Carolina Birds
I am attempting to get some noteworthy pictures of birds that visit the "hanging" grocery store that my wife runs in our back yard. Although I like some of my pictures, I am still a novice when it comes to using Photoshop Elements 4's noise reduction component. I am looking into purchasing a good noise reduction program, and some photographers have recommended Noise Ninja and Neat Image. Any suggestions based on ease of use, integration with PSE 4, and so forth?
Gil
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i have noise ninja, I think, I have the Ninja one.
It is very easy for me to use, but I paid the extra to be able to put it into my CS2 program, then I messed that up..................I have no idea how to add things to any of the photoshop programs, and I have been using them for years.
However, the noise ninja is on my desktop and I find it very easy to use, though I don't use it often.
I just picked one, it seemed to work when I downloaded the trial, so I sucked it up and bought it.
ginger
IMHO, the best way to get rid of noise is to minimize it's presence by shooting in good light with as low an ISO as possible. Try and put the feeders in areas where you can get the hummers in sunlight and try using ISO 200-400.
That being said, sometimes you just have to make due with the light thats there and shoot with a high ISO, realizing that it will affect your image. I've never used any third party products to reduce noise, so I can't comment on those but you can get pretty darn good noise reduction in Photoshop. You may be limited in PS Elements though. So the below example may not be applicable for Elements
I took the image you posted in my thread on hummers and did a quick noise reduction:
Started with:
Then in Photoshop selected each channel individually (red, blue, green) and ran PS's noise reduction filter on each channel, several times on some of the channels. That still didn't get rid of all the noise so I made a loose selection on some of the background areas that still had noise and ran a Gaussian Blur filter on them and got this:
Still could use some cleaning up, but was able to get rid of most of the noise.
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Thanks for the response, Ginger. Appreciate it. I am planning to download the trial version, and also to look into another program, Neat Image.
Gil
What a difference your work on the hummer made in the noise reduction. Thanks for taking the time to tweak it. I also appreciated your direction to the technique thread; you are indeed right. As a newbie to this site, I am still learning how to get around and to do what it takes to learn the protocols. Geez, and I thought Microsoft Access was hard!!
One of these days I may spring for Photoshop CS. However, I will learn PSE 4 first, along with advice from people like you. I have found Smugmug to be an excellent source for good advice and techniques, and continue to look at the EXIF data to help me learn settings that are more likely to get me where I want to be, as well as techniques. Thanks, again, for your work on my picture.
(Incidentally, your Website is beautifully created and a pleasure to visit. Very professionally designed.)
Gil Coon