Noise Reduction Software

Noise is a very much like the film grain that one finds in film photographs. It is the grainy texture that comes out in digital pictures as a result of shooting a picture using a high ISO. In today’s digitally-driven world of photography, the presence of noise is inevitable.

Therefore, every photographer needs to deal with noise in his or her lifetime. There are a lot of techniques that one can do in order to take out the noise in a photograph. However, doing this over and over might result in an unproductive work flow for you as a photographer. Fortunately, there is a solution to this particular problem. Enter Neat Image.

Neat Image is a "noise reduction software" which essentially does what it so proudly professes to do: it completely takes out the noise in a digital image. Because of this software, digital photographers may now get rid of the noise in their photographs without compromising picture quality.

In the past, if one removes noise and grain from the picture using different techniques or primitive filters, the detail within the picture is lost. This detail is responsible for defining and filling in shadows as well as outlining the edges of an image’s subject.

So while the noise is essentially removed in previous noise reduction filters, the picture will tend to look like it was washed out and sometimes may even take on a "plastic" overall feel when the image is done. This is because along with the noise, significant information is lost within the noise reduction process.

The noise reducing algorithm of Neat Image is sophisticated enough to precisely calculate the noise that is on an image. After it does this calculation, it works at taking away the noise without discarding any valuable information that the editor might need.

This is because Neat Image recognizes the extremely random nature of noise and how it can sample an area of the picture that contains the noise. This essentially gives the user a preview of a before and after shot of the picture with and without noise. The user can also effectively adjust how much noise is taken and from what channels should the noise be reduced.

Through this type of technique, the amount of information that needs to be kept is maintained and the information that the user needs to discard is effectively removed from the image.

The beauty of Neat Image is that the software is also able to profile different cameras as well as camera settings so that the photographer will be able to simply load them if they recognize that a particular image may be applicable for a certain type of softness. An example of this is when you have photographs that were taken at ISO 800 during nighttime.

Since you have a photograph with a high noise value, you could essentially apply a noise reduction profile which can deal with the amount of noise that can be found in ISO 800 shots taken at night.