Noise Reduction Tested - DXO Optics Clear winner

[ExPat2B]

I ran a test today on DXO Optics PRIME noise reduction VS Topaz Labs VS Native Photoshop Noise reduction.

I suspected from my own experience that DXO Optics did the best job, but I was actually surprised just how far it was ahead.

I have created a Flikr Album to show the results, using a test scene with an ISO 12233 chart, some watches, a feather and some plastic primary colours, and a black jumper to try to test all aspects of detail retention and colour noise and shadow. The below link shows a short summary of the results on 100% crops of the feather.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/125129318@N06/143595...

I used DXO Optics with no other correction, just prime noise reduction on the RAW files, using luminance 80 ( Strong ) and luminance 40 ( Moderate ) settings.
I used Topaz Lab Photoshop plugin on RAW Strongest and RAW Moderate preset.
I used Photoshop Adobe RAW converter Noise reduction on Luminance 50 and Color 30 settings to open the RAW files.

The Album link gives all the full size files, and original files so you can view results. Hopefully the file names are self explanatory.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/125129318@N06/sets/7...

In the interests of balance,

DXO Optics Pro is slow ( 4 mins per picture on a quad 4.1GHZ machine with 7770 ATI graphics card )

I will say that Topaz seems to beat DXO on noisy native Jpeg's

If anyone has any other packages they wanted tested let me know, or you can use the original files in the album link to run your own tests.

[ExPat2B]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nQYa1d]
[/url] Noise_Comparison by pistonheads_tests, on Flickr