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Posts Tagged ‘ulead photoimpact’

What is Image Noise
Image noise is something every photographer should be conscious of.
It is defined as the arbitrary variation of brightness or color data in images produced by the sensor and circuitry of a scanning device or digital camera and is regarded as an unwanted by-product of image capture. The quality of the circuitry definitely plays a part in noise reduction and cheaper cameras typically produce more noise than more expensive SLRs in low light situations. When taking pictures with a digital SLR camera, image noise is most commonly caused by utilizing a high ISO setting, especially those over ISO 800, though this varies by model. Image noise manifests as noticeable artifacts that degrade image quality. Image noise comes in two flavors; luminance (grayscale) noise, which makes an image look grainy, and chroma (color) noise, which is generally noticeable as coloured artifacts in the image. When using a scanner, image noise usually happens in the dark parts of images.

Getting Rid of Image Noise
Most image editing packages allow for you to add and decrease noise, as an effect or filter. This works well enough for adding noise, but removing it is a much trickier process which, when applied with simple built in filters causes the image to lose sharpness. Enter Neat Image. Neat Image is a digital filter application specially designed to efficiently reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. Neat Image is provided as a stand alone application, but also as a plug-in for a wide range of image processing applications, like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, Ulead PhotoImpact, PhotoLine32, IrfanView and others. Neat Image reduces the high ISO noise associated with image sensors in digital cameras and scanners, the film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts of over-compressed images, and color banding. Another benefit of noise reduction by Neat Image is that the reduction of noise produces smaller file sizes for JPEG image with the same quality setting generating a file which is about 30% smaller.

Neat Image incorporates the most advanced noise reduction algorithms in the industry that surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. It provides the most accurate noise reduction currently available. Neat Image uses device noise profiles to make noise reduction custom-tailored to your camera or scanner model, making it the the most accurate noice reducer available. It offers premium noise reduction and image sharpening utilizing an advanced noise filter to reduce noise and grain in digital images. The professional editions of Neat Image fully even support 48-bit RGB and 16-bit grayscale images.
No Noise Dude
Saving Money with Neat Image
As we’ve already discussed, Neat Image does noise reduction best, but why do you need or want it. Well, if you have any modern hand held point and shoot, you’ll love what it can do to improve your low light images. But what if you already have a nice Digital SLR? This is where you can save a little money with neat image. When it starts to get dark out (think football game) you have a few choices if you want to capture sharp images. You can get up close with a flash, but this really freezes action and eliminates the opportunity for desirable motion blur. You can spend $900 (minimum) for a fast lens, like an F2.8 zoom but, apart from being cost prohibitive for many of us, this low f-stop also dramatically reduces the depth of field of your image so that only your immediate subject is in focus, which may also be undesirable. The alternative is to use a good variable zoom lens at say F 5.6 and shoot at a higher iso setting. This does cause image noise, but for $75 or less depending on the version you buy, you can clean up the noise without losing sharpness and leave the $900 in the bank.  To get your own copy, check out Neat Images website at http://www.neatimage.com where you can download the demo version for free.