
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