[cyclohexane]

I've been experimenting with selectively applying gaussian blur to the A and B channels after converting the image to Lab color to get rid of nasty color noise.* I seem to remember Thom Hogan or someone else saying that this was one way to do it without special software.* Nikon Capture has a utility that works similarly to this process, I think, but I haven't used the program.* If you apply too much, you get color-smearing, but this does seem to kill off most of the color noise at the expense of saturation. Your image doesn't really seem to have a lot of color noise, and I wasn't really making a noticeable improvement when I tried working on your sample. Hopefully someone who gets this stuff better can help you more, LOL

Also, try printing the image as an 8 x 10 or whatever your regular usage size is.* Is the noise really that noticeable?* The D2H is noisier than the D70- in fact, it's considered one of Nikon's noisiest cameras; yet even at ISO 1600, it looks fine when printed.* I've got some rather large images in our yearbook shot at ISO 1600 which look just fine to most eyes.