Makes sense. I have the Canon G5X that I occationally use, and this is also quite noisy in low light. Thanks!
Right? I tend to add noise more than I remove it. Still not nailing that Anton Corbijn look, but Nik SilverEfex sure gets me in the neighbouhood (on a good day).
Thank you! I’ll keep an eye out on Ebay which is a great place to find books.
Thank you! I’ll try them and see if they work out with the photos I need to work on! On 1 is cheaper. So I’ll try that app. 
Airwhale, yes it is rather amazing when it works out that way. I have taken a lot of concert shots and that is so tricky. I often pushed the film and paid a small fortune to have it processed separate. And it really ran the gamut whether they turned out well or not. I held on to some thinking that just maybe someday, just maybe I’d be able to process them or have them processed well in the future. It amazes me what you can do with these apps!
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I have the entire Topaz suite. I use DeNoise on every picture, even ISO 100. Occasionally, it produces artifacts, but otherwise it is great. It’s better than DXO’s noise reduction. I have not tried On1, though.
When you shoot birds or any action in low light, you get a lot of noise. It’s not uncommon for me to take ISO 12800 images (shooting 1/4000 at f8 does create noise). Topaz DeNoise handles that very well in most cases.
Here’s an example after running DeNoise. 1/2000, f8, ISO 12800.
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Affinity’s workbook is an expensive beautiful hardcover that I did not think was especially helpful for beginners. Too textbook-y for me.
Much better is the inexpensive ebook by Robin Whalley available from his website Essential Affinity Photo Book - Lenscraft and other usual bookish sources.
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Try Introduction to Procreate - Ultimate Guide Getting Started with Digital Drawing - YouTube. The presenter, Art with Flo, is enthusiastic and very clear about how to use Procreate.
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Inexpensive… I like how that sounds. $7! Thank you ever so very much.
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Like others, the conditions I sometimes shoot in mean noise is a common thing. A 300mm lens on an APS-C camera stopped down to f/8 gives a roughly 10cm depth of field at a distance of 2 metres. To get a shutter speed fast enough for a bird that won’t sit still, you need to crank the ISO up and even more so under a tree canopy.
My Pentax KP has vastly superior performance on the noise front to some of my prior models. I used to hate the noise at 400 from the K10D, but the KP I let float to 6400 in daily use. It is, at least, a nice even noise, but it can be quite harsh in the out of focus areas.
While @veit claims Topaz is superior to DxO’s noise reduction, I have found the DxO forums split on this subject so I think it depends what sort of subjects you have. I briefly tried Topaz but as I’m already invested in DxO PhotoLab and it does a fantastic job, I’m not looking to jump to another single-job tool.
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Correct - I heard/read similar opinions. For my kind of images, Topaz works better, but that is subjective. As long as whatever software you use works for you, enjoy!
So after your praise for Topaz I downloaded the trial to give it a go. I gave it the recent photo I had in mind with my above description — bird nearby under tree canopy — and I have to say I am very impressed!
As with all such comparisons it’s hard to do a true head-to-head because some other factors come into play, but I’m tempted to rate it ahead of PhotoLab, too.
I have Topaz Sharpen, after that friend I mentioned sang its praises. I’m happy with it for the occasional bit of sharpening.
It is very cool that there is a thriving plugin market.
And nice Kingfisher. I too photograph birds, and often use noise reduction on the resulting images.
Thank you for the kudos! Agree that the thriving plugin market is a good thing!
Watch for sales. I got the two plugins I use for under $100 US combined! 
If you like your results, there’s no need for you to look elsewhere.
Before Topaz, I processed my images in Capture One. I liked the results very much up to ISO 1600, even although Capture One fell short in dealing with shadow noise. And anything higher than ISO 1600 had visible noise no matter what I did. Topaz not only eliminated it, but it did so very quickly; e.g., in sunny conditions, they “standard” setting with sliders sets to Auto produces great results, which means I could DeNoise such an image in a few seconds.
Here’s an interesting video by Photoshop Hall of Famer Matt Kloskowski why he switched away from Photoshop/Lightroom noise reduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLaqr_ia7nw
Download a copy and try for yourself. They have a 30-day trial.
Late but …
I personally don’t use Photos since it’s program that tries to solve two different things: being a “scrapbook” (i.e. photos of receipts, a photo of something that should I should buy at the shop, screenshots etc etc) and storing photos (photos taken intentionally). And it’s very difficult to keep unedited photos, edited photos, photos I’m working on, etc. I never manage to keep an organization that actually works over time.
I’m using Lightroom as my main storage and Photos is really a scrapbook that I clean out every 3-5 weeks.
There are additional reasons why I’m not using Photos for anything more than this but this is one of the major reasons. The reason why I’m using LR is that I find the price reasonable and they have a mobile client that make it possible to edit photos on my iPad (and no, the syncing isn’t perfect and I’m not using “LR Cloud” as my main app but “LR Classic”, I regularly move photos from “LR Cloud” to “LR Classic”).
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I have gone back to using Raw Photo - a much under-estimated Biot of software IMHO. Basically feature parity between iPhone, iPad and Mac - important to me. can operate with finder folders/files or the Photos library. And it after a recent update it can decode raws that Photos can’t (e.g. compressed Fuji Raws). You can extract the thumbnail from these as well. It doesn’t do all that Aperture does/did, but it works really well in a Photos-based workflow.
Do you mean the RAW Power app, or are you talking about some other app called Raw Photo?