How is denoise quality? I switched from Darktable to commercial DxO PhotoLab, largely because by the time Darktable tames noise at around ISO 3200, a lot of resolution and color is lost. PhotoLab seems to take everything thrown at it and end up with a bright smooth image. Anyway that's one weakness in otherwise great free tool.
I don't blame you for switching from Darktable at all. Darktable can be quite powerful but it suffers from ease of use and discoverability issues. It's not reasonable for a photo processing application to expect its users to deeply understand how it all works under the hood in order to get good results.
As someone who did a deep dive into understanding DT's scene-referred modules, it changed the way I think of photo processing. I now have a hard time using any other photo software.
What did you use as a resource for this? I struggle with DT on every update to get my photos looking like I want when the semantics of a module change or a module is replaced with something theoretically better but practically with more controls that I now need to relearn.
Yup, I have the same experience even in smaller ways. Wavelet decomposition, parametric masks, Lab curves -- these things are fundamental to how I think of image processing now, and it all came out of forcing myself to be productive with Darktable.
None of those things are available in commercial processing software.
(Granted, it was a few years ago I did photography stuff last, so this may well have changed since then.)
I recently upgraded my system and now I can't even open a folder in Darktable, I have to add it to some bullshit "library", put the library in a "collection", and then open a "film roll" from the collection. Why can't I just browse a filesystem tree and click a folder, damnit ...
Impulse noise reduction in RawTherapee is pretty good.
For darktable, there was some changes to noise reduction a few releases ago, and its now recommended to use two instances of the profiled denoise module, on that targets luma noise and one that targets chroma noise. It also works pretty well.
Neither work as well as the DxO prime, which is the best noise reduction I've ever seen.
> Darktable tames noise at around ISO 3200, a lot of resolution and color is lost.
Could you elaborate on what this means?
I tried Darktable a few months ago, and no matter how hard I tried, my images just looked "washed out".
I assume this is what you mean. I really wanted to use DT because the parametric masking features were pretty nice, but every image looked vaguely bleached.
If you've got 50 minutes for a very complete and in depth answer, this video by Aurelien who works on the pixel pipe covers why Darktable tends to look washed out (out of the box) compared to other apps and how to conceptualize what it's doing and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwB7FogUs
Thank you. That's actually one of the videos that I watched a few months back. It helped a little bit, but not enough for my tastes.
It just seemed like there was a LOT of extra tweaking I needed to do for each image. My suspicion is that if you want to use DT (effectively), you need to have a deep understanding of color theory and image processing (at least more than I am willing to devote).
I also enjoyed his rant(s) on the new releases of DT, especially the complaints about the UI.
I had similar experiences with DT.
When taking RAW+JPG I always struggled to create an edit of the RAW in DT that is more satisfying than the out of camera JPG - and I watched quite a few videos and read a few guides, also trying to work with scene-referred workflow introduced in DT4.
I'm currently giving Capture One a shot (Express version is free for Sony users) and I'm really pleased how accessible the UI is. Applying default adjustments already gives a great starting point for further tweaking (similar or better than the OOC JPG). Recovering highlights also works way better than in DT. It just felt like the algorithms in DT are sometimes not quite on the same level.
I did a lot of side-by-side comparisons between C1 & DT on my raw files and I could not get DT to make anything that looked like C1's automatic adjustments.
The best I could determine is that the out-of-the-box adjustments made by C1 were somewhat complex (e.g., it wasn't a 'simple' transformation of rgb values).
Obviously, it's preferable to know what's happening under the hood instead of relying on black-magic, but I just didn't have the time to invest in trying to figure that out.
C1 is really nice. I also compared it to Lightroom and I didn't like those results as much as C1.
edit: Although C1's masking features are excellent, I wish they had more parametric masking features. That's the one thing I miss from DT.
Did you work with denoising the chroma channels separately from luminance? I believe that's a large part of the trick -- humans are far less sensitive to colour resolution issues, and chroma noise just looks awful compared to luminance noise.
I was always very doubtful about those AI tools, but I absolutely second DxO. It actually managed to save some Astro Shots which were completely noisy to a manageable level, without too much noticeable LoD
