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I like many others downloaded the trial of Topaz denoise to give it a whirl and see what all the hype is about - lets be fair a software package that claims to rid images of noise is going to get a fair bit of attention. I did some trials with a few underexposed and low light images and well, tbh, I found the results a bit mixed and a bit MEH, sure it does reduce the luminance and colour  noise but despite the claims it did affect the image quality quite significantly introducing smearing , artefacts , well, just like any other noise reduction really, so is it worth spending a £100 or so? my findings indicate it works fine on images that only have low levels of noise anyway, and this can be removed easily in traditional post processing techniques.

so I thought I would post an example of my own techniques for noise removal using photoshop, bear in mind this was a 5 minute exercise to quickly demonstrate my point - have a look at the images below - is it worth a discussion on the merits of noise reduction software ?

the images are self explanatory - the first is the original at ISO 12800 and is a screenshot of Lightroom the second is the edited image and the third a big crop  -