Noise Ninja

Just downloaded this and had a quick fumble with it (as an add-on to PSE7). Initial results look promising. The price also looks quite reasonable.

Do other people use it and if so how would you rate it?

Clicky.

It is better than whats in PhotoShop or Lightroom at the moment, but Adobe Camera RAW 6? (whatever will be included with CS5 and LightRoom3) blows it away completely.

Honestly, I downloaded this one and a few other noise reduction software titles. None really impressed me to a great extent. Maybe I just didn't use them long enough but if they are that hard to use, the upgrade price for LR3 or CS5 is enough to make up for the ease of use.

Does PSE include camera RAW at all? If so, wait out and see what the new capabilities will add.
Otherwise you might want to wait a bit and see what these guys have to offer to compete with what Adobe is about to set upon the world.

i use a mix of nose ninja and neat image and topaz denoise, depends what the pic is, i find neat image the best,
noiseware is suppose to be awsome but is dear.

I use Neat Image, there's no evaluation period and the demo version works very well with only a few limitations, the biggest problem I find is it wipes the majority of the EXIF, though this is easily rectified.

The software is easy to use and the "auto" selection works quite well, if it can gather enough info from a suitable portion of the image it does an outstanding job of reducing noise yet retaining detail with little or no input from the user.

Almost the same here but didn't use Noise Ninja, only the trail of it. Now with the new version of Topaz Denoise I only use that and it works surprisingly well and works in PS 64bit.

it comes in handy downloading the camera profiles for noise ninja and neat image and it does it better.

Oggy, I'm a fan of the NR in Lightroom 3 beta 2. It's NR is a big jump up on previous versions, and if the final cut is as good, then it will be a serious contender to replace version 1.x. Given I use LR for nearly all of my post processing, it makes sense for me to use a single bit of software up until the image is converted to a jpg.

I always liked neat image but since you need to pay more for 64bit support I didn't do it. Do you've a link to the download of those profiles, never knew you could do that.

hi stefan i think this is it.
http://www.neatimage.com/noise-profiles/digital-cameras/Pentax/download.html

Nik Softwares "Dfine 2.0" is very good I find as it retains lots of detail. It isn't cheap, but they do a free trial.

Camera Raw 6 is a whole new step forward though, my first impressions are that it is far more controllable & refined than previous incarnations.

I recently tried a shot at iso 12,800 & processed through Camera Raw 6 & a touch of Dfine 2.0 also. I can't display it here as it isn't a Pentax shot, but you can follow this link.

Thank you, I always use the auto profiler which does a good job most of the time.

Thanks for the replies.

I am getting on reasonably well with it but you have given me some others to try.

I've been a Neat Image user for several years, and very recently switched to Noiseware Pro which I found to be significantly better than Neat Image or Noise Ninja. About 3 days after getting NWP, Adobe released Lightroom 3 beta 2 and I found that as a one stop solution it was very impressive, more so than my results from my short experience with NWP and using Silkypix Pro as my Raw converter.

Since then I've re-visited many of the other NR programs and RC's to see if the results I obtained with LR3b2 can be equalled or even bettered. So far it's been fairly clear that LR3b2 is a class leading solution, but I have found that if I develop in Silkypix Pro with no noise reduction, but max application of "False colour control", then use the default settings in Noiseware Pro, I usually get a result that equals LRv3b2 with maybe slightly less colour smearing and artifacts on very noisy high ISO shots.

The fact that I'm playing around with a two stage process rather than just opting for LR3, is that I prefer many of the other features in Silkypix (i.e. automatic selective CA correction, very effective shadow/highlight correction, lens distortion correction and perspective control, being just a few). In addition I rarely use anything above ISO 400 so my current NR requirement is low, but maybe it will increase as I experiment more with NR and have the ability to push for the higher ISO's. Another reason is that I dislike the user interface in LR but one can get used to anything!

Ideally, I'm looking forward to ISL (Silkypixs' developers) taking much more notice of user input put to them by John Nevill, the very active UK distributor so that the Japanese guys can swallow their loss of face hangups and the next release of SP Pro will be a giant step forward!

Richard I found that LR3b2 softens the image a bit and more so then others and that's why I don't use it often any more.

I wonder if we could do a little test to see who can get the best result, anyone in for that?

We would need to have a standard Raw file (ideally several) for it to be meaningful in any way.