Reviewcapture one 16.8 denoise vs lightroom denoise on gig files

so c1 added ai denoise in 16.8. downloaded the trial tonight after a show because why not. same raw, r6 at iso 12800, small club, purple and red led wash, which is the worst case for noise.

lightroom denoise: cleaner overall, but skin goes a little plasticky if you push it past 50. c1: keeps more texture, a bit more noise left in the shadows, but the reds look less smeary to me. also faster on my laptop which surprised me.

honestly closer than i expected. not switching, i'm too deep in lr, but if you're already a c1 person you probably don't need to keep paying for a separate denoise thing anymore. idk, anyone else tried it?

noisyshadows said:

keeps more texture, a bit more noise left in the shadows

Nice to see an actual same-file comparison instead of vibes. I ran it on some high ISO test frames this week and I'd agree on texture. For me the bigger win is having it in the same app, so I'm not round-tripping TIFFs through a third program anymore. That was the real time sink.

I tested with indoor handball, A7 IV files from last year at ISO 8000, mixed LED and daylight from the high windows.

Same result as you: C1 a little more texture, LR a little more clean. On the faces I prefer C1, on the floor and the dark seats behind I prefer LR. The red team shirts were the biggest difference, in LR they go slightly flat, like a painted wall, in C1 you still see the fabric. Speed on my desktop was similar, around the same seconds per file, so I can't confirm the faster part.

At normal viewing size I could not tell which is which in a blind test with my wife. She chose the C1 one twice and the LR one once. Happy to answer questions.

dmitri_k said:

She chose the C1 one twice and the LR one once.

this is the most scientific test on the whole internet

For astro the test I care about is whether it invents stars, so I ran the same experiment on a 20-second single frame from the A7 IV at ISO 3200 and on a 40-frame stack of the same field.

On the single frame both did a respectable job. Lightroom smoothed the faint Milky Way structure a little more, Capture One left a bit more grain in the dark lanes but kept the small dust detail. Neither added anything I could spot that wasn't in the stack.

The bigger point is order of operations. I wouldn't run either on subs I'm about to stack. Stacking averages out the random noise far better, and AI denoise before stacking can create small pinpoint artifacts that then get reinforced across frames. After stacking, a light pass at 20-30% is fine and I can't tell it's been applied. Your gig files are the opposite case, one frame, no second chance, so denoise is exactly the right tool there.

rjhowell said:

one frame, no second chance

yeah exactly. i only ever have one frame of a guitarist doing the thing so stacking's out lol

I'm on C1 for tethering anyway, so this is the first update in a while that's actually saved me money. Cancelled the separate denoise app last night. My studio work rarely goes above ISO 400, but event headshots in hotel ballrooms do, and those were the only files I was round-tripping.

cdalton_photo said:

Cancelled the separate denoise app

One less subscription. That's how it starts.

Or just use the Lightroom one and stop paying for three things? Or am I missing something