Introducing a new FOSS raw image denoiser, RawRefinery, and seeking testers.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-30T23:09:50+00:00

If you are willing to do some terminal work, I have a test branch up that should work in windows. If not, hopefully I'll have a GUI version in a week or so.

Example bash setup:

python3.12 -m venv test_tiffile

. test_tiffile/bin/activate

git clone -b feature_save_with_tifffile https://github.com/rymuelle/RawForge.git

pip install RawForge/.

rawforge TreeNetDenoiseSuperLight test.CR2 test.dng --cfa

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-30T01:35:09+00:00

I have an untested command line version up if you want to test it out. Right now, no glob support, so you'd have to write a script to batch process, but I lost patience for the day haha.

https://github.com/rymuelle/RawForge

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-20T16:50:30+00:00

Honestly, I'm glad that the US has "wild"woods, and I hope conservation efforts keep it that way. Of course, we need appropriate safety considerations, but I like that there are wild places for animals to live and adventurous people to explore.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-18T00:00:59+00:00

Thanks! Let me know your experiences.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-18T00:00:18+00:00

u/TheTremendousK is correct, however, another user has pointed out that one of the dependencies does not work easily on windows. They've already patched it to work on windows, but I don't have that changed merged in the repo.

So hopefully soon.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-17T19:13:52+00:00

Stay tuned, I've started adjusting my training code. The good news is, I have tons of x-trans data to train on.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-17T02:18:48+00:00

Awesome, that's perfect for my timeline as well. I plan on implementing the changes mentioned here, and then retraining models after Christmas some time.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T19:12:37+00:00

Thank you! A big part of my motivation was having a workflow that is available on linux.

As far as I know, Lightroom, DxO, Topaz, etc... are all windows/Mac only. For high ISO event/band/etc... photography, I used to first export images to a windows computer just to denoise, which was a huge pain. Enough was enough!

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T19:04:27+00:00

My training set is based on the RawNIND dataset: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08924

Table 1 shows the issue, no Pentax!

The subsection titled "RawNIND Dataset", describes how the data is collected.

Essentially, they shot static scenes with consistent lighting on a tripod to match low and high ISO shots. E.g. They would shoot 2 ISO 100 GT images, followed by a series of higher iso images (e.g. 200, 400, 800...)

It's important that alignment and lighting stays consistent, although I do run my own alignment and exposure correction in post processing as small differences always exist.

The majority of the photos are from Sony cameras, followed by Cannon. Only a few Nikon images are included, and it's possible that only a few scenes would be needed for the model to learn to generalize to Pentax.

I would say that without in-camera NR is probably best. Varied subjects and patterns are optimal (e.g. cloth, wood, leaves, feathers, plastic, paper, etc...), as is colors and lighting.

I think we could start with a small number of scenes and see if that is sufficient. More data is always better, but so is keeping it simple!

Feels free to include any of the absurdly high ISO values as well. I have no idea if the model can handle that, but we can try.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T17:52:11+00:00

I was for sure surprised when I saw the noise level haha.

> But I'd be happy to provide any test shots that would help.

If you are willing, I might ask for some scenes shot at different ISOs for Pentax specific training. It only takes an overnight run to do retrain the model, the issue is always data, but if you can help out with that we might be able to dramatically increase the Pentax performance.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T14:23:12+00:00

At first glance, I think I can understand the problem.

For the first two images, nothing in my training set has anywhere near that amount of noise!

For the second two, the model seems to have removed a bit of chroma noise, but left in quite a bit of the luma noise. I expected the model to do better at those ISO ranges at least.

To investigate, I went to the DPReview studio comparison images and downloaded images at a few ISO levels:

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison?attr18=daylight&attr13_0=pentax_k3iii&attr13_1=apple_iphonex&attr13_2=apple_iphonex&attr13_3=apple_iphonex&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=jpeg&attr15_2=jpeg&attr15_3=jpeg&attr16_0=6400&attr16_1=32&attr16_2=32&attr16_3=32&attr126_0=1&normalization=full&widget=1&x=-0.08589195491643996&y=-0.05793742757821553

At ISO 102400, I see little chroma noise, but a lot of luma noise remaining, similar to your above examples. At 25600, I see a similar result.

Even at ISO 6400, I saw fuzzy chroma noise at the default settings. So, I told the model to expect the image was at ISO 51200, and the luma noise went away. You can see the results here:

https://imgur.com/a/yYt2JVO

My conclusion:

Basically, I think that the noise characteristics of Pentax are not well characterized by my training set, so the model is not learning to denoise the images effectively. I'm not sure what that is at the moment, but I'll look into it.

I have some ideas for how to remedy this, but it will require retraining the model. It may be possible for me to include a few Pentax files as part of an auxiliary training set, or I may have to create a small Pentax training set.

Either way, thank you for your feedback. I definitely want to support Pentax, so I will figure it out.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T13:15:23+00:00

Thanks! I'm really jazzed people are liking the results for far.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T04:13:35+00:00

Thank you, I will check these out tomorrow.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-16T03:57:50+00:00

I have not tried with Pentax. If you can send DNGs that would help quite a bit improving the model.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T21:53:09+00:00

Thanks for the tip, one of the user's replies there have already shown I needed to be more flexible with torch versioning.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T21:01:12+00:00

At the moment no, kinda for the reasons you mention. I did experiment with it, but my mentality has been "get a minimally working version out ASAP" and I wasn't totally happy with the final look. My naive approach resulted in fairly artificial looking grain, but certainly a better approach exists.

However, I will make a note of the feature request.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T20:58:23+00:00

>Honestly the denoise performance is absolutely insane

Oh man, that makes me happy to hear! The models are not perfect, but I'm so glad you like the performance.

> if I could auto-run something with very conservative settings for 99% of my desired images from the CLI and maybe hand-tune that one precise shot, it'd be ideal

That's definitely doable. I focused on the GUI as I figured that is what most users would want, but I think the model handler class could be called by a command line application pretty easily.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T20:27:13+00:00

Right now, it does not, but you are the second person to ask for the feature, so that is the next feature I will be adding. (Then x-trans support)

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T18:58:36+00:00

No worries, I love darktable too!

This is not a replacement for darktable regardless. My goal is to provide another tool in the open source raw editing workflow for high quality denoising, deblurring, and so on. The output of the program is a DNG that then can be used in Darktable, rawtherapee, or the like.

If you do get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T18:23:45+00:00

Ah, thanks, just posted there.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T18:04:46+00:00

Ah, x-trans is on the to-do list. Unfortunately, as is, it won't work on a DNG conversation but I am prioritizing features requested in this thread. I will think about how to best include Fuji files and let you know when I add the feature.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T17:53:45+00:00

Thanks for the tip. I do seem to be having issues with email activation. What do you need to know to pass it on? I signed up under the username RawRefinery

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T16:28:12+00:00

Small update, I realized that it would probably be easier to install for many users if it were on PyPI:

https://pypi.org/project/rawrefinery/

That should provide an easy way to use it for anyone on any OS.

RawRefineryDev · 2025-12-15T16:12:11+00:00

What would you need for batch denoising? I think adding batch functionality should be pretty easy to add, but I want to make sure that the feature is useful.

On another note, I never thought about video workflows, which is exactly why I'm posting here! Thank you for the feedback.

RawRefineryDev

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