#NOISEWARE VS NEAT IMAGE PRO#
#NOISEWARE VS NEAT IMAGE ISO#

I’m not worried about the noise on the bright tones here. When recording a setting I often judge noise at 200% to detect artefacts better, so let’s see it up close:

#NOISEWARE VS NEAT IMAGE ISO#

I would have been prepared to use iso 6400 but I had a fair amount of light to play with here. Nikon D3S files are a particular challenge to improve on in practice, because Nikon have done a remarkable job of controlling colour noise, and luminance noise is not that strong for a camera of its era, either. On the other hand, there is very little shadow and noise to worry about in this high key picture. But this subject is a two megapixel crop, which diminishes the quality to such an extent that it was like shooting it with an APS-C camera, or even like framing the subject on a micro four thirds camera, where iso 3200 would be a fraction above the limit I deem usable for this material. The D3S is effectively at iso 3200 for this file and as I have shown in the Background section, I am comfortable with it to iso 6400. The camera on an experiment with auto iso without compensation, produced 1100 iso and I’ve chosen to apply 1.65 stops extra which makes approximately iso 3200. The impatient reader may like to skip directly to Part 2 which will tackle files that are a stop above the maximum iso, but only on the most effective noise reduction programs. What follows is a demonstration of using the best noise reduction programs on an “easy” use case, of tidying up a person shot where the iso is not terribly high.

#NOISEWARE VS NEAT IMAGE PRO#

That leaves NeatImage (now on its eighth iteration), Noiseware Pro version 5, and Denoise version 6, I will also be revisiting DxO Labs Prime of Photolab 2, given their strengthening reputation in this area, hoping it has improved on its snail-like speed in particular. I did try it but am not cluttering the article with the results. I do not include the noise reduction in Phase One Capture One 11 because it is much too simple to compete in this company, as is the noise reduction available in Lightroom or Photoshop. Nik Dfine was not very customisable or one of the most effective for shots of people, even if it was quite clever at guessing settings for landscapes, and there is little for me to explore in the settings of Dfine. Kodak Gem is now very old indeed, no longer sold, and fairly primitive. Several are old now and no longer being developed. I am dropping several of the programs from the last test in the light of experience with them and time constraints. The former two were too primitive and poor, and the second one took very long amounts of time for my batching workflow, like two minutes per file, and was not well integrated to an Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop workflow. I did not really write much about the noise reduction in Nikon Capture NX2, Adobe Photoshop or DxO Optics Pro at the time. Way back in 2014 I tested Kodak Gem, Picturecode Noise Ninja, Nik Dfine 2, Imagenomic Noiseware Pro 5, Absoft NeatImage 7, Topaz Denoise 6.

Noiseware vs neat image