I'm trying to sharpen and denoise photographs from my Canon 7DmkII at high ISO. When I shoot basketball games, I'm forced to ISO 10000 or thereabouts by our lighting (it was probably 1/3 stop too high as you'll see, but that doesn't really change matters very much). For various reasons I'd prefer to use Darktable (for the most part it's more powerful, it's much more stable, and I'm liking the interface), but the noise reduction simply isn't acceptable. Last night I was forced to use both (initial processing with RawTherapee, including exposure/lightness/saturation, and that since it interacts with NR, and then cropping and watermarking with darktable because RT crashes endlessly).
Reference https://rlk.smugmug.com/Photography/DarktableRawTherapee/ (which is a crop from the original). The 7DmkII has a fairly aggressive optical low pass filter, so it's well-advertised that shots from said camera need to be sharpened out of the camera. It's quite noisy at ISO 10000 (first shot in the linked gallery), not too surprisingly, but I don't have much trouble cleaning it up very nicely with RawTherapee (third shot), using sharpen with Sharpen Only Edges enabled and straightforward noise reduction (defaults for chroma, which isn't much of a problem here anyway, and a good bit of Luminance and Luminance Detail). It's a very different story with Darktable. I can't get anywhere near the combination of smoothness and sharpness whatever I do. With profiled denoise, some areas get denoised and some really don't; adjusting the strength slider does have some effect here, but mostly it just blurs out some areas while leaving some areas untouched for a very unnatural effect. Sharpening sharpens the residual noise as much as it sharpens the edges. I've attached the metadata files from DT and RT for illustration. The actual shot, fully processed and cropped (very differently) is at https://rlk.smugmug.com/Sports/Basketball/MIT-SarLaw-mbb-20161126/i-chq2xjG/A -- Robert Krawitz <[email protected]> *** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com *** Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton ____________________________________________________________________________ darktable user mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to [email protected]
test.jpg.pp3
Description: Binary data
test.jpg.xmp
Description: Binary data
