PV2010 Color Noise Reduction Robs Dark Tones

Question

No pun intended.
I thought at first it was the raw-conversion/de-mosaicing, but its turned out to be the color noise reduction.
Here is a the latest example of a picture that looks better in PV2003 than PV2010 no matter what I do, because of loss of clarity / contrast / dark-tones resulting from the new Color Noise Reduction algorithm. Note: This loss can not be restored using clarity or contrast sliders.
This probably ought to be a feature request: A slider that controls the coarser aspects of color noise reduction (color waves or clarity/contrast) versus the most localized aspects (color specs). In this instance, just getting rid of the specs without trying to reduce the waves might leave the dark tones(?) - Something like that. In any case, there is room to improve color noise reduction so that it leaves the dark tones / contrast / clarity in certain cases like this.
(Its a 100% crop of a section of a fish under water)
PV2003:
PV2010:
The difference is striking when viewing the whole photo from afar...
PS - I just discovered that minimizing noise reduction will maintain the dark tones better - I've therefore added down-throttling of color noise reduction to my PV2003  -> PV2010 practice.
Rob

Answer 1

dorin_nicolaescu wrote:
Luminosity Contrast slider also helps maintain some darker tones.
Indeed it do.
And, last but maybe (or maybe not) least, one can cheat a bit at the end and add some grain, to give the illusion of greater detail / texture. So, if you really want to preserve full detail when converting high ISO shots from PV2003 to PV2010, you need to:
1. Crank up the luminance noise reduction detail slider pretty darn high (if not all the way up).
2. Crank up the luminance noise reduction contrast slider pretty darn high (if not all the way up).
3. Minimize color noise reduction amount.
4. Crank up the color noise reduction detail slider fairly darn high (not all the way up! - color artefacts - bleh).
5. Maybe add a touch of grain (pretty darn low).
(I've left out the luminance NR amount slider and sharpening because they are the more obvious ones).
I'm guessing I'm not the first person to fall into the trap of trying to recover detail lost by noise reduction by decreasing luminance noise reduction amount and increasing sharpening detail (and maybe amount too), and winding up right back where you started - too much noise. The detail/contrast sliders of the noise reduction controls really work a lot better for that, and minimizing color noise reduction is also a hot tip for you detail junkies.
I hope I'm not the last person on this forum to realize what is now seeming sort of obvious to me, whilst everyone has a good laugh...
(I had previous just left color noise reduction and detail, plus luminance NR contrast at their defaults (I discovered the importance of the lum.NR detail slider long ago...) - but not anymore. It has helped me to articulate all this - hope it helps somebody else too..........
Rob