The Sight of Silence

So what's next?

Well, that would be me finally giving some attention to photos I took in recent months. Since yeah, this did start out as a photo blog. Some readers and viewers might be contemplating suicide by now, after being confronted with all this nerd talk, so maybe time for some images...

Also, I have to go back on a promise - which I don't like doing in general - but a port of DNGMonochrome to OS X will have to wait until I settle down a bit with experimenting. I have too much stuff I want to try out in the current version, before I can set myself to the quite boring and time consuming task of translating code, ending up with basically nothing new...

I am however looking into ways of restructuring the code I have now, to make the core more portable. Then only the user interface would have to be redone.

Where DNGMonochrome is concerned, I will be concentrating next on the algorithms and noise.


Algorithms

The aim was to get what I have now into only one algorithm: retaining the sharpness of the sharpest, but with less to no artifacts.

Currently I'm testing a new algorithm that comes very close.

It's faster than what I have now, it's sharper than the 'smooth' algorithm, and it's without any of the artifacts the current sharp algorithms can produce. No speckles on high ISO, no ringing on highlighted edges, nicely stepped diagonals with no pixels misbehaving...

It's close to what I want... it was just not as sharp as the sharpest I have now.

But after some tuning, I managed to solve that with an extra setting, optionally changing the innards of the algorithm slightly.

Overall it means going to only one algorithm with one extra option for sharpness, ditching three separate algorithms, ditching the mixover and the quality slider, gaining speed and basically improving the conversion, since the new algorithm doesn't misbehave and is still sharper than the current smooth one.

And with the extra option you can still get to gritty, noisy and sharper.

In both cases (with or without the sharper option) the algorithm produces sharper results than Lightroom turned B&W.

I still need to run some tests on this new stuff, and see if it also works out for the RAW red and the RAW blue, but if it does, it will most likely be in the next release.


Noise

At present, the noise reduction offered in DNGMonochrome is kinda lame.

Now the assumption was that 'lame' was actually okay, because the monochrome DNG is not your finished result: Lightroom or any other RAW converter you use can take care of the noise. I threw in those crusty median filters because I had experimented with them and they actually worked, so why not... but they are not very sophisticated...

But in the latest version I introduced RGB filtering: the red and blue interpolated results are mixed in with the regular result, so noisy pixels (especially the red channel can be quite messy) are introduced into the regular result if you use those filters.

To be able to perform good solid noise reduction on the RAW red and RAW blue, before they are used in the filtering, would be a very welcome addition.

Now, when you google 'noise reduction' it's almost inescapable: it needs to be wavelets.


Wavelets?

Yes, wavelets.

Fourier transforms are also possible, but that seems to be yesterday's thing: wavelets are the way to go... (also not very recent mind you, but it's what all the kids rave about: wavelets!).

I had no clue... that's the fun of DNGMonochrome (for me that is). When I started it I had even less of a clue. It forces me to dive deeper and deeper, learning heaps of new stuff.

Pointless really, but it keeps me busy.

After reading up on wavelets, I finally had some vague idea of what they were, but it was still very abstract all.

Then I stumbled onto a piece of programming code, something practical, that represented 'wavelet denoising'... (dcraw, great program, not easy to read the source code, but at least that I'm capable of)...

So I grabbed that code - really not a lot of lines, strange: after reading many thick PDF on the theory of wavelets, one would expect some bulky programming code, but not so... and started to experiment with it.


Insight

I first adapted it to actually show me these mysterious 'wavelets' (or at least their consequences) and then I really started to understand (well, sort of...)

Then it took me a while to get it adapted to work with DNGMonochrome, and when it finally did: bingo.


The Sight of Silence

Impressive noise reduction.

No joke: seriously impressive noise reduction.

In comparison with Lightroom (3.6) one might even claim - on very very close inspection - that the wavelets rule: they seem to deal slightly better with fine detail (although I can't exclude Lightroom also using a wavelet technique: the results are remarkably similar - and when you throw in the detail slider in Lightroom, the difference becomes neglectable).


Getting philosophical

Of course 'good' and 'better' become very relative, because almost none of these differences are visible at 100%. This whole quality thing is really about extreme pixel peeping, under the assumption that if it's better at 800% magnification, it must also be better at 100%. Which in itself is true of course (is it?), but it excludes the notion: can we still see it?

Or on a more philosophical note: is better still better if we can't experience the difference?

Anyway...


Improvements?

After reworking this wavelet code a bit (adding an extra 'detail' setting and getting it more in line with my own programming), and reading some more on wavelets, I saw some concerns in the present code I'd like to address.

For instance: wavelets operate with thresholds. But the basic threshold in the present code is fixed per level and it's not documented where this threshold is coming from. There's suggested ways to determine the threshold dynamically and not set it upfront, so I want to have a look at that.

Also, the number of decomposition levels is fixed (how many wavelets are created in total), where it might be better to have a high number of levels for low ISO photos, and lower levels for high ISO photos. Need to examine that, see if I can detect a difference when changing the number of levels.

And I read about possible optimization steps after the denoising, for getting back lost detail, so I also need to examine that one.

So, enough to do for a next release...