An apparatus includes a raw image pipeline comprising a first circuit and a second circuit. The first circuit of the raw image pipeline may be configured to distinguish between smooth picture noisy areas and non-smooth clean areas of an image by performing tone based non-smooth detection on data of the image to obtain an adjusted non-smoothness value for at least one area comprising a plurality of pixels of the image. The second circuit of the raw image pipeline may be configured to adjust one or more of noise reduction filtering or sharpening filtering performed on the at least one area of the image based on the adjusted non-smoothness value.