Yes, noise. We don’t like it at three in the morning and we certainly don’t like it in our digital images.
Well, luckily, there are solutions to the digital noise that pops up in your digital images. Two programs called Noise Ninja and NeatImage will help you rid the noise from your images while maintain most of the good stuff. Both programs come with Photoshop plug-ins, but only Noise Ninja comes with a stand-alone application as well; helpful if you don’t own Photoshop.
I use Noise Ninja and I think it’s just great. It does a great job at eliminating most, if not all, of the unwanted noise in my images without trashing the fine details too much. Also, Noise Ninja lets me create my own camera profiles which help fine tune the noise reduction specifically for my camera at specified ISO settings (remember, higher ISOs mean more noise in the image). After creating the profiles, Noise Ninja reads the metadata of the image and applies the specific profile to that image. So, if I shot an image at ISO 400, and I created a camera profile for the 400 ISO rating, Noise Ninja just loads up that profile and applies it to the image. And that’s that; no more noise. If you don’t want to profile your camera, Noise Ninja does a pretty darn good job in automatic mode.
I’m sure NeatImage works just as well. I don’t own it so I have no opinions about it. Well, it is less expensive, but you do need to have Photoshop to use it (or another program that can use Photoshop Plug-ins).
Also, notice how both websites use pictures of hockey players as demos? Interesting.
Now as far as the noise at 3am, well, there’s not much I can do about that. Use earplugs.
