The past year, after Klaus' praises, I evaluated the DxO PureRAW 3 denoiser. It did a good job on a few critically noisy photos I shot. Before that evaluation I didn't think that I really needed a denoiser, but having tried one changed my mind. Then I left the trial expire because I didn't have the time to evaluate competing applications. One year and a half later I was able to do a round of comparative testing: Topaz Photo AI, On1 NoNoise AI and the latest DxO PureRAW 4. At this point I need to pick one and buy a license. My personal evaluation is that PureRAW is still the best of the pack: some competitors might produce sometimes sharper images, and maybe offer the capability of better sharpening when the problem is not noise, but slight mis-focusing; but often the images they produce look unnatural and/or there are digital artefacts.
Anyway, before buying a license I'd like to hear your comments, if you have experience.
PS For people who are interested but never tried an evaluation, these might be two starting points — but consider that both the video and the post are from about seven/eight months ago and in the meantime more recent versions have been released, so you really need to try yourself. All the products have free trials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp5HIUmudAs
https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1844182/0
