A Real Digital Photographers Friend

[alwayslearning]

Ok ... I did a shoot this past Thursday. Where I meant to have my ISO at 160, I had it at 1600!! I was called literally at a moments notice to do a very simple shoot at a university. They wanted the photo(s) for a poster. AGGGHHH!!! I was instructed that I had to hurry with this thing. The group for the photo had to get out of there. I don't like that sort of pressure. I make stupid mistakes. I did. I did big time. Did not know this until I got home. I should have made time to put on my glasses to review the photos. My camera has a 3" display with almost a million pixels and at a glance it looked decent. Dumb, dumb, dumb on my part.

With a sinking feeling in my heart, I grabbed a photoshop CS3 book I love to see if it had anything about noise reduction. It did. I followed the steps with little success and the tutorial said that little success was likely. BUT ... he said that photoshops noise reduction is ..... "not great" ... he uses noiseware pro by imagenomics. ( http://www.imagenomic.com/nwpg.aspx ) He said it was a miracle worker. I said, ya .. right. It was 70 bucks. I downloaded it, opened one of my photos in photoshop, FILTERS ---> IMAGENOMICS ---> NOISEWARE and watched what seemed to me to be an actual miracle! I cannot believe the way it fixed those images!

All I can say, if any of you have any issues with noise that needs to be repaired, try this plugin! (No, I have no vested interest in the company ... never heard of it until yesterday morning.) Just one photographer passin' on info to another.

This afternoon I took a photo I had that was decent and applied the noiseware filter to it just to see what happens with a photo that is already ok. There are a LOT of controls for versatility in this software ......... I really do mean a LOT. It made this photo (ocean at Laguna Beach) even better. And of course, yes ... you can have fun with it too should you desire to do that.

Larry, who happily sent the once trashed photos to the university with a decent invoice.

[Casalen]

I discovered that program after a low light wedding left me with grain, and I'll second this. Incredible, I never expected it to work as well as it does. I also like the sharpening algorithm in this one.

[DeadEyesSmiling]

Do either or both of you have some Before/After examples? Thanks!

-DES

[Casalen]

I've deleted all of my grainy photos since then, so I had to search Google for one. Not the best example, but for a quick run it should give you some idea. It can get more detail if you start with a better high resolution photo. My apologies if Ken Rockwell uses this forum for utilizing his work. Hopefully he doesn't mind.

http://www.cl-photo.com/noise.jpg

[Spartacus]

A lot of us are waiting for the FCP version of the video noise reduction plugin from NEAT, but the PS version has been around for a while now: http://www.neatimage.com/mac/aperture/examples.html

Also wins the award for "Ugliest Webdesign For A PS PlugIn Ever"...

[Matt Grunau]

That is very impressive. I especially like that you can get camera profiles. Very nifty.

You could batch process an entire film that way, and not have much trouble doing it.


Great find, and great thread.

[alwayslearning]

Ok, I literally did nothing to the first photo. It was shot in RAW @ 1600 ISO. I cropped out one girl from the group. No CC or anything ...

The second is a hurried, default settings only, application of the imagenomic's noiseware.

You can see why I was in a panic and then relieved.

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/1216/1237740272.jpg

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/1216/1237740345.jpg

You can play with lots of controls .... luminance noise, color noise, individual color channel noise .... lots of stuff. There's a nice sharpening tool that I didn't use in this sample, you can denoise only certain areas (e.g. around her hands and knees) that you choose .... very verstile.

Larry

[Matt Grunau]

That's pretty effin amazing Larry. I am somewhat concerned with the loss of detail in the clothing folds. That could be painted back in though, if it came down to it.

I downloaded the demo and will be checking it out. Very impressive, much more so than PS's noise reducer.

[alwayslearning]

Although the final is watermarked, there is a free, fully functional version to download and try before purchasing.

Larry

[egproductions]

I don't know.... in my opinion I would rather keep the grain and maintain the detail in the photo. Noise reductions tend to eliminate fine textures and edge sharpness because its basically just smearing your image to eliminate the noise. Take a look at her shirt for example.

In the end you shouldn't worry too much about having a noisy or ultra high resolution image. The 100% crop you showed above is probably a section of a 2x3 foot image. Nobody is looking at that image at the same distance you would a monitor. Whats important is the color and composition of the image.

[Postmaster]

Whit a bit tweaking it gets better, but still somewhat soft.

On the other hand, it wasn´t too sharp/in focus in te first place.

Frank

[triplej96]

That is pretty impressive Frank. I have noise ninja it seems to do a comparable job.