ive used the denoiser option inside of lightroom... whats wrong with that one.?
The Lightroom (ACR) denoiser cannot tell between subject and background and tends to sharpen background noise, so to get good results from higher iso sources you have to use the brush to prevent this from happening.
Smarter algorithms like Noise Ninja or esp. PS CC'S "smart sharpen" do this automatically and give superior results if viewed @100% w/o local adjustments. The best state of the art denoiser by far is DxO's PRIME in their "Pro Optics", but beware, it doesn't work on dng and takes some minutes for each picture.
Current LR design doesn't allow plugins to work as known from applications like Photoshop CS.
Indeed and it's unfortunate if you want to keep a raw workflow, but it seems it's unlikely to change since Adobe wants to keep Camera Raw as a self-contained "good enough" editing solution while keeping selling Creative Cloud licenses
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...it's not just about the file size cr2/dng vs. 48bit tiff, but lossless wb adjustment is gone once it's not raw anymore and many plugins might profit from seeing the actual raw data and not just the demoisaiced version, esp. denoiser like DxO shows us.
