![]() Kodachrome 25 or 64, even 200, or later Fuji Velvia or Provia also show grain, but less than Agfachrome did. But I also must say, some films I already avoided back in the day due to strong grain and the Agfa slide films were amongst them. Or you could learn to live with it because that’s what we got from film back in the day. You could try to use a photo editor like PS or AP to add some Gaussian blurr after selecting the sky colour, but as soon as a small cloud is in the sky with it’s own grain structure, the manipulation will become obvious. The grains are the fine details many posters in this thread were talking about, and these grains come in a chaotic, non-Bayer pattern. In a way, you got a high quality, fine detailed picture of film grain. This is no solid knowledge but I think noise reduction of RAW converters, especially Photolab 5 with it’s many camera specific features first check the ISO and put this together with a sensor profile. I also think different RAW from various digital cameras produce RAW that can differ slightly in the process ever if the differences are far from as extreme as my old Agfa images are. To get more punch I can finish exporting with “Bicubic sharpen”. I also use to emulate a much finer grain to help crusching the original grain. After that I add 30-35 of Fine Contrast which is the only way almost to get some sort of “sharpening” effect. It is absolutely remarkable how that clears the skies from that grain. The first is the fantastic tool of Fine Contrast and second is Microcontrast that I always with these images pull as far at it gets to the left to get rid of absolutely all impact of that variable. So what to do? There are a few things that worked wonders and has been the main reason I ended up using Optical Limits/Photolab. Must be something in the pattern of the grain that tricks these tools. Fix that with Deep Prime? No way - just doesn’t work at all! Sharpen with “Unsharp mask” or “Lens correction”? Just impossible since that material is totally indifferent to these tools. That material of mostly Agfa CT 18 AND 21 images (ISO 50 and 100) and especially blue skies in these images often get terribly corse, ugly and grainy like these “rocks” JoJu talked about. As an example I can tell you I have processed many thousands of my old analog positive colorslides from the seventies and eighties when I was travelling a lot. No one has even mentioned that the RAW-material itself can affect our possibilities to postprocess some images. ![]() There is no really way to normalise a test like that really so this task of comparisions is far from easy and tends to get pretty useless in most cases. Another way is trying to achive the best result one can get but the problem with that is that we are far more different minds than this “one” I am talking about that even differs from day to day of different reasons. ![]() Is there for exampel any point of comparing Topaz and Photolab or for that matter Capture One or Lightroom at some sort of default value? I don’t think so. I agree with JoJu that noise isn’t really a problem today with either of Topaz or Photolab but there is always a problem comparing software that are not a black box with one that is if the settings are not known. If Topaz Denoise AI reaches a point where it renders better results then DeepPRIME, I will be the first in line to purchase a license. Some may suggest that I am guilty of being a fanboy due to my obvious preference for DxO’s products, but my comments were based purely on my visual inspection of the results he presented. My only objection to Dave Kelly’s video was the simplistic comparison he made against PureRAW where he was focused entirely on the reduction of noise and ignored the obvious and more important loss of fine detail which resulted from it. And, if the latest upgrade is superior to DeepPRIME in normal use on raw files then it raises the bar for excellence. Presumably the latest version will be a marked improvement over previous versions which is a good thing. Owning, but no longer using, a recent version of Denoise AI, I understand its strengths and weaknesses. More and better tools gives us greater flexibility when and if we decide to use them I can’t speak for others, but if Topaz is able to improve the reduction of visible and distracting noise while still retaining fine detail, that is terrific. I think this thread is startng to get a bit out of hand.
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