Introduction

I finally succumbed to the lure of Neat Image. I'd seen so many positive comments that I decided to ignore my poor impressions of the very early version and exercise the ol' credit card. There are three different versions, but I chose the Pro+ version as this includes a Photoshop plug-in, in addition, to the stand-alone program. So far, I've mainly used the plug-in, which gives identical noise reduction capability to the stand-alone program.

Roger's Dummies Guide to Starting with Neat Image

Neat Image works by analysing the image and building a noise profile. This is done by examining individual areas of the image indicated by the user - you use the cursor to draw a small 300 x 300 pixel square. You can use smaller rectangles, but it's recommended they should be, at least, 100 x 100: Neat Image Device Noise Profile Tab

Having identified the target zone, the first phase is kicked of by clicking the ruler icon in the Rough Noise Analyser section. A constraint on the use of NI is that the target zones must be areas without detail. However, since you can save profiles for re-use, this just means that you need one picture in your shoot that can be used to build the profile. Notice you can add EXIF data to the profile, which is a useful reminder when you want to re-use a saved profile.

Phase 2 is repeated several times: a new target zone is specified and the fine tune button is clicked (at the bottom of the window in the Noise Profile Equaliser section). At this point, you begin to realise the major weakness of NI: speed - it doesn't have any. Maybe it's not too bad on a 2.8 GHz P4 with 2 gig or RAM, but on my modest 933 PIII with only 768 mb, it is slooo....ooowwww. Take a good book. I usually visit my favourite forums while NI crunches away.

Neat Image Noise Filter Settings Tab

Once you've built the profile, click on the Noise Filter Settings tab. There you can choose to see a preview of the results by selecting a part of the image using the cursor; you can adjust how strongly the filter is applied by fiddling with the noise reduction amounts - 50-70% seems to give good results. 100% removes all the identified noise and can give a very artificial, plastic-looking result. When you're happy, apply the filter to the whole image. At this point, you will have time to read several pages of your book.

As you can see from the screen shots, there are a lot more controls that can be twiddled, tweaked and otherwise adjusted, but this simple approach has generally worked for me so far.