Thank you. This program really surprises me in how complex solutions can be done. I was blown away by the FFT noise reduction in Affinity Photo (getting rid of textured paper patterns as an example). Your instructions of complex solutions to complex problems are appreciated. Reading folks comments really helped me.

Compound Masks are great. Thank you! More Affinity Photo =)

So impressive!

Thank you for these tutorials! Compound mask operations are pretty awesome and we need more examples like this to wrap our heads around 😃 One question please...Is there any point in this example that you might employ color noise reduction? Correct me if I am seeing this as a luminosity noise reduction only.

I will be the odd one out and don’t find this resulted in an improved image. There is some noise reduction in the shadows with a great deal of splotchy colors and then a heavy noisy area in mid-tones and highlights. I would delete this image unless it held some sentimental value. Otherwise it would be deleted or ran through Adobe Noise AI, Topaz or DXO to see what they could do with it. Affinity Photo just isn’t equipped to meaningfully reduce the noise, even with compound masks.

Why did you bypass the color noise reduction part? This is half good half bad, but free of course once you have paid for AP2. For people who are photographing seriously in raw, the obvious choice to remove heavy noise like this is by using the DxO PureRAW 2 software as an initial process. The output can be a DNG file which reacts like the original raw file to the following editing in your favorite software. All raw types and lenses are covered. You can choose to denoise only or to denoise and lens sharpen. The process is fast and the results are perfect, better than any attempt ever made by Topaz Labs. The module is not cheap but worth the money. I am not an affiliate - just a happy user, who got tired of the questionable results with traditional noise reduction and sharpening methods.