P: Denoise AI and Pentax K3 MKIII DNG files - not working

Adobe has acknowledged the bug. See pinned reply by @Rikk Flohr: Inactive at the top. No fix yet so this must be a non trivial bug. It has nothing to do with GPU or other parts of the system and that was well established here by us all. It is just a bug where this doesn't work with pentax K3 and probably a few others. The support people on the phone are usually not at all aware of these so no surprise that they keep steering people in the wrong direction.

I have RAW files from several cameras here. Lightroom AI Denoise works perfectly fine on all of them - except for files from the Pentax KP and Pentax K-3 III. The results are consistently bad - either no visible noise reduction at all or blotches with slightly reduced noise. Both cameras produce RAW-Files with baked in noise-reduction (which can't be turned off). That may be the specific characteristic which Adobe has to investigate / train their AI for.

@danilot27785307 Yes, I have an 8GB graphics card and I strongly doubt that VRAM is the issue here.

I do not own thankfully any dSLRs, so I downloaded a sample from dpreview... I have RTX4070 dGPU (12gb memory)... in my case Adobe's enhanced NR does "work" ( as you can see the difference between applied / not applied ) - but not something that I 'd call a great NR ... may be because Pentax already applies  NR to all raw files from K-III ( that you can't switch off ) and Adobe was not able to do better than this quite poor NR  ? 

Hi all, after all What I said I received a call yesterday from Adobe, some minutes I post the replies. Strange ! They told me the issue stand in my poor 4GB graphic card (again), then they suggest me the issue was with a single file only (again). I rejected all this assumpions because I said and I prove them :

1) with my system I can denoise a NEF file easily

2) I cannot denoise any K3iii DNG or PEF file, not just one

My english is not so good but I think I understood he 'd have to talk with the expert to fix the issue in the next Ligthroom updates release .

Then I received an email that says "issue closed" .

For sure the issue is not close

If there is any LR user that has a Pentax K3III or a ricoh with a 8GB graphic card , could you please post your feedback here? Is the AI NR working on your machine?

I will open another case, at least until :.

1) they will fix it

2) they will admit K3iii is not 100% fully compatible with Adobe LR ( at the very end I cannot ask something they are not able to fix) 

Hi Sameer, just to let you know I appreciate your help but you can easly check the log of the issue I opened with Adobe (*) . You can easily notice that GPU, Driver, OS, does not have any relation with this issue.

The issue is only connected with Pentax files. There are prove of it.

Now I know you have to ask , because this is the procedure , the full list of specs of each single configuration but I am only trying to suggest you not waste your time.

(*) I can give you the issue number if it is not an issue with Adobe policy (one never know...)

EDITED

I spent more than 4 hours (four hours) in two different calls with Adobe expert. I provide them a full set of info, I provide them a full set of config, I followed their instruction in order to update GPU driver, they used my PC with remote desktop feature and at the end, despite the fact they SAW live the AI noise reduction is NOT WORKING with Pentax/ricoh file, despite the fact they SAW that AI NR is working on my exact PC with NEF files for instance , despite all of this thay say on their machine it is working.

I ask them to receive an enhanced DNG files from one of my Pentax files and they was so kind to send it to me. The enhanced file just prove what we all knows: AI NR in Adobe App is not working with Pentax file, at all.

I spent more than 4 hours for nothing, I have Adobe emails that says they have found a solution but it is not. I wasted my time and I felt like they are taking joke of me. End of the story.

PS I ask Pentax dealer here in Italy and the reply is, you can image: Adobe lightroom is not working ? Who cares! Is not something we can manage

... because im not going to pay $35 a month for just this feature (cost of DXO PurerRaw) as I'm doing all other edits in LR.

Cmon Adobe, bring this up-todate please!

... So would still prefer the built in LR AI denoise to work.

Thanks for the tip. 

DXO mark works well, it seems, in removing the noise.

Downsides are extra workflow step and also the generated new DGNs seem to be 2-3 times bigger - up to 90 MB in my test cases. But output is indeed better than manual noise removal in LR, so this is good.

I've just done a noise reduction test with another camera model (Lumix dmc- FZ300) and the noise was removed in 20 seconds. So the problem isn't with the Apple M3 chip, but with Pentax's raw files, which Camera Raw doesn't interpret correctly