One of the most annoying artefacts in micro-CT is image noise. No matter how careful you are during acquisition, no matter how many projections you take or how high you put the frame averaging, that dreadful noise is always there. Simply cranking up the smoothing during reconstruction looks great from a distance, but hmmm… looks like you lost all your porosity there...
Also image filters are a great tool to improve your signal-to-noise ratio, but they can take a long time to compute. Sometimes you just need that little bit of extra contrast or brightness, and then some image enhancement tips can make a big difference.
If you are interesting and if you want to learn more, just read the whole article!