Wow. IMHO, this shows the dangers of noise removal. There's alot of loss of detail. Look at the areas of cliff detail in the upper left, for example. depending on the size of the print, this would be very noticeable.
Why would you want to remove the grain? To make it look like a low resolution digital photo? I would look to lessen the grain in the smooth areas, like the sky, but leave it alone in the detailed areas. I've never seen auto noise or grain reduction that didn't also reduce detail. The blurriness is bad for large prints, and the noise or grain is not as noticeable in small prints (generally speaking!).
This is just my preference- YMMV! The key is not to look at the difference at 100% in PS, but to look at the prints at final size,
after all contrast adjustments have been made, then decide which is better.
Bill
I assume by “noise” you mean film grain? I can’t say which is best, but I get very good results with Neat Image. I use it mostly for Velvia and Provia. Neat Image works best if you create accurate noise profiles. I used IT8.7 targets to build my noise profiles. As a result, Neat Image will almost completely remove film grain with virtually no loss of detail.
Edit:
Here is an example. The photo is a small crop from a 7800 x 5232 pixel scan. One is the original scan; the other has had Neat Image applied. Both versions were converted to sRGB, 8 bit and saved as jpeg’s with moderate compression. It would be possible to do more aggressive removal of the film grain in the smooth sky area using layers with masks in PS, but for this example the NI noise reduction was done globally.