Photographing people in low light often means high ISO, and high ISO often means noisy images. Depending on your camera, noise can be quite significant. Radiant Photo paired with DxO PureRAW3 have noise solutions wrapped up. Let’s compare noise reduction in Radiant Photo and DxO PureRAW3 — and how the two work together.

Now, noise isn’t always a bad thing: You shouldn’t assume that you have to do everything you can to remove it. But when you’re working with underexposed or low light photos, using a powerful noise reduction tool like Radiant Photo or DxO PureRAW3 can dramatically improve the quality of your photos. Honestly, modern noise reduction makes me feel like I took these photos with a whole new camera.

Save detail in noisy photos with Radiant Photo advanced noise reduction

Radiant Photo has the fastest noise reduction engine on the market. It’s got you covered not just for ISO noise in digital photos and grain in scanned images, but can fix JPG compression artifacts and moiré pattern effects as well.

First I’m going to drag-and-drop my batch of, let’s face it, really poorly exposed images, into Radiant Photo. Radiant Photo immediately processes the images. I can tweak the noise reduction in the Detailed Edit panel:

Detailed Edit > Details > Noise

radiant photo noise reduction
Radiant Photo detects the Noise and automatically selects the Night preset to correct it.

Because Radiant Photo processes noise automatically, it will only apply to photos where noise is detected. One of the five presets will be selected based on the content of the photo:

  • Default — this is effective for most general situations
  • Portrait — this setting avoids a plastic, overprocessed look while removing noise and maintaining natural color composition
  • Night — this preset is optimized for images where there are dark areas and brightly illuminated, detail-rich areas
  • Camera Phone — this adds a special correction for the grainy quality of camera phone pictures
  • Strongest — this forces the maximum reduction for really noisy images

You can Sync all your settings across the batch, with Radiant Photo only applying the noise reduction where needed. Radiant Photo noise reduction will remove noise by about 2-3 stops. In other words if your photo was taken at ISO 3200 then Radiant Photo can make that look more like ISO 400-800.

Why can’t I turn on noise reduction in Radiant Photo?

If the setting for noise reduction is grayed out in your Detailed Edit tools, then it means that Radiant Photo hasn’t detected any noise in that image. Noise reduction is only applied if needed.

radiant photo noise reduction
In the same batch, this photo has no noise detected, so Radiant Photo doesn’t apply noise reduction.

This makes syncing across a batch safe and effective because the noise is only addressed when its needed.

Save detail in noisy photos with DxO PureRAW3 before making photos pop in Radiant Photo

DxO PureRAW3 has export to Radiant Photo built-in as an option after processing. To take advantage of the DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD algorithms, you can run your photos through DxO PureRAW3 as a first processing step.

noise reduction dxo pureraw 3
This image went through DxO first and then Radiant Photo, and I love the punchy, detailed, clean result. See the before version of this photo below.

While Radiant Photo can be used as a stand-alone editing solution, or as part of your existing workflow (e.g. with Lightroom Classic), DxO PureRAW3 is a tool with a specific purpose. Its job is to improve your RAW photos before editing. It has simultaneous AI-powered denoising and demosaicing which yields exceptional results to save detail in noisy photos.

Import photos into DxO PureRAW3 and process with DeepPRIME or DeepPRIME XD

To process your photos in DxO PureRAW3 before finishing in Radiant Photo, choose the option to Export to Radiant Photo. I processed these photos with DeepPRIME XD. The process time makes this a press Start Processing and come back later kind of task. The results are worth it, though.

export to radiant photo from dxo pureraw
After opening your files in DxO PureRAW3, select the option to Export to Radiant Photo after processing.
dxo pureraw noise reduction
It takes a while for DxO PureRAW3 to work its magic, so let it run and come back to it later.

For a little more on the difference between DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD, have a look at this article.

View results of DxO PureRAW3 in Radiant Photo after noise reduction

After processing, DxO PureRAW3 will prompt you to open Radiant Photo. The photos will be instantly processed with Radiant Photo Smart Presets. Then as usual you can get creative with LOOKs and Color Grade to make your photo perfect. I’m keeping it simple here and going for a real color look as much as possible.

I’m asking a lot here with some of these photos. Very dark, very underexposed, and in tricky lighting. Radiant Photo and DxO PureRAW3 do a good job of saving the detail in these noisy photos.

Finishing off with straightened angles after saving the detail in noisy photos

One last step to finish off my photos: I’m going to import them into Lightroom Classic and straighten angles. The AI engine that powers Radiant Photo works best with square pixels so there is no straighten tool in Radiant Photo (however, you’ll find Crop in the Detailed Edit panel).

save detail in noisy photos
I love straight lines in a photo so once the AI magic has been done, I’ll finish off with a quick straighten in Lightroom Classic.

Depending on your workflow, if you’re starting in Lightroom Classic then outsourcing your problem children to Radiant Photo and DxO PureRAW3, it’s worth noting that the DxO PureRAW3 plugin for Lightroom Classic can process your RAW files in the background while you work on other tasks.

dxo pureraw lightroom classic plugin
The DxO PureRAW3 plugin for Lightroom Classic processes your RAW files in the background then saves them to the DxO PureRAW collection.

DxO PureRAW3 also makes precise lens-specific and camera-specific adjustments to sharpen your images, so it’s a powerful tool to have in your workflow.  

Comparing noise reduction in Radiant Photo and DxO PureRAW3

Let’s finish up by taking a look at one of my images in depth, comparing the noise reduction in each. I’ve zoomed in to 100% here and cropped the same section for comparison.

Original RAW: straight out of camera, with no processing.

before noise reduction
Straight out of camera, this image is grainy and noisy.

Processed in Radiant Photo only.

after processing in radiant photo
After processing in Radiant Photo, the noise is significantly reduced. The Smart Preset automatically applied has done the rest of the work.

Processed in DxO PureRAW3 only.

noise reduction dxo deepprime xd
This is the improved RAW photo after processing with DeepPRIME XD — the photo isn’t finished, but the noise has been removed and detail improved.

Processed in DxO PureRAW3 and then finished in Radiant Photo.

finished photo in radiant photo
After noise reduction and detail preservation in DxO PureRAW3 the RAW is finished in Radiant Photo for that characteristic pop.

Let’s look at these four variations again as comparisons. First comparison is the original RAW versus the DxO PureRAW3 processed RAW.

And now let’s look at the original after processing in Radiant Photo only, versus the DxO PureRAW3 version after Radiant Photo processing.

Depending on what your noise problems are, Radiant Photo might do the trick, or you might need the deeper attention of DxO PureRAW3.

Noise reduction tech today can bring new life to old photos and old cameras

It’s impressive what you can achieve with Radiant Photo and DxO PureRAW3 to bring clarity, detail and pop to grainy, underexposed photos. I find it particularly useful for photos taken on my older cameras. With sensors that are not up to modern standard it’s nice to be able to get more use out of my images with cutting edge noise reduction tech.