■ Noise Ninja by PictureCode. Used by many
newspapers, this noise reduction application is
aimed at photographers who want to get the
noise reduction done fast and done well. The
folks that make Noise Ninja have made this
program extremely fast and effective by creat-
ing different profiles for different cameras. If a
profile doesn’t exist for your camera, you can
have the automatic profiler determine the
noise characteristics of your image and apply
the best noise reduction. The Noise Ninja
software also has a batch-processing mode
that can automatically apply the noise reduc-
tion to multiple images, freeing you up from
this step of the post-processing workflow. The
main window of Noise Ninja allows you to
adjust the luminance and color noise reduc-
tion separately, and you get to see a 100 per-
cent and full image preview at the same time,
as you can see in Figure 11-6. Noise Ninja
comes in a variety of packages and price
points, from $34.95 for the basic home ver-
sion to $79.95 for the Pro Bundle.
■ DeNoise by Topaz. This noise reduction
application cleans up luminance or contrast
noise and color noise, but it also deals with
banding noise. It tries to do it in a way that
doesn’t destroy any of the detail in the image.
Banding noise occurs when you can see paral-
lel stripes of noise that run vertically or hori-
zontally in your image. This type of noise is
actually just regular luminance and color
noise, but it falls into this pattern. Our eyes
pick up on this type of pattern very easily, and
it can be really distracting when trying to
view an image that is affected by banding.
Another adjustment in DeNoise that can
Shadows. This brush tries to remove the
noise in shadows and low-light areas while
trying to keep the detail.
Strong Noise. This brush reduces noise
while keeping as much detail as possible.
This is the brush for those really high ISO
images.
11-5
ABOUT THIS FIGURE Here, you see the Nik Dfine window por-
tion showing the after view of the noise reduction. The window is split
with the pre-sharpening tools on the left and the post-sharpening tools
on the right.
If you shoot a lot of images that are susceptible
to noise, then this is a great product to invest in
for $99.