All I can say is WOW. I saw this product years ago and because you had to pay for it I didn’t bother looking any further. But I bit the bullet last night and bought it.
It is a gift from heaven!!!!!!!! The difference is remarkable, and striking. I have included some images of Comet McNaught I took. the ambient air temp was 40 degrees Celsius after sunset which dropped to about 35 when we left the mountain top. That meant any camera up there was going to suffer badly with severe noise, and especially at higher ISO's. The shots were tarnished by barrow loads of noise and consequently were shelved in the too hard basket. Not any more. I will be reprocessing these little snippets of history to get some decent images from them, unfortunately I took them in jpeg only (new to the imaging scene I forgot to use RAW).
the image on the left is an original file while the one on the right is the noise ninja processed one
If I may stick my nose in here, Paul might be interested in Neatimage. Very similar to noise ninja but they have a free trial that does pretty good and is quite useful. The trial doesn't watermark your images and has a PS plugin. It has a few gotchas but these can be lived with. If you don't mind h0ughy, I tried Neatimage on your noisy image and got a similar result to Noise ninja (maybe oversharpened a bit - I don't have my specs on )
Sorry, didn't want to start a this is better than that argument . Just letting Paul know about versions of noise reduction software for cashed strapped individuals. There is also Noiseware Community Edition, its free but I haven't used it much.
Like I said in the other thread, I use Noiseware Professional as a photoshop plugin.
At that level, i'm pretty sure all of them (noise ninja, noiseware, neatimage) are all going to be very similar in what they can do and what the final image will look like.
As long as they have the ability to customise the profiles, then it's great. Sometimes the "default" setting is too harsh/smoothing for some times of astrophotography so you need be able to back off the sliders to reduce the noise without eliminating detail.
Nice examples Houghy,
I use the Noise Ninja plug in for PS too - great bit of software.
Do you use the specific profiles for your camera?
You can find them here... http://www.picturecode.com/profiles.htm
They work very nicely on my 40D images
Doug
I'm another recent purchaser and fan of Noise Ninja. Have not had time to go back and improve all my previous images yet!
I think Mike's right that many programs will achieve a similar outcome. If you've ever got one that doesn't offer control of how much noise removal it offers, you can just blend it into an uncorrected layer in eg Photoshop.
I tried this a while ago, and found that it was really no better than CS3's in-built "Smart Blur" filter. I'm struggling to see any real difference. What am I missing?
I tried this a while ago, and found that it was really no better than CS3's in-built "Smart Blur" filter. I'm struggling to see any real difference. What am I missing?
Hi Chris
I have Neat Image and what I like about it, (although only recently understood), is that I can generate custom noise profiles using a “blank” area of the frame.
So, for example, in the recent smilie face conjunction, using the “Auto Profile” function I draw a rectangle in a region of uniform tonality and Neat Image analyses that region and generates a “noise profile” tied to the EXIF details of camera body, exposure length and ISO setting. You can then fine tune the profile (I haven’t got this far yet) before applying it to the image. You can build up a Library of these profiles based on the variables of camera, exposure length, ISO and re-use them.
So although it does take some work upfront, and maybe there is a need to regenerate these profiles periodically if the sensor characteristics drift with time, Neat Image offers a targeted way to hit noise. The downsides are additional cost, having to master a new program, etc.
I haven’t done any tests on CS3 noise reduction capabilities vs. Neat Image, I just got sucked in by other posters on IIS and the Neat Image blurb! LOL!
It's good to question these claims critically Chris. We need to do some comparisons on fine nebula detail to see if these programs deliver anything more than PS Smart Blur. Would be interesting to see.. will try one day..
It's good to question these claims critically Chris. We need to do some comparisons on fine nebula detail to see if these programs deliver anything more than PS Smart Blur. Would be interesting to see.. will try one day..
Just tried smart blur vs NN. NN won hands down in retaining detail in nebula
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