Don't Delete Noisy Photos — Edit Them Like This

ELI5/TLDR

Wildlife shooters often have to crank ISO into ugly territory — rain, low light, fast birds. The grain that follows used to mean tossing the shot. Matt Shannon’s pitch: don’t. Run the raw file through DxO Pure Raw 6 first to strip noise and add lens-specific sharpening, then go back to Lightroom for the regular tone-and-mood pass. Heads up that the video is openly sponsored by DxO.

The Full Story

The problem ISO creates

Push ISO past about 6400 and the sensor starts inventing colour speckle and luminance fuzz. You can still see a duck’s feathers at ISO 6400, but the texture sits underneath a haze. At ISO 10,000 it gets worse. At 25,600 the image is almost a write-off without help.

Step 1 — send the raw file to Pure Raw 6 first

In Lightroom, right-click the raw and choose Export → Process with Pure Raw 6 (or File → Export with Preset). Critical detail: Pure Raw works on the raw, not on whatever you’ve already done in Lightroom. Any exposure, shadow, or saturation moves you make beforehand get discarded. So either do nothing first, or be ready to copy-paste those settings onto the new file Pure Raw spits out.

Step 2 — pick a denoise model

Pure Raw offers two relevant ones:

DeepPRIME 3 — fast, good enough up to about ISO 10,000. Use this when you’re batching hundreds of frames.
DeepPRIME XD3 — slower, slightly sharper, better for very high ISO.

Side-by-side at ISO 25,600, the difference is small. Shannon’s rule: XD3 for the worst offenders, DeepPRIME 3 for everything else.

Step 3 — set luminance and force details

Luminance controls how aggressively the fuzz gets smoothed. At 0 you only kill the colour speckle, fuzz remains. At 100 it’s overkill and feathers turn plasticky. Around 40-50 is the sweet spot.
Force details can sit at 100 without the usual oversharpening artefacts. Pure Raw is more forgiving here than competing tools.

Step 4 — let the lens profile do its thing

Pure Raw recognises the camera body and lens combo (in the demo, an OM-1 Mark II with 100-400) and applies a profile built for that exact pairing. If your lens is soft at the edges, the profile compensates. Lens sharpness has soft (+75), standard, strong (+150) presets. Standard is the default to reach for. If your lens isn’t in their library, you can request they profile it.

Step 5 — batch the rest

Once you’ve dialled in settings on one frame, don’t reopen the preview window for every shot. Right-click the batch in Lightroom and choose Process with Last Used Settings in DxO Pure Raw 6. Wedding and wildlife shooters with hundreds of frames live or die by this.

Step 6 — back in Lightroom, do the actual edit

Now the noise is gone, treat the new file like any other raw:

Lift shadows, nudge exposure, add contrast, pull highlights and whites down
Crop, level, vignette
Use the Select Subject mask on the bird, add texture and clarity to it
Add a linear gradient along the foreground (water) and drop exposure to pull the eye in
Add a radial gradient on the lit side of the subject, lift exposure, drop highlights, dehaze for a softer glow, warm it slightly
Add another linear gradient on the shadow side of the bird and darken — this gives the impression of directional light even on a flat grey day

The honest limit

Pure Raw fixes noise and softness. It does not fix motion blur, missed focus, or bad exposure. Those are field mistakes and stay field mistakes.

The Lightroom alternative

DxO also sells Photo Lab 9 (currently 9.6) as a Lightroom replacement — no subscription, no catalog import (you browse files where they live), and a subject-selection tool Shannon thinks beats Lightroom’s. It also has high-fidelity DNG compression that shrinks raw files up to 4x without quality loss, which matters if your library is eating drives.

Key Takeaways

Run noisy raws through a dedicated denoiser before doing any tonal work in Lightroom — the order matters because Pure Raw discards your Lightroom edits
DeepPRIME XD3 for extreme ISO, DeepPRIME 3 for speed and bulk
Luminance around 40-50 is the no-plastic zone; force details can go to 100 without trouble
Lens profiles are tied to your specific body-lens pairing and correct for edge softness
Batch via “process with last used settings” — don’t reopen the GUI for every frame
The tool fixes noise and softness, not motion blur or focus misses

Claude’s Take

This is a competent, openly sponsored walkthrough. The steps are real, the order is correct, and the demo across ISO 6400 / 10,000 / 25,600 actually shows the thing working rather than waving hands. The headline point — that a dedicated denoiser belongs upstream of your tone edits, not downstream — is the genuinely useful idea. It applies whether you use DxO, Topaz, or Lightroom’s built-in Denoise.

The sponsorship colours the rest. There’s no comparison to Topaz Photo AI or Adobe’s own AI Denoise (which lives inside Lightroom and would be the obvious side-by-side test). Photo Lab 9 gets oversold as a Lightroom alternative — it lacks Lightroom’s catalog and library tools, which for most photographers is the whole point of Lightroom. Treat that segment as an ad.

Score: 6. Solid technique video, useful workflow shape, but you’re getting one vendor’s view of the denoising landscape.