Amazing product: Noise Ninja

[Elysian]

As you say, it does turn thing to a plastic look if your not careful with it.

Yes and another thing with Neatimage are those crystal looking artifacts that pop up sometimes.

There are easy ways to deal with both problems in NeatImage;

Crystal artifacts

The crystal-like artifacts (usually these are the residual JPEG compression artifacts) look like thin lines in the filtered image. They can be easily eliminated by increasing the high frequency noise level in the filter settings.

Plastic look

The reason is that too much filtration was applied. Let Neat Image keep some noise to have natural-looking results. Adjust the noise reduction amounts; for example, reduce Y channel amount to 50-70%.

[gahspidy]

Yes and another thing with Neatimage are those crystal looking artifacts that pop up sometimes.

There are easy ways to deal with both problems in NeatImage;

Crystal artifacts

The crystal-like artifacts (usually these are the residual JPEG compression artifacts) look like thin lines in the filtered image. They can be easily eliminated by increasing the high frequency noise level in the filter settings.

Plastic look

The reason is that too much filtration was applied. Let Neat Image keep some noise to have natural-looking results. Adjust the noise reduction amounts; for example, reduce Y channel amount to 50-70%.

Elysian,
I use it on my tiff files and am using the RGB channels. It is the very first step in my editing process. i have it as a plug-in and use it selectively ( i.e sky or negative space, water. .whatever really needs the cleanup and try not to touch rest of image too much) So would the R channel substitute for the Y channel in your method?
I'm learning to use it lightly and let some noise stay to keep it natural but sometimes I have a problem with low frequency muddy looking areas especially in areas of an image that has a smooth negative space like sky or darkness.