For still pictures, its quite easy to eliminate noise and still retail the original detail. There was a thread about the same thing that had a link to a program that eliminated noise. But, in that link, there was a link from there that took me to a photoshop tutorial.
Basically, it entailed taking bracketed photos, similar to what you would do if shooting HDR shots. But, you only need a normally taken shot and a shot taken at +2EV.
In Rawtherapee (or any other raw conversion program), render the normal exposure with the usual settings. For the +2EV shot, lower the exposure level in Rawtherapee to -2. This gives you a photo that is a little washed out, but about the same brightness as the normal exposure shot.
Do you use gimp?
Well, I do, so the photoshop tutorial had to be adjusted. So, here is what I do in GIMP. Take the normal shot, make this the background layer. Open a new layer using the overexposed adjusted shot. Now, with this second layer, add a layer mask using a greyscale and inverted image. You should now notice much of the noise is gone, but colors will be off a bit. So, add a third layer using the original, normal exposure image, but add a layer mask using a greyscale image.
Flatten the image, adjust the colors, and you're done. No noise and the colors should be better than the original.