Looking for noise reduction tool with advanced settings

[marimagen]

I normally use the ACR noise reduction tool or Colormancer to deal with minor noise issues. But I now have to handle a few shots with a strong contrast between shadows and lighted areas. The correction I apply to improve the darker tones is too strong for the highlights: I get a "plastic" unnatural look. Is there a noise reduction tool which can discriminate between dark/light areas?
Thanks in advance for your answers,
Marie

[Mark D Segal]

Open the photo in Photoshop. Try demo versions of Topaz DeNoise, Neat Image, Noiseware, etc. to see which you like best; all are good. The mot  controlled way I know of is to isolate areas of different tonality is to make layers holding approximate selections of each area of interest and apply the noise reduction to the active layer.

[Stefan Ohlsson]

I normally use the ACR noise reduction tool or Colormancer to deal with minor noise issues. But I now have to handle a few shots with a strong contrast between shadows and lighted areas. The correction I apply to improve the darker tones is too strong for the highlights: I get a "plastic" unnatural look. Is there a noise reduction tool which can discriminate between dark/light areas?
Thanks in advance for your answers,
Marie

Easy. Make a new layer of the image, apply the filter so that the shadow area doesn't show noise. Apply a Blend if, so that the noise layer gets a transparency in the highlight areas. (Layer > Layer Style > Blending options). If you want even closer control, do an edge mask to protect areas with lots of details.

[IliasG]

With Rawtherapee you have the luminocity curve to set the amount of denoising adapted to luminance levels ..

http://50.87.144.65/~rt/w/index.php?title=Noise_Reduction

[TylerB]

Noise ware includes those controls and others, I've rarely had to build masks and separate layers for it

[marimagen]

Thanks to all of you for your input! It was realy frustrating getting that plastic look. Marie

[LesPalenik]

Topaz is now offering their entire collection of 15 filters including the Denoise plugin at a substantial discount.
More information at My blogsite

I have both Nik Dfine and Topaz Denoise plugins, and find that Denoise retains more details than Dfine.
As Mark and Stefan note, if you apply strong noise reduction, sometimes it's worthwhile to run the noise reduction on a separate layer and then selectively erase/mask noise reduction effects from specific image portions.

[marimagen]

Thanks. I used the Topaz denoise trial and it worked just fine. The other methods were good enough on urban landscapes and such, but were trickier to use on skin tones and people. Marie