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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Best Noise Reduction Software...for Newspapers?
Dan Powers, Photographer
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Appleton | WI | USA | Posted: 2:03 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> Hey fellow newspaper folks...I just finished the Rob Galbraith story on SI's workflow and I noticed that they are using Grain Surgery 2 for reducing noise in digital images. I have also heard good things about Noise Ninja. What are you guys using and why do you think it's the best on the market. I value your input greatly and I'm in no hurry to make a decision. So, what do you think we should do? Cheers...Dan. |
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Rick Berk, Photographer
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Holbrook | NY | USA | Posted: 2:11 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> I'm not a newspaper guy, but I've found Neat Image pro to be excellent. |
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Matt Edwards, Photographer
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Port Orange | FL | USA | Posted: 2:13 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> I work at the newspaper in daytona beach, I don't specifically work in the graphics/photo department but the department I work in supports those 2 departments. I know the graphics department uses photoshop for all of their photo editing needs. The photog's at my paper don't do a whole lot of toning/editing to their pictures, they mostly just crop them and send them back to the graphics department where they are toned to specific newspaper color settings that our press needs. |
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Matt Edwards, Photographer
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Port Orange | FL | USA | Posted: 2:15 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> One more thing I might add. The photo department does use photo mechanic pro if they do any editing at all to their pictures, I should have mentioned this in my other post and now that I think about it more, the photo department solely uses photo mechanic for any of the editing they do. |
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Darrell Scattergood, Photographer
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Mountlake Terrace | WA | usa | Posted: 2:21 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> luminous-landscape has a recent review on noise ninja. I've got a copy, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. then again, I'm probably not doing it right. maybe I should read the manual and run throught the tutorial. |
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Larry W. Smith, Photographer
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Valley Center | KS | USA | Posted: 2:25 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> I am not a staffer but I freelance for papers and I use the Fred Maranda noise reduction software, I like it because if makes a copy of the orginal and never touches the original file, and only works in certain channels. I've never use the others mentioned above only the Camera Bits Band Aid. |
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Dan Powers, Photographer
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Appleton | WI | USA | Posted: 2:34 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> We use Photomechanic for editing and also Photoshop. In the next month we will upgrade to Mac OSX and Photoshop CS and the latest upgrade of Photomechinic...if it matters. Cheers...Dan. |
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Chuong Doan, Photographer
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Kansas City | MO | USA | Posted: 2:44 PM on 03.19.04 |
->> Try this link: http://www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise.htm
This guy went through the trouble of comparing no less than 18 noise reduction programs. He comes to the conclusion that Noise Ninja, Neat Image, and Grain Surgery are the top three in that order. I personally use Neat Image but it can be a bit slow especially if you want to fine tune the settings. |
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Mike Braca, Photographer
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Providence | RI | USA | Posted: 9:00 PM on 03.19.04 |
->> I use Noise Ninja, mostly for cleaning up D1h images shot at 1600 + 1 step (lotta dark venues here!), and have been pleased with the results. It would be much better if it were a Photoshop plug-in, but my volume is relatively low so it's not that big a deal.
I'll shoot RAW, then maybe just tweak the exposure in Photoshop CS before converting to TIFF and running it through NN. It is important not to underexpose the main subject. You also don't want to do too much pre-manipulation of the image because NN has "profiles" of noise associated with various cameras at various ISOs, and you can tweak it enough to throw it off big time. There actually is no profile for the D1h, but there is a procedure for printing a test target and having a profile generated for you. I have been too lazy to do this for the D1h because it seems the D1x profile works reasonably well.
NN copies the image to a "filtered" TIFF, so the original is not touched. This doesn't matter to me because I keep the RAW file, so I just delete the intermediary TIFF anyhow. I generally use the default settings for all the NN parameters (I went through the tutorial, but not much of it "stuck"), except I'll turn off sharpening, since I prefer to leave sharpening as the last step of the whole process. Back in PS, open the filtered TIFF, and start color correcting.
