12-11-2006, 01:38 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Noise Reduction Plug-Ins: Yes or No?
Since coming back from Hawaii with several thousand RAW images (more on that later), I've been thinking much more about how to best utilize RAW. One of the things I just discovered recently was the Luminance Smoothing and Colour Noise Reduction functions in the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in. I'm quite impressed with how they reduce noise - I took quite a few sunset photos in Hawaii, where my ISO was bumped up to 1600, so I have some noisy images. There's one photo in particular that turned out really nicely, and a family member has requested a 16 by 20 inch print of it. I need to keep the noise under control with such a large print size, so I'm looking at the Noise Ninja plug-in. I read the review we published almost two years ago, but it seems more attuned to reducing noise in JPEG files. I've done some testing on my own - looking at the same image, one RAW processed with maximum noise reduction, and one processed with none then Noise Ninja applied, and I'm not seeing very good results from Noise Ninja. If I use Noise Ninja on the post-RAW noise reduced image, I start to lose detail. So I'm looking for some opinions about noise reduction - if I'm shooting in RAW, is the Adobe Camera RAW noise reduction "good enough", or is Noise Ninja better and worth learning how to use properly? Thanks for any opinions!
[Bonus points: any thoughts about PhotoKit Sharpener?]
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