Post Processing Software Really is Something Else These Days
So this is a single frame from a shoot out under the stars in the California desert a couple months back.
It is shot at ISO 3200, 20 seconds at f/2.8.
It was a throw away frame from a set I was shooting to stack in Sequator. It's a throw away because a car way off in the distance behind me turned it's headlights on and sat there for a while. This flooded my foreground with a level of sidelight and contrast that I just didn't want for my image. Because of this I decided to omit it from my stack, and instead process it as a lone image to see how good Adobe's new de-noise option is (inside Lightroom and CameraRAW).
The short version is that it's pretty darn good.
It was 100 ° at 11 o'clock at night, and this shot is 50-something in on a series of 20 second exposures at ISO 3200. This means my sensor was likely VERY warm, and as such would have flooded the image with noise and hot pixels.
Adobe's de-noise software really does seem to work like a charm and took care of a ton of the noise without destroying the details in the foreground and (more importantly for me) the sky.