In personal experience with Nikon and a handful of other vendors, long exposure noise reduction does actually affect the raw image. Two images are taken, one of which is the black frame. The resulting raw file has had the black frame noise removed from it. The only time the setting wouldn't affect the raw file is if the shutter speed is faster than whatever the threshold is for the raw frame capture to kick in, but that just being pedantic on my part
. I have no direct experience with Canon.
There's an interesting article about what does and doesn't affect the raw file that I'll try and find.
Edit:
https://photographylife.com/which-camera-settings-affect-raw-photos
I agree and your link is a very good review.
While this is getting way off topic, the use of long exposure noise reduction is an interesting point. On the one hand, it is generally beneficial when shooting long exposures. On the other hand, it effectively doubles your time for each shot.
This is only relevant for astrophotography or landscape/architectural photography using exposure times of several minutes (in the latter case to blur cloud/water motion for creative purposes). Possible there are other applications as well
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For really long exposures, one has to balance the better RAW file achieved using long exposure NR (by blanking out hot pixels) with the halving of available shooting time because each exposure takes twice as long before the camera is able to start another capture.
Long exposure photography tends to require some trial and error when choosing the time of the exposure. There are calculators to get you in the right ballpark, but it is rare that the first choice for exposure time ends up being the optimal exposure time. Often the first capture is either under- or over-exposed.
With long exposure NR enabled, your first guess exposure at say 2 minutes takes 4 minutes before you can see the file and realize that 2 minutes was the wrong exposure. So I usually turn off long exposure NR until I know the proper exposure for what I am shooting.
Even when I know the proper exposure settings, I don’t always use long exposure NR. Most of my long exposure pics are in daylight using ND filters. Lighting and cloud cover can and do change. Doubling the time between captures halves the number of potential captures I can make over a given period of time. It can be a balancing act between not having to deal with hot pixels in post vs getting more images to choose from in the available shooting window.