Windows Photo Gallery Vs. Lightroom 3 for Photo Noise Reduction

It’ been about two weeks since I sold my Canon Xsi to buy a T2i. According to UPS tracking information, my camera shall arrive tomorrow morning (of course, ill be at school). Anyways, here are two photos my friend Lucas took with my Xsi this past winter. This is a comparison of the noise reduction in two different programs.   This photo was taken at 1600 ISO, 5.6f and 105mm. The noise was relatively bad so I plopped it into Lightroom 3 beta two and fixed that noise problem. The top photo without a watermark is the photo that I used noise reduction from Windows Live Photo Gallery and the bottom photo with the Oliver Sholder watermark is edited with lightroom to remove noise. Viewing the larger photos will show a major difference between the two. The conclusion: lightroom is significantly better in terms of noise reduction. This, however, did not come as a surprise since the program costs more than the other free program, plus it has a much more complex algorithm.