Noise reduction Settings

[Califfoto]

Hi Guys,

Since the birth of my daughter a few months ago I started shooting portraits with my Canonet and Bessa L. Like most of us, I scan negatives and post-process them using PSCS2 and recently Neat Image for Noise Reduction. However, I'm not sure which settings fit best portraits and which one landscapes:bang: . As an analogy with converting from color to B&W, higher settings on reds go with landscape and higher greens and blues fit better for portraits.
I wonder if similar settings exist with Noise Reduction, e.g for colors, etc.
Many thanks

Califfot from www.califfoto.com

 

[dmr]

Neat Image is one of the coolest things I've run into since I started using Photoshop. I've used it quite a bit for three kinds of things:

1. To reduce apparent grain in film photos.

2. To reduce apparent halftone dots and moire patterns in scans from printed photos and drawings.

3. To reduce what I call "garbage noise" in various images of all kinds.

To answer your question, I've found no standard set of settings that will work all the time for anything. It depends on the image.

The real "trick" with Neat Image, I've found, is to get the absolute best profile possible, using an area of the photo which has nothing in it but the noise you want to eliminate. Sometimes auto profile works fine, often it does not.

On some images you can upsize the image before feeding into Neat Image to give what appears to NI to be larger areas to work with. Sometimes this works, sometimes it does not.

I would suggest to play around with the noise reduction levels, sampling various areas of the photo. I'll often times turn the sharpening way down to work with the noise reduction settings, then add sharpening after, if it needs it. Too much of that and you get that "plastic" artificial look.

Bottom line is that although there are many cook-book type recipes for converting color to mono and such, making the best use of Neat Image is so dependent on the image itself and how it's made up that there's really no recipe that will work all of the time.

 

[Simon Larbalestier]

dmr
thanks for posting this - i got Neat Image a few days ago to tweak some Holga negs which had some high grain/noise which was distracting in certain parts of the image.