I have made a gallery with a sample image that shows the results of filtering with Noise Ninja. The image is divided into 3 parts for easy comparing of the original RAW image, the output of Noise Ninja with no sharpening, then the filtered image with unsharp mask applied. All images are at 100%.
http://www.sportsshooter.com/mbraca/noiseninja/ |
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Ian Elliott, Photographer
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Junction City | OR | USA | Posted: 9:06 PM on 03.19.04 |
->> I use Noise Ninja. Anyone wanting the D2H noise profiles please let me know and I'll email them to you. I downloaded the Noise Ninja target, printed it out and shot it at every step from 200 through 6,400 on my D2H.
Load these profiles and see the difference it makes.
Cheers....
Ian |
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Chris Lekhavanija, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Silver Spring | MD | USA | Posted: 9:07 PM on 03.19.04 |
| ->> I use Noise Ninja also, very good result on files for both D1X and D2H. |
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Kevin Saitta, Photographer
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Groveland | CA | USA | Posted: 11:47 PM on 03.19.04 |
->> Noise Ninja is just Excellent. I use it with the D2H in conjunction at times Photozoom pro to get killer noise free 20x30!
Also Noise Ninja with 1600 and 3200 ISO work fantastic! |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 1:52 AM on 03.20.04 |
->> For what it's worth, I work at the local paper in the department formerly known as the darkroom. We're not part of prepress, but we are the ones who prep and convert to cmyk editorial images for the paper.
In my opinion, the majority of noisy images produced by the staffers (all Nikon D1H or D1X cameras) and wire photos don't need to be processed in anything other than Photoshop. We tried Quantum Mechanic (which might not be all that great - I'm not sure - I wasn't the one who did the actual testing), but it wasn't worth the extra work. Considering that the files are for newspaper reproduction and not for fine quality printing (or even for magazine paper stock, which is totally different from newsprint), Photoshop works fine almost all the time (actually for us, all the time because that is all we use). There are plenty of ways to minimize noise in PS that will be good enough for publication. When it comes to file prep for newsprint - "good enough" is the key factor. It is not necessary to totally remove noise, just suppress it enough so that the ink bleed during printing will mask it. Color noise in dark areas is probably the worst. Remove the color from the noise and it will print better.. and the solution there is often to mask off shadow values and certain colors such as deep blues and purples when applying sharpening to the rest of the image. The ink will bleed enough during printing to obscure the noise in the unsharpened areas.
Actually, what is wrong with some noise/grain in an image? I find the NN processed file posted by Mike to be more offensive to my photographic tastes than a somewhat noisy image (not the image itself, just that kind of noise reduction treatment). The end result is too smooth with no real sharpness. It would reproduce as mush in our paper. OK, the original file was severe, I'll concede that, but even using the color noise reduction in Adobe Camera Raw (moire option in ACR 1) will be sufficient to control the color noise, which is half the battle. The rest can be handled in PS itself.
I suppose a variable is also how photographers cover events and the kind of events covered. Perhaps the photo editor here has taken a different philosophy. He encourages setting up off camera strobes when feasible and photographers are now starting to shoot raw in tricky conditions to give us more to work with when processing files. We've rarely ever had a photographer shoot at higher than 1600... which might be part of the solution: to make the files as good as possible in the camera. Granted, it depends on the conditions you face daily and there are times you don't have much choice, and I'm not suggesting that no one here tries to get the best file possible out of the camera.... But sometimes it's easy to fall back on the "fix it later in PS" line of thought. If possible, get it as good as possible during image capture.
In reading the Rob Galbraith article about SI's Super Bowl coverage I thought the following comment by the SI imaging department's director was right on the money:
Quote:
"Digital photography has changed not only the magazine's workflow but also its visual aesthetic, says Geoff Michaud. "There's a different quality expectation with digital vs. film. With film, grain was accepted and tolerated. It was a by-product of sharpness. When we moved to digital we found that the expectation changed. I'm not 100% sure why. Now a softer feel image [is considered good], and when noise becomes apparent it's a negative thing, where it wasn't with film. I'm concerned with my operators now that because noise or grain has become a negative thing, sometimes they're holding off on sharpening."
