No Noise Reduction
The new LAB noise reduction with its speed ups and individual noise channel controls.
Need I say anything more? Yup. Great job RT folks!!
Find RAWTherapee 4.0.10.1 here
http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx
Showing posts with label noise cleanup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label noise cleanup. Show all posts
Friday, March 8, 2013
It's Here!! RAWTherapee 4.0.10
No Noise Reduction
The new LAB noise reduction with its speed ups and individual noise channel controls.
Need I say anything more? Yup. Great job RT folks!!
Find RAWTherapee 4.0.10.1 here
http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Teen with Fedora--A Second 'First Look'
In my original post on RAW Therapee's new noise reduction routines I had excellent results with the image of Charlotte under Lord Shiva but far worse results with some other images. The noise reduction part still worked but thick black vertical lines appeared in the converted.images.
Turns out the noise reduction algorithm broke the image into segments called tiles. It worked its noise reduction magic on each tile individually but sometimes the tiles didn't rejoin smoothly. A tricky and hard to find bug, judging from the number of posts that appeared in the forum while they were fixing the problem.
That bug has been mostly swatted--noise reduction still doesn't work on JPGs-- but with code change set 135 we can now test and work with RAW files. ( found at http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx )
Turns out the noise reduction algorithm broke the image into segments called tiles. It worked its noise reduction magic on each tile individually but sometimes the tiles didn't rejoin smoothly. A tricky and hard to find bug, judging from the number of posts that appeared in the forum while they were fixing the problem.
That bug has been mostly swatted--noise reduction still doesn't work on JPGs-- but with code change set 135 we can now test and work with RAW files. ( found at http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx )
ISO 6400 f8.0 1/25 sec EV -0.7
This snap was taken at Old World Wisconsin in the back of a barn during a demonstration of 19th century cow milking. The lighting wasn't insanely difficult but as you can see from the camera settings I was pushing my D7000 to get this shot.
So how did RT do when I tried to improve the image.
YUP! RT noise reduction works,
The noisy image to the left is without any noise reduction, just a +0.7 exposure correction to compensate for the -0.7 correction I did in the camera to move the shutter speed up to 1/25 of a second. The NR settings of the much cleaner image on the left are shown below.
I adjusted the Chrominance slider first. Use a 400 % box on something with little detail like the girl's cheek. Find a setting where all the color speckles disappear and then add a bit more. This slider works on the A and B LAB channels that only contain low resolution color information so you are not blurring detail. With my D7000 at ISO 6400 about 2/3 of the noise was chromatic so that was a no fiddling around adjustment. Nice
For the other two sliders I picked a region with fine detail, the wood grain on the 2x4, and adjusted them to match the detail in my conversion to the detail in the jpg out of the camera. The Luminance slider controls the strength of the noise reduction. The Luminance Detail slider sets the threshold on another algorithm that does its best to seperate real detail from random noise. In this image Luminance 70 and Luminance Detail 50 worked well.
So where are we at now. The left top line profile is from a RT conversion with no noise reduction.
The one below that is from the camera's jpg where I used the D7000's normal noise reduction setting. It also is very close to the noise I measured when I used RT's default settings.
The top right profile is from my detail preserving image. And finally the insanely low noise ISO 6400 profile below it is from when I went all out with a Luminance of 90 and a Luminance Detail of 6 to see how low noise I could go.
How bad was that image. When I displayed it side by side with my tuned image I didn't have to pixel peek hard to see I had lost detail. But if I had emailed it to Fedora Girl I'm sure she wouldn't have screamed "WHERE IS MY DETAIL" and immediately sent it into the bit bucket. We RT users are after the very best quality but in this world drowning in imagery, I'm afraid most viewer don't notice.
So great job RT folks and especially Emil who designed the algorithms and did the coding.
Monday, July 16, 2012
First Look--RAWTherapee's New Noise Reduction
Last Wednesday during this hottest on record Midwest heat wave Charlotte and her Mom and I drove in air conditioned comfort to tour Charlotte's favorite museum, the Milwaukee Public. There Charlotte became my guide. My Nikon D7000 hanging around my neck, she led me from exhibit to exhibit.
Excellent exhibits, I'll admit. But from a low light, hand held photographer's point of view, the trip was not a successs. The lighting, or lack of it, was the pits. Still, I snapped away and came home with a few GB's of images, hoping for some lucky shots.
What I discovered when I went to process the RAWs wasn't luck exactly. I've been following the development of RT's new noise reduction routines for over a year and I check their forum regularly. The developer's denoise compile I downloaded isn't bug free and only works with 64bit Win7, but with my new computer its match with my museum snaps was perfect.
