NeatImage photoshop plug-in (1 Viewer)

Finally got around to getting this. It's the Neat Image v2.5 Pro+ edition. Works out at about £52 inc v.a.t
Initial performance via the Photoshop plug-in is very impressive..... seems to work faster than the standalone version with 1mb images taking about a minute on my slug-like p3 600mhz machine (512mb RAM).

The familiar NeatImage screen opens upon your photoshop workspace and it's use is the same as before... when finished it returns you to your photoshop workspace with the image finished and ready to save in any format.

The obvious benefits of having the plug-in version is that you can apply NeatImage to specifically selected areas ... which also saves time, rather than working on the entire image.
As well as this bonus, you can use Photoshop's history brush to revert areas back to the original pre-NeatImage in steps from 1% of the original to 100% (100% is pretty useless as it won't change the image, but you get the point I'm making).

I was always a bit sceptical about NeatImage's artifacts in earlier versions with rather coarse controls.... you should have seen some of the ghastly results posted by photographers in the early days! Latter versions offer far more control, with luma and chroma noise vanishing without trace. You still have to be careful, with the finished image looking unnaturally clean... but it's more than capable of saving some very poor images.

Andy

Interesting. Would it be possible to provide us with a 'before' and 'after' photo to give us an example of what it can do?

Alan Hill

Hi Alan,
NeatImage is fairly popular with a number of members.... there's a discussion and photo comparisons here .... Petee's Shrike is a good example on this thread http://www.birdforum.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5562
Andy

you can get a not time limited version of NeatImage for free on their home site and try; http://www.neatimage.com. I have cheper home version and I vould not want to be without it. I think this is a very useful program. The example with the parrot is not very good. Neatimage can be used to sharpen pictures aswell.
It has a very short and good manual
Regards from Pierre

I've heard that to get "really good" results takes practice and understanding. That might be true, but I can get what I consider "good" results without either of those!

I have to admit that I don't fully understand all of the controls that neatimage has (and I'd probably benefit from learning about them) but even in its most basic (defaults and a profile for your camera at a given ISO) and the results are very nice. Turn 10D 800ISO images into something reasonable. 800ISO isn't bad, but after neat image it removes your fear of using it (especially if you can reduce the image afterwards.)

Eric

I agree eric. You can get good and even really good results with very little understanding. I have seen some images that the detail is greatly effected by it. In this case I think the user is probably including the main subject duing the sampling process. In that case the program is going to treat the details as noise and the end result is lost detail. I always select area with no detail and never include any part of the main subject.

Neatimage also works very well for sharpening. In some cases I use the first sharpeing preset that removes noise and sharpens the image.

I am tempted to purchase program but so far I have gotten by with the free version. I just wonder how much, if any quality is being lost when you save. Is it compressing the image at the same rate as the original file?

Widowmaker said:

I just wonder how much, if any quality is being lost when you save. Is it compressing the image at the same rate as the original file?

Click to expand...

That was a concern for myself with the free programme... the saved jpg seemed considerably smaller in file size than the original, even considering the removal of noise that would obviously have an impact on it's size.
I have to say that I find using NeatImage in Photoshop a joy.... going back over certain parts of the image with the history brush is extremely useful. Considering how much plug-in filters like Quantum Mechanic pro and the Nik series cost.... the full Neat Image v2.5 Pro+ edition is an absolute bargain.

As well as the resonable price of the commercial versions, the freebie version seems quite generous in that it doesn't output images with excessive compression. I did some tests a while back to try to convince someone of this who was attributing artifacts from poorly executed filtering to excessive jpeg compression.

I have a Panasonic DMC-FZ1 which produces 2MP images compressed to ~750K. Running the freebie version of NeatImage on this with a blank noise profile produces results indistinguishable from the original (except the files are a bit larger at 800+K). Similarly a photo taken at the higher compression setting on the FZ1 went from being 300K to 400K.

For those with better raw material, I found that putting a high quality raytraced bitmap image through the demo yielded a jpeg similar to that achieved from Photoshop with the default Maximum setting (8 or 9ish depending on version).

As an update to my initial post, I've just got the free upgrade to NeatImage 3.1 pro+ ....this version operates on the image considerably faster (just as well now I've got 12mp images to work on). Apparently the noise reduction engine has been improved somewhat, though that's not something you can judge easily.

This site seems to have a pretty good description of the variables available and how to use them:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/neatimage.shtml