However did I survive without "Neat Image"
 

I am still amazed at what this program is capable of and it has encouraged me to start shooting in the higer ISO ranges w/o losing a lot of quality to the shot. Thanks for the recommendations guys.

Hi K.C.,

I was interested in your comments so downloaded myself a copy of "neat image" and was quickly impressed with it, mainly with images that had originally been quite dark and showed a lot of noise when lightened.It should be interesting to see how it performs with higher ISO ratings which should be very useful as I do a lot of handheld photography.

My question is, when in the photo image processing is it best to use it-first of all, right at the end or somewhere in between, as I presume it can make quite a difference.

Thans, Charly.

Noise reduction should take place on the original full size image at the end of normal processing i.e after brightness, contrast and colour adjustments. The next stage is resize which will resize any errors with the details of an image. If you slightly over or under use noise reduction algorithms then after resize the difference will be hardly noticeable. Once resized sharpening will put back some sharpness lost to the smoothing effect of all noise reduction algorithms.

Hi Charly, just noticed this was your first post. Welcome to WPF.

Hi Charly and a warm welcome to you.

There seems to be two schools of thought on whether it should be done first or after some adjustments. I have been told to do it before any corrections were made to the original image and must admit I have tried it both ways and I do see better results with doing first.

While I don't use Neat Image, I use Noiseware Professional, I do almost always apply noise reduction before I do any other work on the image. I may sometimes just use a slight amount of brightness control if necessary to lighten the image before I apply noise reduction. The last thing I do is run unsharp mask to add the required amount of sharpening to the finished image before saving it to file with a unique title.

nirofo.

Hi all,

Thanks for the warm welcome and for the advice, much appreciated, can't wait to put it to good use.

I was wondering, of those that use a noise reduction programme to counteract the negative effects of shooting with a higher ISO rating, how high can you push it before the noise becomes too much and you lose that natural feel to the shot.

Charly.

Depends on what camera you have Charly. On my Canon 300D 400 ISO was really the safe limit. Now on my 20D I don't like pushing it above 800 ISO.

Yes I noise clean before. I used to after but the results are better before.

Depends on your own eye, if you're happy with it then thats how far you can push it!

nirofo.

Hi Charly, this was taken at 1600 ISO. Now can you see why I was so delighted ;)

Hi KC, so you should be happy with that pic, to freeze the wings like that, amazing! I bet they all didn't come out that good LOL.

Hi Nirofo, Yes, I agree, If I'm happy with it that's the most important thing (pretty obvious really), I just love the way NEAT IMAGE removes all the noise without hardly touching the detail you want to keep, how does it know? On second thoughts don't tell me, I probably wouldn't understand anyway.

Thanks, Charly.

[quote=robski]Depends on what camera you have Charly. On my Canon 300D 400 ISO was really the safe limit. Now on my 20D I don't like pushing it above 800 ISO.QUOTE]

I agree - with my Minolta A2 ISO 400 was really beyond the limit. Now I have a 20D I have used all the was up to ISO 3200 when its necessary to obtain a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the movement/eliminate camera shake - see this shot in my galley taken at ISO 3200

I used to use Noise Ninja but now I shoot in RAW I do my noise reduction in Camera RAW at the time of the RAW conversion which IMHO gives as good results and is quicker - if you've not tried this have look at this thread