Reply To: I asked once before but I'm asking again

[EyeDocPhotog]

DXO may have even better noise suppression.

In my experiences, if my goal is good noise reduction with the least user input work (I can’t think of a time when this wasn’t the case!), DxO wins CONSISTENTLY hands down – but I have a 2013 12-core, 32G ram Mac Pro which skews my curve in terms of time. For about maybe a year, at which time a salesperson somewhere will say “12-core, 32G ram?! Hey Tony, get a load of the dinosaur this guy has in his basement! You can’t even play Tetris Time Machine with that!”

If you want to ‘pixel-peep’ your way through the image to reduce noise, maybe dFine or Noise Ninja (or maybe Neat Image) would perform perhaps a notch better – at the expense of SIGNIFICANT workload from the human editor.

I have all four of those programs but only use DxO, and only if I’m shooting with my 50D which is not too often. The 1Dx provides for significantly higher ISO with minimal NR software use beyond LR5 – in fact, I can’t recall EVER needing to use DxO with a full frame sensor. But, then again, I’m not selling any images. I guess everyone has their own needs.

As with anything computer based the old, tried-n-true rule to remember is: Speed, Reliability, Low Cost – pick any two.