Today I tried out Dfine 2.0 for noise reduction. First this meant finding a picture that contained some noticeable noise (i.e. shot in dim conditions at a high ISO setting). Since I generally avoid taking such shots this took some searching. However, have a spider again, just as an example. Here is the original:

And here is the result, having applied only automatic noise reduction:

On a small screen, or if viewed only inside this post, these two may look close to identical. However, look closer: Here is a 1MP crop of a section of the web from the top-left. First, without noise reduction:

And here with noise reduction. Notice how much smoother the background is, without blurring the web strands. I think this is pretty amazing — and took only a couple of minutes to achieve. I’m sure that selectively using the manual controls could lead to even better results.