This snap was taken at a 1/4 sec and ISO2500. Charlotte held her pose. Image stabilization and I held the camera steady. After a 2 EV boast in exposure and a tone curve, it's a decent image to see how well RT's latest and greatest works. There is no manual entry yet but the routine turned out to be more automated than I expected and easy to work out.
The luminance slider sets the maximum strength of the noise reduction; the luminance detail slider sets how much of that maximum strength is actually used. At a detail setting of 100, no or very little noise reduction is applied. At 5 and with a strength of 20--the settings I used here--the noise reduction was both artifact free and very impressive. But I was clearly losing detail as you can see in comparison with an image with no noise reduction (right) below
I'd gone too far. Below is a tuned version where I tried to preserve detail.
I kept the luminance setting at 20 but ran the detail slider up 60, added more unsharp mask sharpening and set the gamma to 1.4 to bias the noise reduction towards the shadows. Below is another comparison with the no noise reduction image. Beside being significantly less noisy the tuned image shows as much and perhaps even more detail than the no noise reduction image. Click on the image and go to the original size if you want a better view.
(note--if you download this build from http://dl.free.fr/getfile.pl?file=/unoeMxPZ RL convolution sharpening is broken, When you process an image in the queue the software grabs all the available memory and crashes when it can not find more.)
To finish off this first look here are the respective noise profiles--05 detail on the top, tuned detail in the middle and no noise reduction on the bottom.
While this is not the released version and there are still some bugs to work out, I'm very impressed. So congratulations to everyone involved.
Excellent exhibits, I'll admit. But from a low light, hand held photographer's point of view, the trip was not a successs. The lighting, or lack of it, was the pits. Still, I snapped away and came home with a few GB's of images, hoping for some lucky shots.
What I discovered when I went to process the RAWs wasn't luck exactly. I've been following the development of RT's new noise reduction routines for over a year and I check their forum regularly. The developer's denoise compile I downloaded isn't bug free and only works with 64bit Win7, but with my new computer its match with my museum snaps was perfect.
This snap was taken at a 1/4 sec and ISO2500. Charlotte held her pose. Image stabilization and I held the camera steady. After a 2 EV boast in exposure and a tone curve, it's a decent image to see how well RT's latest and greatest works. There is no manual entry yet but the routine turned out to be more automated than I expected and easy to work out.
The luminance slider sets the maximum strength of the noise reduction; the luminance detail slider sets how much of that maximum strength is actually used. At a detail setting of 100, no or very little noise reduction is applied. At 5 and with a strength of 20--the settings I used here--the noise reduction was both artifact free and very impressive. But I was clearly losing detail as you can see in comparison with an image with no noise reduction (right) below
I'd gone too far. Below is a tuned version where I tried to preserve detail.
I kept the luminance setting at 20 but ran the detail slider up 60, added more unsharp mask sharpening and set the gamma to 1.4 to bias the noise reduction towards the shadows. Below is another comparison with the no noise reduction image. Beside being significantly less noisy the tuned image shows as much and perhaps even more detail than the no noise reduction image. Click on the image and go to the original size if you want a better view.
(note--if you download this build from http://dl.free.fr/getfile.pl?file=/unoeMxPZ RL convolution sharpening is broken, When you process an image in the queue the software grabs all the available memory and crashes when it can not find more.)
To finish off this first look here are the respective noise profiles--05 detail on the top, tuned detail in the middle and no noise reduction on the bottom.
While this is not the released version and there are still some bugs to work out, I'm very impressed. So congratulations to everyone involved.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Mistakes--Serendipitous
By Madison in Febuary standards last Saturday was balmy. Despite the sunny, mid 40's weather my D7000 and I spent the afternoon indoors at the Olbrich Garden photographing the Children of the Rain Forest.
This month's performers were the Hale O Malo Polynesian Dance Group, Their costumes and dances ranged from a New Zealand Maori war dance to a Tahitian fertility dance. That invocation of human fertility came with a friendly warning, "Do not attempt this at home."
This image was shot during the pictures-with-the-kids session at the end of the show using my new Tamron 18 -270 mm f3.5-5.6 super zoom set at 18mm wide angle. The manual exposure settings were f8 and 1/200 sec combined with an auto ISO. That ended up at 6400.
Not an optimum or necessary ISO for this image. It could have been much lower. At 18mm the lens opens at f 3.5. For a static shot a shutter speed of 1/60 sec would have worked. But I had set up the camera for telephoto dance images, 1/200 sec to give a sense of motion without excessive blur and f8 to sharpen up the lens's slightly soft long end. I didn't spot any massive noise problems when I reviewied the screen shots during the shoot so I went with the default settings.
For post processing I downloaded RAW Therapee's latest 64 bit build, version 4.7.01. It doesn't have the new noise reduction routines yet, but it does have enough new features to justify a build jump from 4.6 to 4.7. I'll talk about a few newfeatures in this post, plus some older ones that I haven't used much, starting with the big review images in the file browser.
With dance groups I tend to over shoot. You know, long continuous bursts hoping to capture that perfect combination of step, twirl and jump. This time I filled my 16 GB main card and moved down to my 8GB secondary card. There I found Miss Thumps-Up posing for Mom's perfect snap combined with an interesting environmental background.
Viewing the preview jpgs full size on my laptop screen while using the number and color coded ratings sped up my selection workflow. I ranked my 'maybe images' during a first pass and then fine tuning the selection set. Definitely a winner.
Judging by the curve of the molding board at the top, this image, shot at 18mm, has serious wide angle lens distortion. So I tried the fix in the Transform/lensgeometry/distortion tab. My first guess, a -0.5 pincushion setting went way over the top. But it did open up ideas for some creative playing around later.
The for real setting was -0.09. I pulled up a grid Guide Type to provide straight lines as a reference. At the moment the routine bends the image only one way and creates a curved blank area at the bottom. So I used auto fill to clean up that problem. And for those interested in composition rules the Guide Types include rule of thirds, rule of diagonals and several harmonic mean or, as I used to call them, golden sections.
With the proper settings I created an '18mm tamron' default profile that I can call up to automatically correct my wide angle images.
This fixed I tried out a new profile that came with RT 4.7-- 'default ISO high'. After I applied the profile it was 'WOW!! Where has all the ISO 6400 noise gone!!?'
Turns out the RT team had done some interesting things but the real WOW maker was my serendipitous mistake. I'd been working with the jpg not the NEF file, a jpg that had already gone through one pass of the Nikon D7000 excellent in-camera noise reduction routine.
I posted twice last August about how well RAW Therapee works as a jpg editor My mistake turned up another use- one that is especially helpful to someone who shoots flash-less low light party and people photos.
Here is the most interesting settings in the 'default ISO high' profile along with my modifications.
I left the Impulse Noise Reduction at 80. Luminance comes up as 0 so I set that to 20. Gamma 1.2 has the effect of shifting noise reduction into the shadows where it is needed the most. As usual the effect of all this is to blur detail (bad) while removing noise (good).
The RT folk's ingenious addition is to use 'contrast by detail levels' to recover a surprising amount of the blurred detail. The default values are 0 (finest) =1.00 and the next level '1' =2.00 but at the time I was thinking noise rather than detail; So I may have gone a little too far fiddling with the sliders and cut out slightly more detail than the noise reduction needed. Either way, the noise cleanup and preserved detail on this ISO 6400 image is dramatic.
How dramatic. Here are my results. And unlike the Tahitian fertility dance you should definitely try this at home.
The image on the left is from the NEF using the current noise reduction routines. It has the highest noise. It also has the most preserved detail in the girl's hair so I could have pushed its noise reduction harder. The middle image is the jpg from the D7000 using its default jpg (Sd) and noise reduction (norm) settings. While I wouldn't have called it bad a week ago, now it looks flat and washed out next to the RT image on the right. I lost some detail in the hair but with the noise now so low I can print it up large, perhaps to 11 by 14, without showing objectionable noise. Not shabby for an ISO 6400 image.
Lesson learnt. At the moment there is no advantage working from NEFs using RT. Not that this is a massive bash; the D7000 has one of the best in-camera noise reduction algorithms around. And judging from the comments in the forum, RT should get better soon. See Issue 1052: New luminance NR algorithm http://code.google.com/p/rawtherapee/issues/detail?id=1052 for up to date details.
With a CPM member's show coming up and several low-light images I'm considering exhibiting, it is time for some serious post processing. Will let you know how everything works out.
PS. The line profiles were taken off the wall over the girl's shoulder.
This month's performers were the Hale O Malo Polynesian Dance Group, Their costumes and dances ranged from a New Zealand Maori war dance to a Tahitian fertility dance. That invocation of human fertility came with a friendly warning, "Do not attempt this at home."
This image was shot during the pictures-with-the-kids session at the end of the show using my new Tamron 18 -270 mm f3.5-5.6 super zoom set at 18mm wide angle. The manual exposure settings were f8 and 1/200 sec combined with an auto ISO. That ended up at 6400.
Not an optimum or necessary ISO for this image. It could have been much lower. At 18mm the lens opens at f 3.5. For a static shot a shutter speed of 1/60 sec would have worked. But I had set up the camera for telephoto dance images, 1/200 sec to give a sense of motion without excessive blur and f8 to sharpen up the lens's slightly soft long end. I didn't spot any massive noise problems when I reviewied the screen shots during the shoot so I went with the default settings.
For post processing I downloaded RAW Therapee's latest 64 bit build, version 4.7.01. It doesn't have the new noise reduction routines yet, but it does have enough new features to justify a build jump from 4.6 to 4.7. I'll talk about a few newfeatures in this post, plus some older ones that I haven't used much, starting with the big review images in the file browser.
With dance groups I tend to over shoot. You know, long continuous bursts hoping to capture that perfect combination of step, twirl and jump. This time I filled my 16 GB main card and moved down to my 8GB secondary card. There I found Miss Thumps-Up posing for Mom's perfect snap combined with an interesting environmental background.
Viewing the preview jpgs full size on my laptop screen while using the number and color coded ratings sped up my selection workflow. I ranked my 'maybe images' during a first pass and then fine tuning the selection set. Definitely a winner.
Judging by the curve of the molding board at the top, this image, shot at 18mm, has serious wide angle lens distortion. So I tried the fix in the Transform/lensgeometry/distortion tab. My first guess, a -0.5 pincushion setting went way over the top. But it did open up ideas for some creative playing around later.
The for real setting was -0.09. I pulled up a grid Guide Type to provide straight lines as a reference. At the moment the routine bends the image only one way and creates a curved blank area at the bottom. So I used auto fill to clean up that problem. And for those interested in composition rules the Guide Types include rule of thirds, rule of diagonals and several harmonic mean or, as I used to call them, golden sections.
With the proper settings I created an '18mm tamron' default profile that I can call up to automatically correct my wide angle images.
This fixed I tried out a new profile that came with RT 4.7-- 'default ISO high'. After I applied the profile it was 'WOW!! Where has all the ISO 6400 noise gone!!?'
Turns out the RT team had done some interesting things but the real WOW maker was my serendipitous mistake. I'd been working with the jpg not the NEF file, a jpg that had already gone through one pass of the Nikon D7000 excellent in-camera noise reduction routine.
I posted twice last August about how well RAW Therapee works as a jpg editor My mistake turned up another use- one that is especially helpful to someone who shoots flash-less low light party and people photos.
Here is the most interesting settings in the 'default ISO high' profile along with my modifications.
I left the Impulse Noise Reduction at 80. Luminance comes up as 0 so I set that to 20. Gamma 1.2 has the effect of shifting noise reduction into the shadows where it is needed the most. As usual the effect of all this is to blur detail (bad) while removing noise (good).
The RT folk's ingenious addition is to use 'contrast by detail levels' to recover a surprising amount of the blurred detail. The default values are 0 (finest) =1.00 and the next level '1' =2.00 but at the time I was thinking noise rather than detail; So I may have gone a little too far fiddling with the sliders and cut out slightly more detail than the noise reduction needed. Either way, the noise cleanup and preserved detail on this ISO 6400 image is dramatic.
How dramatic. Here are my results. And unlike the Tahitian fertility dance you should definitely try this at home.
The image on the left is from the NEF using the current noise reduction routines. It has the highest noise. It also has the most preserved detail in the girl's hair so I could have pushed its noise reduction harder. The middle image is the jpg from the D7000 using its default jpg (Sd) and noise reduction (norm) settings. While I wouldn't have called it bad a week ago, now it looks flat and washed out next to the RT image on the right. I lost some detail in the hair but with the noise now so low I can print it up large, perhaps to 11 by 14, without showing objectionable noise. Not shabby for an ISO 6400 image.
Lesson learnt. At the moment there is no advantage working from NEFs using RT. Not that this is a massive bash; the D7000 has one of the best in-camera noise reduction algorithms around. And judging from the comments in the forum, RT should get better soon. See Issue 1052: New luminance NR algorithm http://code.google.com/p/rawtherapee/issues/detail?id=1052 for up to date details.
With a CPM member's show coming up and several low-light images I'm considering exhibiting, it is time for some serious post processing. Will let you know how everything works out.
PS. The line profiles were taken off the wall over the girl's shoulder.
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