Via David Kilpatrick I came across a very useful guide to ACR 6 (which corresponds to the Develop module in LR3).
Agree. I may use Lightroom's Denoise every now and then, but not routinely because I hate to have large files added to my catalog. Curves option in masking is just a great addition, have used it already for quite some pictures I took lately. And previews browsing is indeed faster than before. All in all quite the update after the bomb they dropped with AI masking.I played around with this a little tonight comparing it to Prime in DXO PureRAW 2 using a 3200 ISO file from my Sony RX100. With all sharpening turned off in both LR and PR2 the DXO output is a little crisper. Adding in the DXO lens module sharpening it is noticeably better. (Since sharpening in DXO is lens specific this may not be true for all lenses.) Boosting sharpening on the LR processed file using LR's sharpening tools to try to match the PR output resulted in sharpening artefacts. It's a good first effort from LR and I expect they will develop and improve it, but for now it won't replace PR2 for me. Also, on my somewhat elderly laptop LR took 6 minutes to process the file while PR2 took 2 minutes. That's quite a significant factor if you don't have a bang up to date high end set up.
For me the more significant update this time round is being able to use curves with masks.
Interesting write up. I tried the trial version of DXO DeepPrimeXD on a few files (via PureRAW) but didn't consider it a sufficient improvement over DeepPrime to be worth the $80 upgrade fee. My experience with it was that at default settings it 'over-recovers' or 'over-sharpens' detail (I'm not sure exactly how it works so I'm not sure exactly what it is doing.) I though this was particularly noticeable with faces. I found that it worked best with the default setting turned down, which partly negates any advantage over DeepPrime.I just wrote a broader comparison report today, pegging LR's new NR engine against Topaz, DxO, and ON1 with test images from three different bodies. Full report is here: Denoising Software Comparison - This Beautiful Planet.
Hope some of you will find it useful.