If one uses DeepPrime XD as artificial sharpening it might be worth it. Tinkering with a detail slider for DeepPrime XD seems mostly unnecessary to me. DeepPrime can handle a higher amount of NR before smearing than Prime, which I mostly kept at 2 or 4. The right amount of Luminance slider does depend on which NR one is using. I rarely set the Luminance slider higher than 8. Wow, you guys like your images a lot more smoothed out than I do. I then often shift the Luminance slider away from its default value of 40 in order to get back some luminance noise. Nikon and Sony owners only enjoy a 1 stop improvement. Every Canon user who even occasionally shoots high ISO should own PhotoLab as PhotoLab offers a two-stop improvement at high ISO.

Prime was a game changer for Canon cameras like the 5D Mark III which suffers from very high chroma noise at ISO from 6400 on. DeepPrime is basically a better and faster (on the right hardware) version of Prime. Prime was excellent in its time but has little use now except on hardware which won’t process DeepPrime. HQ can be very useful to create realistic looking grain. Sony high ISO images were similar to Nikon but without as much pointillism and more smeared noise reduction. The pointillism is not a bad effect, it’s very similar to what Nikon did to lead all the camera manufacturers in good looking high ISO images for about twelve years from the release of the D700, until the R5/R6 came out a couple of years ago and Canon finally caught up. HQ is not like that, HQ will create pointillism even on low ISO image. It’s not a terrible idea as DeepPrime seems to have the good sense not to add much noise reduction when there isn’t much noise.

Some people enable DeepPrime on everything. DeepPrime was quite enough and is very fast on modern hardware. DeepPrime XD is aggressive and creates artificial detail.

Dx0 photolab