Sigma Merrill RAW Issues for last 6+ months: Many fixed with .385

[Wumpus]

Just an update after doing some testing last night with 1.7.1.385, and the ongoing denoising/demosaicing issues (not sure which was causing the problem) which made Merrill (SD and DP Merrill series cameras) barely usable, now appears significantly improved. Before, there was so much noise evident (mostly chroma, but also some luminance) even with reasonably well exposed images, that to get rid of sufficient noise resulted in also removing so much detail that the output almost looked like a stylized cellphone oilpainting filter. NOTE: this problem only occurred with the Sigma Merrill cameras, and did not affect earlier Sigma cameras, which performed normally.

Now, it is possible (for well lit areas within an image) to adjust the denoising so that you can just apply enough to get rid of widespread noise, but through the currently available controls, selectively adjust the extent applied such that a balanced amount of detail can be retained (meaningful noise:detail tradeoffs). It still needs a fairly bright exposure, but it is no longer prohibitive. I don't know if this was due to the hard work of Affinity or LibRaw, but thank you very much.

I ran out of time, but images captured as pure BW may still be opening in AP as colour. I will test with .390 this weekend. But this is a huge quality improvement for all Merrill users.