Second View Wavelets--The Workflow

Yesterday in my last tutorial I outlined a possible default workflow based on wavelets. Today I experimented around to see how well it works.

Photo loaded

This image  was taken at in 9-11 memorial that was traveling the county by truck last summer. I shot it handheld with my D7000 at ISO6400  1/100 sec.

 Contrast

Around 6 clicks on  the contrast + button. The D7000 produces soft raw file straight out of the camera

Fifty Percent Wavelet Sharpening

After a certain point more sharpening only increases noise and artifacts. With my camera I've been switching between 25 and 50 percent. At some point I'll settle on a default setting.

Noise Reduction without Median Filter

A decent looking result until you increase the magnification The ratios for the luminous noise sliders were 80 strength, 20 detail which is higher than my usual 50-50 ratio,

Artifacts

Scattered line artifacts are more obvious at 200% magnification especially if you blowup the screen shot.

3X3 Strong Median Filter

The median filter does a good job reducing the artifacts. There is a small lose in detail but the overall wavelet line sharpening is not affected much.  I'm not ready to scream from the rooftops-just from this blog post- but I beginning to think you don't have to trade detail for low noise anymore in high ISO images 

A BIG BIG advance for low-light no-flash handheld photographers like me. Perhaps one of the developers could comment on this dreamy idea.

CIECAM  color tune up

I used the curve and lightness slider to darken the area around the poster. I used the contrast and chroma sliders to bring up the colors on the woman's blouse.

The final edit vs the original

Bottom line.  My D7000 raw files need more contrast and sharpening when they come out of the camera.  My high ISO raw files also need noise reduction. So these three operations can be combined into default profiles similar to the three default versions that come with RT

CIECAM tuning and cropping are too image dependent. But the GUI could be set up with these tools ready to go and  everything else  closed up. With that setup I'd be willing to bet that I could process 90% of my images with just these four tools, two of which work automatically.