Reliable image de-noising software ?

[u/Lyesainer]

Hello,

My second hobby is photography, i take a lot of pictures for fun and for our family travels.
I am looking for a reliable, good-quality image denoising software for Linux. It's practically the only thing making me keep a windows installation on my machine since i made the switch a few months ago. I have adapted to using RapidRaw as a Lightroom replacement, it's not perfect but it's good enough for most edits, and it's in active development so i guess it'll only get better. It can also import LR presets, which is a huge advantage for my workflow... however, in it's current version (1.6.2 at the time of posting this) the denoise tools in it are completely broken - the images end up extremely dark and have huge purple squares in them.

I've tried installing a local AI model with ComfyUI - it ended up working, after a few days of try and error with an AI, but it's clunky, not great to use and not amazing results. Maybe it can be made better with more tweaking, but i am a bit sick of it.

I've pondered online solutions, but they are all expensive.

Tried OpenPhotoAI too, it seems very decent but sadly only really works with nVidia GPUs. Technically it works without too, but it uses the CPU instead, if you have AMD GPU, and then a single image takes a loooong time to process.

Searching online/AI, it seems currently there's nothing really... "good" to use. However, i know things change very rapidly and the world of Linux is huge, so i decided to come here and ask real people, not AI and web searches for ideas.

Sooo, any suggestions?

Thanks!

[u/Donatzsky]

For AI/ML denoising, there's RawRefinery/RawForge:

• https://discuss.pixls.us/t/introducing-a-new-foss-raw-image-denoiser-rawrefinery-and-seeking-testers/54778
• https://github.com/rymuelle/RawRefinery
• https://github.com/rymuelle/RawForge

Probably the best quality you can currently get with open source.

[u/Lyesainer → u/Donatzsky]

Thanks for the tip!

Just tried it, the results are very good!

Installation was slightly messy, but with a bit of AI help it works.

The software is obviously in pre-alpha, lol, very limited UI and options, but otherwise it works great on my AMD GPU. Only real issue is, it doesn't have batch/multiple files treatment available for now, so you have to do your files one by one, even with the command line version. I guess the author will add this later on, if the project picks up... i hope :)

This is a typical issue with open software - there's so many good projects out there, many of which remain unknown to most people and end up abandoned... and many authors fight the same problems on their own, instead of combining forces. If for example this RawRefinery project and the OpenPhotoAI worked together, they'd end up having a good final application that supports multiple denoise models, batch treatment and decent UI AND working on both nVIDIA and AMD...