Remove photo noise

[denzjos]

Photos taken in difficult circumstances is sometimes resulting in noisy results. Software can help but there is detail loss in most cases. This information can help you :
https://www.mora-foto.it/en/tutorials-gi...-gmic.html

[rich2005]

(09-08-2021, 07:39 PM)denzjos Wrote: Photos taken in difficult circumstances is sometimes resulting in noisy results. Software can help but there is detail loss in most cases. This information can help you :
https://www.mora-foto.it/en/tutorials-gi...-gmic.html

I know the mora-foto site, lots of good content, worth a visit.

For the denoising article, using gmic 2.9,  so fairly recent, early 2020 surprisingly  no mention of Iain Noise Reduction 2019 which is excellent

from the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPj_7J4iD_U  

I suppose, this is the context, from the article:

When we started experimenting with astrophotography we decided to buy a license of Topaz Denoise, probably the best professional solution available today. Obviously it is compatible with Gimp, using a plugin called PSPI. Needless to say, the results are better than what we can get with G'MIC, at least if we don't want to spend a lot of time on it

..that last bit, how much effort is required.

[denzjos]

Even with Topaz Denoise there is a loss of detail. On the website of Topaz Denoise there is a macro photo of a bee and of one move the before/after slider, there is remarkable lost in detail. Still weighing loss of detail against sharpness and take care that the result still have a natural look.

[denzjos]

Making photos on a music festival is always a challenge. For easy manipulation I use a small camera with a 30x optical zoom. Lichting effects, smoke, loud bass sound vibrations, moving persons on stage and around you and in this case dark weather make it difficult to capture acceptable photos. The small sensor in this kind of camera can't give ultra sharp pictures, so sometimes I use gimp to correct some photos. In the result there is some lost of detail but I just want to look on my computer screen to 4896x3264 (180 pixels/inch) photos. That's right for me. To correct some photos, I used this filters in gimp (original photo 30x optical zoom)  :
Filters / Enhance / Wavelet-Decompose (value 7)
Set layers 'scale1' and 'scale2' on not visible
Make a new layer from visible (as a top layer)
Script-Fu / Sharpness / Sharper / High-pass Sharpen (colour / value 20)
Make a new layer from visible (as a top layer)
Script-Fu / Sharpness / Warp Sharp (values 7/3/2/2,5)
Filters / Enhance / Sharpen (Unsharp Mask) (values 2/0,5/0)
Original
   
Result
   
Original detail 100%
   
Original result 100%
   

[cloverleaf]

(09-09-2021, 09:31 AM)denzjos Wrote: Even with Topaz Denoise there is a loss of detail. On the website of Topaz Denoise there is a macro photo of a bee and of one move the before/after slider, there is remarkable lost in detail. Still weighing loss of detail against sharpness and take care that the result still have a natural look.

It's not an ultimate solution, I believe. I would use DeNoise only for really heavy noise removal - as it needs a long time to render a raw photo and then it might give a plastic-ish effect to the final result. But I have only tried a trial version. Maybe more advanced options work better.
Or - as another option - I saw some decent results that were made using Topaz + Neat Image combo.

denzjos, the result is very nice, actually. I'd probably add more sharpness to the face, otherwise, it's blurry.