I have just started to look into RAW images, something I thought I could get away without.
Now I wonder how I ever managed to get any results at all… 
Anyway, I was wondering how much very careful reduction of luminance noise would affect alignment.
Color noise is off limits of course!
How much does RC use luminance for pattern recognition?
I gather if it’s only color values, luminance noise reduction should not influence the results too much, right?
Since it only makes sence for texturing, it could also be done by swapping the images before that stage.
But that would mean twice the amount of disk space and one more thing to do.
And since texturing, as I have gathered, calculates average values it should - in theory - cancel out the noise if there are enough images for each part of the object…