I agree completely with this digital noise vs. film grain perception. Why is noise suddenly considered to be so bad?
And a quote by SI DOP Steve Fine:
"Sometimes [digital] looks like it's underwater, a little bit too smooth."
The impression I have is that with all the noise reduction variables avaialbe for processing digital files, some photographers go way overboard, smoothing out tones to such a degree that images lose a lot of detail, and to me start to look artificial.
In fact, a super smooth file (over)processed through something like NN might pose it's own image quality issues. For example, when increasing contrast to and saturating such images, it's quite common for the added saturation to cause banding where there was previously a rather smooth transition (this is more evident once sharpened and a problem after a file is converted to cmyk, but saturation applied in cmyk is more effective then when done in rgb because you are working within the viable color range of the cmyk space rather than the wider rgb space). Without any noise to break up large areas of similar tone, the banding becomes quite noticeable.
In fact, if you were to watch over my shoulder while I prep images at the paper, you might be shocked at how oversharpened and apparently noisy some of the final files appear, yet they still print well. It is the nature of ink on newsprint. (Hint: view images at 50%, not 100% and always avoid the 33.3% and 66.7% sizes - and - LCD displays tend to over exaggerate the appearance of noise compared to good CRT monitors)
So I guess my point is that while there certainly are times to use noise reduction, it may not be as necessary as you think (when outputting to newsprint, which is the deciding factor here). If anything, carefully consider how much noise reduction to apply. In it's own way, too much smoothing can be as undesirable as too much noise.
Lastly, if there is one other suggestion I may make: If you are not the one prepping files for publication, do not apply any sharpening before putting your images in the system. Doing so will just make it that much harder for the prepress techs to properly process the files (especially if the files are recompressed for storage before being picked up by prepress, which they likely are).
But that's just my opinion (sorry for the long-winded post). |
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Ken Carozza, Photographer
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Bronx | NY | USA | Posted: 9:34 AM on 03.20.04 |
| ->> How about the program from NIK multimedia? |
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Andrew Phelps, Photographer, Student/Intern
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David A. Cantor, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Toledo | OH | USA | Posted: 3:06 PM on 03.20.04 |
->> iTunes and headphones......oh. I'm sorry...I thought we were talking about noise reduction in the newsroom....
seriously, since all of this is going the a 75 line screen, I just tweak with dust and scratches in lab color channels and give a small juice with unsharp mask.... |
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Steven E. Frischling, Photographer
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Amherst | MA | USA | Posted: 3:21 PM on 03.20.04 |
->> With the D1/h/x I was using Neat Image. While I like Neat Image quite a bit (was using it on Windows 2000, not Mac), sometimes the images were a little bit to smooth. Newspaper editors seemed to like that in the files, I personally don't like it.
A lot of folks like Noise Ninja, but when used on files from my EOS 1D (on Mac), I don't see enough of a difference to warrant the extra time I am spending on the files. |
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Chris Jennings, Photographer
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Sherman | TX | USA | Posted: 7:58 PM on 03.20.04 |
->> I agree with Ron and cantor, when I have a noisy file that is going to be ran in the paper I jut fix it in PS, It still looks noisy on the screen but prints well on newsprint.
If a mom calls and wants an 8X12 glossy it's a different story. I've used Fred Miranda's noise reduction stuff on those types of things, but I have not been real pleased with it. |
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Tim Williams, Photographer
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Andrew Phelps, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Vista (San Diego) | CA | USA | Posted: 1:29 PM on 03.21.04 |
->> Neat Image, at its default settings, does tend to produce very smooth images, as Steven said. However, I rarely process an image without custom settings.
I tend to use "Retain natural image look / Remove only half of weaker noise (keep more details)" in the "Noise Filter Settings" tab to keep an image looking sharp-edged and not porcelain-smooth. Also, learning to tweak the three settings boxes below can really make your images look right. |
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