Review: NeatImage v4.3 Noise Reduction Plugin (for Mac)
by Dallas Dahms

If you're like me shooting with available light is your favourite thing to do, but with most digital cameras you can only push the ISO so far before it becomes too noisy, usually putting paid to any creative notions you may have had for this type of photography.

I have been shooting with a Nikon D70 since about 2004 and whilst it performs better than some other cameras at high ISO, I was never comfortable using anything above ISO 800. I am happy with my D2H up to about ISO 1250, but even then I would never willingly have done a shoot for money where I had to rely on it when working at those ISO's. People have become pretty fussy about digital noise these days (especially now that the new Nikons are leading the way with some amazing in-camera noise-reduction techniques).

So, as a photographer working in available light do you lay down some serious dinero for a D3 / D300 or do you look at other options? If so, what options are there? Well, one of them happens to be a fairly good one and it won't cost even 4% of what the D300 sells for at the moment. Enter NeatImage, a plugin for Photoshop that does some pretty neat stuff with noisy images.

I'm not going to give you a typical walk-through of what the authors of the software have already included in the easy-to-use manual, instead I'm going to show you how it can be used in a real life situation to make a noisy photograph look much better.

My situation
I was approached by a dance company to take photographs for their annual year end function which was being held at a local university theatre. My brief was to get images of the various performances during the dress rehearsals so that these could be used for their printed program. No sweat, I thought. The day before the dress rehearsal I went along to the theatre to check out the lighting and do a few test shots. As soon as I switched on the D70 inside the theatre I knew I was in trouble. 1/8 sec at f/5.6 using ISO 640. Sweat boy, sweat!

I had no choice but to attempt the shoot at 1250 and just hope that the images could somehow be rescued in Photoshop. Well, fortunately for me I did some research after that first day and I came across Neat Image. Boy, am I glad I did! If it hadn't been for their plug-in I might not have been able to produce anything for my client, in the process scuppering my planned stage photography career.

This is a typical example of what I was shooting, using my D2H and the 18-200mm VR lens at ISO 1250. This shot has been scaled down to 800x530 pixels for the web, but the effect is still quite visible. Move your mouse over the image to see what it looks like after the Neat Image filter has been applied. Look especially at what is happening on the background and the stage floor.

Here are 100% crops from the above before and after using Neat Image. I was conservative in applying the filter here because I still wanted to retain some noise for realism. I'm one of those guys who believes that images need to have some kind of grain to make them look less sterile.

I am very happy with the results from Neat Image, but more importantly my clients were thrilled with the images I took and ordered quite a few prints.

Setting It Up
Setting up Neat Image is very simple. It comes with a package installer that you just double click to run. It loads itself into your Photoshop filters menu, so when you are working on an image all you have to do is run the filter from within Photoshop.

Using It
Clicking on the NeatImage menu item in Photoshop opens up a dialog box with a whole array of sliders and radio buttons that allow you to change the way the filter operates. Personally I found them a little intimidating, so to begin with I opted for the easy way out and downloaded some profiles for my cameras from the Neat Image website. You can download profiles for a wide array of cameras and scanners from there, which made things much easier for me. Using them is as simple as navigating to wherever you have saved them on your HDD and applying them.

Since obtaining the software I have begun using the "Auto-profile" feature which takes a sample area of your image and automagically calculates the best possible noise reduction algorithm. I find this works best for me, but depends on the image. You should have a uniform area where the noise can be seen easily and the profile built.

The best part about using either the downloadable profiles or an "on-the-fly" auto-profile is that you can preview the effect it will have on any part of your image before you apply it to the whole thing. This allows you to fine-tune your settings to get exactly what you want (especially for the anal retentive!). For me I like the fact that within 10 seconds and 5 mouse clicks I can go from "Oh no" to "Oh yeah!". Noise is not a factor anymore. I can also do the same for images I scan from film.

Sharpening
Neat Image doesn't just remove noise, it can be used to "smart sharpen" your image too. I'm not really into doing a lot of sharpening in PP because I find that if I use the right technique on the shoot I can avoid relying on sharpening later. Although I almost always use a very small amount of USM in Photoshop. It works for me and I think I will stick with it for now, rather than try and re-educate myself using a plug-in. I thought I better mention that this feature is available in Neat Image should you want to use it.

Speed
The Mac version which I am using is a Universal Binary which runs pretty quickly in CS3 on a MacBook 13" with 2GB RAM, taking no more than 4 seconds to filter a jpg image from my D2H. Obviously more pixels would require more time. This is more than workable for me.

Dollar value
Neat Image is available for both Mac and PC. The PC version is also available as a standalone product, meaning you don't need Photoshop to run it. There are several versions of Neat Image available for purchase; for Mac users the Home plug-in v4.3 only costs $34.90, or you can opt for the Pro plug-in at $59.90. The difference? With the Pro version you get support for 16 bit images as well as Photoshop actions. The Home plug-in only allows you to edit 8 bit and obviously you can't add it to an action in Photoshop.

For Windows users there are 4 paid v5.8 licenses available; Home and Home+, Pro and Pro+, ranging from $29.90 to $74.90. I don't have any of those versions so I can't really comment on how they compare to the Mac plug-in for Photoshop feature wise. What I can say is that using the Mac Pro plug-in is great value for money and it does exactly what I need it to do without having to read a monster-sized manual. The learning curve is short and I can see what I am doing as I do it.

How to buy?
Simply pop yourself over to www.neatimage.com and you can buy the plug-in (and all the other versions) directly from their website using a wide range of online payment options, including PayPal.

Verdict?
I highly recommend getting this product. Even if you don't always shoot at high ISO you will still notice a subtle improvement on images shot at low ISO values, especially in shadow details. Like I said at the beginning of this review, I could spend $1800 on a D300 or $59.90 on Neat Image to get me high ISO images that are good enough for most people's eyes. YMMV.

Have you used Neat Image? Tell us what you think of it:

NeatImage Plugin Review

December 19, 2007, 04:16:29 PM by Dallas

Read the review and let us know what you think of NeatImage as a noise reduction filter for digital images.

Write Comment

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Re: NeatImage Plugin Review

1: December 20, 2007, 07:41:41 PM by marek

Dallas,
I've seen noise removal used to good effect before. But for these dance photos, it just seems to result in plastic images without character. I'm not even that old (coming up on 30) but the noise in photos like this just doesn't bother me - in fact I expect it. It was always there and is somehow part of the genre... Embrace the noise I say. As long as it's luminance and not chroma. Nothing wrong with it (of course that statement may not apply to all styles of photography, needs blah blah blah).

Having said that neat image can work wonders (have used the trial non-plugin version extensively back when I shot with a cp5700).

marek

Re: NeatImage Plugin Review

2: December 20, 2007, 09:51:47 PM by Inukshuk

I'm using Noise Ninja and it is very good. But both of them you have to be careful of not removing to much noise or you loose definition or sharpness. This is one thing I noticed on your cropped image. I found it lost all that which to me made the picture loose it's focus. After the noise removal you'd have to re-sharpen it to regain what was lost. For that I use FocalBlade and so far I'm okay, but it took a while to get the hang of using a noise removal plug-in.
But it definitely is a good idea and a lot cheaper than getting a new camera.

Re: NeatImage Plugin Review

3: December 24, 2007, 01:35:42 PM by LilleG

I tried NeatImage as well as Noise Ninja before settling on Imagenomic's Noiseware.  The default settings (I'm lazy) in Noiseware gave me the most realistic treatment.