Quote Originally Posted by gahspidy
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%.