Amazing product: Noise Ninja

I want to share some experiences with you. As you all know, one of the problems with digital photography can be noise, especially if you use high ISO values. A while back people developed a product called NeatImage; http://www.neatimage.com/

Even until this day I consider it one of the most wonderful pieces of software I ever used (and trust me, I work in the IT, I've tried more software that most people will try in a whole lifetime ;) ). Several reviews had the same conclusion; NeatImage is indeed a very unique product.
NeatImage builds a noise profile of your digital camera (or scanner) and uses this profile to remove noise in a sophisticated way. One of the strongest points of NeatImage is that it does it without blurring the image (something quite common when you use Photoshop tools or other products).
I've used the product many times and the results still amaze me. In many cases I even managed to make an image sharper without creating halos.

All this time I was thinking that NeatImage had no competition until... Noise Ninja came along and it was "wow!" from the moment I used it: http://www.picturecode.com/
What a wonderful piece of software. The results amaze me very much.
What I like about this product is that it's easier than NeatImage to avoid those 'crystal' like artifacts that you sometimes notice with NeatImage, but it also tries to avoid this 'plastic' look that we tend to see with NeatImage.

Don't get me wrong, NeatImage is still a top product and the problems I mentioned earlier can be avoided by adjusting the settings, but that's an important difference with Noise Ninja; for some reason Noise Ninja seems to get it quite right the first time.
I found it easier to get clean noise free skies with Noise Ninja than NeatImage. Important is the word 'easier'; Noise Ninja takes takes less time to get things right and that's for me an important aspect. I like to focus on Photography and not on cleaning up noise and sharpening images for 5 minutes or so, especially when I have to process many photographs.

I did notice that NeatImage is still better in some areas; really small, thin details tend to be faded in Noise Ninja, although this can be corrected using different settings.

I also think that Noise Ninja is easier to calibrate using the standard eye droppers it offers. You get the best results with the color calibration chart; very simple to build a profile for your camera.

I just wanted to share this information with you. Whether it's useful or not is something you should all decide for yourself. :)

Some reviews;

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/re...se-ninja.shtml
http://photography.about.com/cs/digi..._noiseninj.htm

Last note: Noise Ninja is only available as stand-alone program. However, the company promised that a Photoshop and Mac plugin will be released later this year.

Joe-
Thanks for this write-up! It's great. I'm glad to see people sharing about this kind of post-capture work. For me, image optimization is almost as important as the original photo. If you don't set it up right, a photo never reaches it's actual potential. And tools like NeatImage and NoiseNinja allow photographers to make their good imagers look better and salvage images that might otherwise go straight to the trash. I'm going to copy your post to the Digital Imaging forum as it's a great fit for that message board.

If you haven't already, could you please post reviews for NeatImage and NoiseNinja? They're both listed in the Noise Reduction software section, but there aren't nearly enough reviews. And anyone else who can post software reviews, please do. We need more software reviews on this site.

Software Reviews >>

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Originally Posted by Photo-John

If you haven't already, could you please post reviews for NeatImage and NoiseNinja?

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I'll do that John ;)

Btw, I have to add that the examples on Noise Ninja's web site are lousy if you ask me. It almost kept me away from trying the product (I really have to write these guys about that...)

It's best to try out the program yourself to see what it's capable of. ;)

Yeah, I'm at the point where these programs are very valuable. I especially like the 16-bit capability of Noise Ninja's Pro Licence.

I'm starting to become a bit of a 16-bit junkie, especially with PS CS's increase in available tools and filters. For some basic image corrections, it makes a big difference...

Elysian,
I just started using NeatImage a month ago and find it to be excellent as well. As you say, it does turn thing to a plastic look if your not careful with it. Thanks for the heads up on this new product

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Originally Posted by gahspidy

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

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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%.

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Originally Posted by Elysian

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%.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Asylum Steve

Yeah, I'm at the point where these programs are very valuable. I especially like the 16-bit capability of Noise Ninja's Pro Licence.

I'm starting to become a bit of a 16-bit junkie, especially with PS CS's increase in available tools and filters. For some basic image corrections, it makes a big difference...

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Steve,
Whenyou say 16 bit I assume you mean per RGB channel. Therefore 48 bit as opposed to 24 bit. The version I have of neat image works on 48 bit. I have not used it with that color depth yet but it shows me that it is available. I have the pro version of the program