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I think the intent is more to rule out the use of AI to remove or add foreign content to the image.
Besides, under adjustment guidelines we have: “Poorly color-managed, over-saturated, over-sharpened or over de-noised processing will affect judging score“.
Which implies de-noising is OK 🙂
That said:
-think about how they’re going to audit the files. You’re not sharing your edits, someone is just going to eye-ball side-by-side your high res JPEG and RAW versions.
-I wouldn’t bother denoising underwater photos (up to ISO 2000 on a full frame sensor), so long as I didn’t boost the shadows a lot.