Squeaky clean
I've been looking for something that will help me polish up my images.
After looking around the net for a while, the choice was down to two: Noise Ninja and Neat Image. I'd pretty much made up my mind when I discovered this really good review of 22 noise reduction products. It's a little out of date now, but it gave me warm fuzzies that I hadn't missed anything obvious.
I opted for Neat Image. Funnily enough, it wasn't about price (they cost the same), it wasn't about the quality of the results (they're both brilliant), nor was it about ease-of-use (both work OK from scratch, but a little setup and practice effort goes a long way).
It was about the nature of the trial versions. Noise Ninja's demo gives you all the features, but overlays the result with a grid pattern. Neat Image's demo, on the other hand, is a free but limited version of the program that is actually useful. Yup, they give you a program that does a good job of cleaning up individual files - no watermarks, no time limits. If you want more, like being able to do batches, or invoke it from an image browser (ACDSee, FastStone, etc), or in the case of the Photoshop plug-in, deal with large files, you buy the version that suits. It's a bit of a risk, giving away genuinely useful software in the hopes that people will come back and pay for more, but in this case, anyway, it worked. Thanks, folks.
This is a detail from one of the first photos I took with a digital camera, way back in 1998. On the left, what the camera gave me. On the right, after being through Neat Image.
You see, that's the trouble with digital cameras. They're noisy little devils, not will you please turn down that flippin' racket noise, but tiny variations in the dots that make up the image. If you took a picture of a flat grey surface and looked closely, you'd see lots of tiny speckles of colour. Whether that's good or bad depends on what you're trying to do. Some people became famous doing exactly this kind of thing.
I don't want to get into the theory behind it. Basically, if you try to take pictures in low light, of things that are moving fast, or if your camera has lots of megapixels, the more likely there is to be noise. It might look good, or it might not. Take a closer look at it and decide for yourself, or look at the noisy original and the cleaned up version separately.
For me, the thing about having a clean image is that it make it easier to do other things to it: enlarge it or crop out a section of it, sharpen it a little, or even add simulated film grain or noise. It's just that I get to choose how much.
But, you say, that was an old camera that you've long since retired, no? Things are so much better with new ones. Much higher resolution for a start…
This is about a fortieth of a photo taken hand-held in the field (all right, in the woods) in sunlight using my shiny new toy. The lower half is what the camera produced; the upper half is cleaned up.
The noise is more obvious in the dark patch in the middle and the green stems in the background on the right. There's rather a lot, actually, for such a well-lit scene. Now for many things, like printing the full frame A4-sized, or resizing it as a screen background, it's not an issue. For larger prints, or cropping in around details like these berries, and it might well become a nuisance. Here are larger crops from the noisy original and cleaned-up versions.
The camera will attempt to do noise reduction; it's a quick and dirty job, though, and has the unfortunate effect of blatting out a lot of fine detail, like the fine hairs on the stem that's holding up the berries. So I've turned it down as much as I can. (If I'm really concerned with fine detail, I'll use the raw files the camera can produce. They're ten times the size of the usual files, though, and not all software handles them.)
As a bonus, the cleaned files are usually quite a bit smaller than the originals, even when stored at very high quality. It's because they're not having to try to preserve all that noise, you see.
Cool.
Now if it would just stop raining so I could go and take some pictures…