Testing the trials of DXO-PL and ON1 at the moment.
Now I have a question about noise reduction defaults.
I set DXO and ON1 to “don’t do anything” except from using a color rendering to let the RAWs look similar in both apps.
Especially noise reduction is set to off. But it seems ON1 is still applying some kind of chroma noise reduction. Does anybody with ON1 experience knows if this is normal with ON1 or am I just missing some settings to fully disable noise reduction?
The only noise reduction worth discussing in much detail these days in PhotoLab is DeepPrime. Personally I prefer a very low setting (2 or 5) to retain some texture in the image. An image is more or less completely clean of noise by 12. Above that you are seeing smoothing, not noise reduction.
That said, I sometimes use HQ noise reduction when I wish to retain grain for artistic reasons.
To impress people who like plasticky smoothed skin and surfaces that DeepPRIME noise reduction is in no way less powerful than Topaz DeNoise AI. Even at very low settings, Topaz DeNoise always turns images waxy/plasticky.