Has anyone been happy with their use on scanned film? While negatives on a Nikon scanner might be too challenging I'd love to hear from anyone who uses these plug-ins on higher quality scanned film and gets good results.Photo Denoise Free is a great noise reduction software to minimize image grain and other imperfections. The main thing that struck me was that lots of tweaking would be required to get the best out of these plug-ins and that isn't what I'm looking for with batch scanning of happy snaps. The grain/noise artifacts left behind varied between the programs (GEM seems to leave behind crystaline star patterns, Photoshop leaves behind different and more distracting crystaline patterns, Ninja grinds the grain smaller and Noiseware looks similar to GEM) - but in all cases it was just a difference in nature without being clearly superior. I felt that, even with less challenging images, GEM=4 during scanning plus even some heavy handed noise reduction on the blue channel in Photoshop was giving me results more or less the same as Noise Ninja or Noiseware. (Don't suppose anyone has one for Kodak Gold 400/800 on a Coolscan 5000?) And that makes evaluating them with the demo versions tricky. I guess this emphasises the need to develop a good profile for a film type. I could more or less duplicate these results using Photoshop's reduce noise filter set to maximum strength and minimum preserve detail (not exactly an endorsement). This was probably exacerbated with one of my test images - a photo of a small English cottage town where practically everything was textured. (But I did learn lots.) The essential problem was that, at default settings, they would tend towards over smoothing and give me 'plastic' looking results. I tried both Noise Ninja and Noiseware demos last night and was mildly disappointed. Once you come up with a satisfactory approach, whether it is using Noiseware or another program, I would be curious to know what you are doing. I don’t know if its just a operator issue, but I find the benefit of running my scans through Noiseware to generally be outweighed by the softness that it adds. I have found it much more difficult to get satisfactory results for the film than it was for the digital stuff. Since that time I bought my own Coolscan and have been scanning a lot of film and slides. Īll that being said, I originally bought Noiseware for use with digital images. I never really gave the Windows centric vs Mac centric much thought, but for the record, I am a Windows user. I purchased both but pretty much only use the plug-in. Noiseware has both a standalone version and photoshop plug-in version. The biggest deciding factor for me was that it seemed to produce good results using the automatic settings the others seemed to require more tweaking. Last year I tried the demo versions all the programs mentioned so far (Topaz excluded). I'll get the Pro version of either as I can scan in 16-bit and it would seem a waste not to take advantage of thisĪt the moment I'm leaning towards Noise Ninja because it seems to have better Mac focus in that they have a stand alone application while Neat Image doesn't, but I welcome observations based on how easy they are to use and the points above. I have no ability to shoot a calibration target as the camera and film are long gone - is either better for generating a custom profile in these circumstances rather than dealing with it image by image (the camera and film are quite consistent - mostly Kodak Gold 400, some Fuji 400 and some Kodak 200)ģ. Using MacBook Pro OS, X 10.6 and Photoshop CS4 ExtendedĢ. A number of my earlier questions here circle back to the observation that "GEM isn't very good, try Neat Image/Noise Ninja instead" so i'm thinking of giving it a go (and Christmas is coming up).īased on ease of use and incorporation into a semi-automated (or batch) workflow and given the following what would people recommend:ġ. I am scanning old negative film (and shortly slide film) using a Coolscan 5000. While I will certainly download the demos and try them out I imagine that differences will be subtle and I'm probably kidding myself that I can make 'the right' decision on that basis alone so I ask for some feedback from everyone here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |