Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> That's interesting. In reading the complaints about banding it was said that
> the noise removers (like NI) were fine for removing random noise but were
> totally ineffective for pattern noise. It seems that NI must have some
> special magic. :-)
>
I wonder if part of the differences in results with NI may be version
and operator based. ;-) There is, or was, a free version, which only
worked on JPEGs and only up to a limited size, and perhaps had limited
features, as I recall.
Then there is the issue of Auto vs. hand adjustment of settings. I would
suppose a lot of users are simply using the Auto feature. That works
very well for some images - and pretty poorly for others.
For example, in the ISO 25,600 image I played with, Auto settings made
the fabrics, particularly the apron, look very unnatural by pretty much
eliminating the tonal cues to surface shape. Pull back the Low slider to
0 and the Medium to about half of the Auto setting and like magic, the
apron has shape again, with little or no effect on reduction of the
banded noise, which is higher frequency. Default resharpening also puts
annoying halos around the lettering on the apron, so I pulled it down a lot.
As I alluded to in my post to CH, sometimes NI settings that are right
for shadows and/or featureless areas are poor for other areas, so I
sometimes apply different settings to different areas of the image with
masks.
All his sounds time consuming (and painful for some), and it can be, for
particular images one wants just so. However, one may save settings and
recall them and by default it uses the last settings used. So working
with any set of images with the same characteristics involves either
loading a saved settings set or setting up the first image, then just
processing the rest without intervention.
A. Noiseless Moose
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