Photography Post: DXO Pure Raw 4 produces an amazing transformation of a ridiculously noisy image

Original on the left, processed in PureRaw 4 on the right

Last July I posted about the amazing power of DxO PhotoLab editing software and the noise removal abilities of Deep Prime XD. I've been using DxO PhotoLab for raw file processing ever since. 

The Deep Prime denoising software has always been available separately under the name PureRaw as a plug-in for Lightroom and other processing software and DxO has just brought out the fourth version of this and it's more complex and powerful than ever before. I've been trying a preview version of DxO PureRaw 4 for the last few weeks and while I still have much to learn I'm impressed enough already to have bought it. 

To give it a thorough test I searched my images for a ridiculously noisy image and came up with this one of noctilucent clouds taken at night at ISO 16,000 with a Sony NEX 7 camera and Sony E 16-50mm lens at 1/60 second and f4. The resulting image is painfully noisy, as the crop below shows, as ISO 16,000 is way beyond what this camera and lens can handle.

I ran this through PureRaw 4's Deep Prime XD2 denoising technology and the difference is astonishing. There is now virtually no noise.

I also processed the image in DxO PhotoLabs 7 which has the previous denoising technology, Deep Prime XD, and the result is also impressive, though there is a little noise (probably not visible here). Either Deep Prime version is vastly superior to the original.

I haven't done any other processing to the images. This shows what DxO Deep Prime XD and XD2 can do on their own.

The image in DxO PhotoLab 7. Original top, processed below

I'll be using PureRaw 4 on more noisy images (I have plenty!) to learn more about its capabilites.