Denoising the fog

I already mentioned Lightroom 3 on this blog, but it was somehow in passing. I am going to write some more now. The reason I came back is the noise around noise reduction in new CS5, or more exactly, in Camera Row. Well, same noise reduction is in Lightroom 3 beta, I figured. And what prompted me to need it at all was discovery of beautiful images I took almost a year and a half ago, with my Nikon D40x in Smoky Mountains. Too many of them didn’t make it to blog, and I feel it is a shame. So I looked at them, and right away saw two things – wrong white balance (I mentioned that D40x had a problem with automatic setting, compared to D300) and noise. I mean, I saw the noise on those photos, so it must have been real bad. Knowing that new algorithm is supposed to work magic, I imported all the images to LR3 beta 2 and started working on them. And you know what? It is freaking amazing!
Just look at the image before and after (you can click on the image to see it a bit bigger).

Maybe the after image has a bit too painterly effect, but overall the whole grain and noise from my camera is gone.
And here is the final image, a small waterfall somewhere on the Arch Rock Trail in Smoky Mountains.